How valuable is your data anywhere?

I was a speaker at the Data Management and Document Control conference 2 weeks’s ago. It was a conference aimed at the Oil & Gas industry, and my presentation was primarily focused on Data in Exploration & Production (E&P) segment of the industry. That’s also the segment that brings in the mega big bucks!

The conversations with the participants have validated and strengthened the fact that no matter how we talk about how valuable data is to the organization, how data is the asset of the organization, the truth is most organization SUCKS big time when it comes to data management. The common issues faced in the E&P data management in Oil & Gas are probably quite similar to many other industries. For the more regulated industries such as banking, financial institutions, governments and telecommunications, data management, I would assume, is a tad better.

The fact of the matter is there little technology change in the past decade in data storage, data protection and data movement. There are innovations from a technology point of view but most technology innovations do not address the way data could be better managed, especially from a data consolidation point of view.

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Technology prowess of Riverbed SteelFusion

The Riverbed SteelFusion (aka Granite) impressed me the moment it was introduced to me 2 years ago. I remembered that genius light bulb moment well, in December 2012 to be exact, and it had left its mark on me. Like I said last week in my previous blog, the SteelFusion technology is unique in the industry so far and has differentiated itself from its WAN optimization competitors.

To further understand the ability of Riverbed SteelFusion, a deeper inspection of the technology is essential. I am fortunate to be given the opportunity to learn more about SteelFusion’s technology and here I am, sharing what I have learned.

What does the technology of SteelFusion do?

Riverbed SteelFusion takes SAN volumes from supported storage vendors in the central datacenter and projects the storage volumes (aka LUNs)to applications and hosts at the remote branches. The technology requires a paired relationship between SteelFusion Core (in the centralized datacenter) and SteelFusion Edge (at the branch). Both SteelFusion Core and Edge are fronted respectively by the Riverbed SteelHead WAN optimization device, to deliver the performance required.

The diagram below gives an overview of how the entire SteelFusion network architecture is like:

Riverbed SteelFusion Overall Solution 2 Continue reading

No Flash in the pan

The storage networking market now is teeming with flash solutions. Consumers are probably sick to their stomach getting a better insight which flash solution they should be considering. There are so much hype, fuzz and buzz and like a swarm of bees, in the chaos of the moment, there is actually a calm and discerning pattern slowly, but surely, emerging. Storage networking guys would probably know this thing well, but for the benefit of the other readers, how we view flash (and other solid state storage) becomes clear with the picture below: Flash performance gap

(picture courtesy of  http://electronicdesign.com/memory/evolution-solid-state-storage-enterprise-servers)

Right at the top, we have the CPU/Memory complex (labelled as Processor). Our applications, albeit bytes and pieces of them, run in this CPU/Memory complex.

Therefore, we can see Pattern #1 showing up. Continue reading

Has Object Storage become the everything store?

I picked up a copy of latest Brad Stone’s book, “The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon at the airport on my way to Beijing last Saturday. I have been reading it my whole time I have been in Beijing, reading in awe about the turbulent ups and downs of Amazon.com.

The Everything Store cover

In its own serendipitous ways, Object-based Storage Devices (OSDs) have been floating in my universe in the past few weeks. Seems like OSDs have been getting a lot of coverage lately and suddenly, while in the shower, I just had an epiphany!

Are storage vendors now positioning Object-based Storage Devices (OSDs) as Everything Store?

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Boosting Solid States beyond SATA

Lately, I have been getting deeper and deeper into low-level implementation related to storage technologies. In my previous blog, I was writing my learning adventure with Priority Flow Control (PFC) and intend to further the Data Center Bridging concepts with future blog entries.

Before I left for Sydney for a holiday last week, I got sidetracked into exciting stuff that’s happening in my daily encounters with friends and new friends. 2 significant storage related technologies fell onto my lap. One is NVMe (Non-Volatile Memory express) and the other FPGA (Field Programmable Gate Array).

While this blog is going to be about NVMe, I actually found FPGA much more exciting to me. Through conversations, I found that there are 2 “biggies” in the FPGA world, and they are designed and manufactured by Xilink and Altera. I admit that I have not done my homework on FPGA yet, having just returned from Sydney last night. I will blog about FPGA in future blogs.

But NVMe is also an important technology direction to the storage world as well.

I think most of us are probably already mesmerized by solid state drives. The bombardment of marketing, presentations, advertising and whatever else the vendors do to promote (and self-promote) solid state drives are inundating the intellectual senses of consumers and enterprises alike. And yet, many vendors do not explain both the pros and cons of integrating solid states into their IT environment. Even worse, many don’t even know the strengths and weaknesses of solid states, hence creating some exaggeration that continues to create a spiral vortex of inaccuracies. Like a self-feeding frenzy, the industry seems to have placed solid state storage as the saviour of the enterprise storage world. Go figure with that!

