Category Archives: Deep Learning

Hadoop is truly dead – LOTR version

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[Disclosure: I was invited by GestaltIT as a delegate to their Storage Field Day 19 event from Jan 22-24, 2020 in the Silicon Valley USA. My expenses, travel, accommodation and conference fees were covered by GestaltIT, the organizer and I was not obligated to blog or promote the vendors’ technologies to be presented at this event. The content of this blog is of my own opinions and views]

This blog was not intended because it was not in my plans to write it. But a string of events happened in the Storage Field Day 19 week and I have the fodder to share my thoughts. Hadoop is indeed dead.

Warning: There are Lord of the Rings references in this blog. You might want to do some research. 😉

Storage metrics never happened

The fellowship of Arjan Timmerman, Keiran Shelden, Brian Gold (Pure Storage) and myself started at the office of Pure Storage in downtown Mountain View, much like Frodo Baggins, Samwise Gamgee, Peregrine Took and Meriadoc Brandybuck forging their journey vows at Rivendell. The podcast was supposed to be on the topic of storage metrics but was unanimously swung to talk about Hadoop under the stewardship of Mr. Stephen Foskett, our host of Tech Field Day. I saw Stephen as Elrond Half-elven, the Lord of Rivendell, moderating the podcast as he would have in the plans of decimating the One Ring in Mount Doom.

So there we were talking about Hadoop, or maybe Sauron, or both.

The photo of the Oliphaunt below seemed apt to describe the industry attacks on Hadoop.

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AI needs data we can trust

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[ Note: This article was published on LinkedIn on Jan 21th 2020. Here is the link to the original article ]

In 2020, the intensity on the topic of Artificial Intelligence will further escalate.

One news which came out last week terrified me. The Sarawak courts want to apply Artificial Intelligence to mete judgment and punishment, perhaps on a small scale.

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NAS is the next Ransomware goldmine

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I get an email like this almost every day:

It is from one of my FreeNAS customers daily security run logs, emailed to our support@katanalogic.com alias. It is attempting a brute force attack trying to crack the authentication barrier via the exposed SSH port.

Just days after the installation was completed months ago, a bot has been doing IP port scans on our system, and found the SSH port open. (We used it for remote support). It has been trying every since, and we have been observing the source IP addresses.

The new Ransomware attack vector

This is not surprising to me. Ransomware has become more sophisticated and more damaging than ever because the monetary returns from the ransomware are far more effective and lucrative than other cybersecurity threats so far. And the easiest preys are the weakest link in the People, Process and Technology chain. Phishing breaches through social engineering, emails are the most common attack vectors, but there are vhishing (via voicemail) and smshing (via SMS) out there too. Of course, we do not discount other attack vectors such as mal-advertising sites, or exploits and so on. Anything to deliver the ransomware payload.

The new attack vector via NAS (Network Attached Storage) and it is easy to understand why.

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Is General Purpose Object Storage disenfranchised?

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[Disclosure: I am invited by GestaltIT as a delegate to their Storage Field Day 19 event from Jan 22-24, 2020 in the Silicon Valley USA. My expenses, travel, accommodation and conference fees will be covered by GestaltIT, the organizer and I am not obligated to blog or promote the vendors’ technologies to be presented at this event. The content of this blog is of my own opinions and views]

This is NOT an advertisement for coloured balls.

This is the license to brag for the vendors in the next 2 weeks or so, as we approach the 2020 new year. This, of course, is the latest 2019 IDC Marketscape for Object-based Storage, released last week.

My object storage mentions

I have written extensively about Object Storage since 2011. With different angles and perspectives, here are some of them:

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Time to Advocate Common Data Personality

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The thought of it has been on my mind