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Novell Filr about to be revealed

My training engagement landed me in Manila this week. At the back of my mind is Novell Filr, first revealed to me a week ago by my buddy at Novell Malaysia. After almost 18 months since I first wrote about it, Novell Filr is about to be revealed in my blog within this month. And it has come at an opportune time, because the enterprise BYOD/file synchronization market is about to take off.

Gartner defines this market as Enterprise File Synchronization and Sharing (EFSS) and it is already a very crowded market given the popularity of Dropbox, Box.net, Sugarsync and many, many others. It is definitely a market that is coveted by many but mastered by a few. There are just too many pretenders and too few real players.

The proliferation of smart phones and tablets and other mobile devices has opened up a burgeoning need to have data everywhere. The wonderfulness of having data right at the fingertips every time they are wanted give rise to the need of wanting business and corporate data to be available as well. The power of having data instantly at the swipe of our fingers on the touchscreen is akin us feeling like God, giving life to our communication and us making opportunities come alive at the very moment. Continue reading

It’s all about executing the story

I have been in hibernation mode, with a bit of “writer’s block”.

I woke up in Bangalore in India at 3am, not having adjusted myself to the local timezone. Plenty of things were on my mind but I can’t help thinking about what’s happening in the enterprise storage market after the Gartner Worldwide External Controller-Based report for 4Q12 came out  last night. Below is the consolidated table from Gartner:

Just a few weeks ago, it was IDC with its Worldwide Disk Storage Tracker and below is their table as well:

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Is there no one to challenge EMC?

It’s been a busy, busy month for me.

And when the IDC Worldwide Quarterly Disk Storage Systems Tracker for 3Q12 came out last week, I was reading in awe how impressive EMC was at the figures that came out. But most impressive of all is how the storage market continue to grow despite very challenging and uncertain business conditions. With the Eurozone crisis, China experiencing lower economic growth numbers and the uncertainty in the US economic sectors, it is unbelievable that the storage market grew 24.4% y-o-y. And for the first time, 7,104PB was shipped! Yes folks, more than 7 exabytes was shipped during that period!

In the Top 5 external disk storage market based on revenue, only EMC and HDS recorded respectable growth, recording 8.7% and 13.8% respectively. NetApp, my “little engine that could” seems to be running out of steam, earning only 0.9% growth. The rest of the field, IBM and HP, recorded negative growth. Here’s a look at the Top 5 and the rest of the pack:

HP -11% decline is shocking to me, and given the woes after woes that HP has been experiencing, HP has not seen the bottom yet. Let’s hope that the new slew of HP storage products and technologies announced at HP Discover 2012 will lift them up. It also looked like a total rebranding of the HP storage products as well, with a big play on the word “Store”. They have names like StoreOnce, StoreServ, StoreAll, StoreVirtual, StoreEasy and perhaps more coming.

The Open SAN market, which includes iSCSI has EMC again at Number 1, with 29.8%, followed by IBM (14%), HDS (12.2%) and HP (11.8%). When combined with NAS numbers, the NAS + Open SAN market, EMC has 33.5% while NetApp is 13.7%.

Of course, it is just not about external storage because the direct-attached storage numbers count too. With that, the server vendors of IBM, HP and Dell are still placed behind EMC. Here’s a look at that table from IDC:

There’s a highlight of Dell in the table above. Dell actually grew by 4.0% compared to decline in HP and IBM, gaining 0.1%. However, their numbers seem too tepid and led to the exit of Darren Thomas, Dell’s storage group head honco. News of Darren’s exit was on TheRegister.

I also want to note that NAS growth numbers actually outpaced Open SAN numbers including iSCSI.

This leads me to say that there is a dire need for NAS technical and technology expertise in the local storage market. As the adoption of NFSv4 under way and SMB 2.0 and 3.0 coming into the picture, I urge all storage networking professionals who are more pro-SAN to step out of their comfort zone and look into NAS as well. The world is changing and it is no longer SAN vs NAS anymore. And NFSv4.1 is blurring the lines even more with the concepts of layout.

But back to the subject to storage market, is there no one out there challenging EMC in a big way? NetApp was, some years ago, recorded double digit growth and challenging EMC neck-and-neck, but that mantle seems to be taken over by HDS. But both are long way to go to get close to EMC.

Kudos to the EMC team for damn good execution!

“Cloud” hosting hacked – customer data lost

Yes, Yes, I have been inactive for almost 2 months. There were many things I had to do to put my business back into shape again, and hence my lack of activities in my blog.

Yes, Yes, I have a lot of catching up to do, but first I would like to report that one of the more prominent web hosting companies (many of who frequently brand themselves as “Cloud” companies) in Malaysia have been hacked.

I got the news at about 8.00am on September 28th morning and I was in Bangalore, India. Friend of mine buzzed me on Facebook Messenger, and shared with me the following:

Thursday, September 27, 2012 1:46 AM
Date: 27th Sep 2012
Time: 6.01PM GMT +0800

We have an intrusion incident that happened early this morning around 12midnight of 27th September 2012. About 50 customers’ Virtual Machines hosted on our CLOUD were deleted from the cloud server. When we spotted the abnormal behavior, we managed to stop the intruder from causing more damages to our system.

From our initial investigation, we suspect one of our employees who will leave the company at this month end logged into one of our control panels and deleted some Virtual Machines. The backup was terminated at the same time when the Virtual Machines were deleted.

At this point of time, our team is working relentlessly on restoring the affected virtual machines and customer data.

In the mean time, my COO is lodging a police report and my manager is lodging a report to MyCERT while I am writing this email.

We are truly sorry about the whole incident as it has caused a great deal of inconvenience to our customers and their end customers as well.

Please also be rest assured that our CLOUD is truly secured; this incident was not a successful hacking attempt but rather sabotage via an ordinary login.

Detailed investigation reports will be compiled and sent to our customers.

Sincerely,

Chan Kee Siak
Founder and CEO

===================================
Summary / History of issues:
===================================
27th Sep 2012,

1.00am:
- We detected several virtual machines on the cloud were throwing warning signals.
- Technical Managers were immediately informed.

01.30am:
- We found out that an intruder was attempting to delete some of the virtual machines on our CLOUD cluster.
- The intruder was using a valid login to access our CLOUD control panel.
- COO was informed, signed in to co-ordinate.
- The access of the intruder has been disabled to prevent further damage.
- We posted an announcement at: https://support.exabytes.com.my/News/2248/c...aintenance.aspx

02.00am:
- CEO was informed.
- We found out that the intruder was using the login ID and password which belonged to one of the staff members whom we had recently sent out termination notice. The last working day of this staff was end of this month.
- Around 50++ Virtual Machines / VPS were affected.
- We started to inform affected customers.

02.30am:
- Rebuild and restoration of virtual machines began.

10.00am:
- Some Virtual Machines were Restored. The rest were still pending, on going.
- For Virtual machines without extra R1Soft Backup, we have recreated blank virtual machines with Operating System.

12:30pm:
- Attempted to recover the deleted backup on the CLOUD Backup server via data recovery tool. No guarantee and no ETA yet, we were doing our very best.

5.39pm:
- 80% of virtual machines were recreated. However, some were without the latest backup of data.
- Our engineers were attempting to recover the Cloud Backup Hard Drive with the use of recovery tool. However, as the size was huge, it might take few more hours.

Damage:
- The CLOUD Accounts, Virtual Machines and CLOUD Backup of affected clients were deleted. Only client with additional R1Soft backup still has the recent backup.

=================================

Date: 27th September 2012
Time: 1:55 AM GMT+8

Maintenance Details:
We have been alert by our monitoring system that certain Cloud VM has been found to be inaccessible. Our senior admin engineers are now working to resolve the issues.

Maintenance effect:
VMs affected isolated under MY-CLOUD-02 Zone.

We regret for any inconveniences caused.

Best regards,

Support team
------------------
Technical Support Department.

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Expensive hard disk is good

No, I don’t mean to be bad, but the spinning HDDs’ prices will remain high even if the post-Thailand flood production has resumed to normalcy.

According to IHS iSuppli, a market research intelligence firm, the prices will continue to hold steady and will not fall to pre-flood level until 2014. The reason is simple. The prices of the hard disk drives are pretty much dictated by the only 2 real remaining hard disk companies in the world – Seagate and Western Digital. These guys controls more than 85% of the hard disk market and as demand of HDDs outstrips supply, the current hard disk prices are hitting the bottom line hard for just about everyone.

But the bad news is turning into good news for solid state storage devices. NAND-Flash based devices are driving a new clan of storage start-ups in the likes of Violin Memory, Kaminario, Pure Storage and Virident. The EMC acquisition of XtremIO was a strong endorsement that cements the cornerstone of all enterprise storage arrays to come. Even the Register predicted that the EMC VMAX will be the last primary storage array before the flash tsunami.

The NAND-Flash solid state of multi-level cells (MLCs) and single level cells (SLCs) and even triple level cells (TLCs) are going through birth, puberty, adolescent extremely fast because the demand for faster and faster IOPS, throughput and lower latency is hitting at full speed. And it is likely that all the xLCs (SLCs, MLCs and TLCs) could go through cycle in an extremely short lifespan, because there is a new class of solid state that is pushing the performance-price envelope closer and closer to speed of DRAM but with the price of Flash. This new type of solid state is Storage Class Memory (SCM). Continue reading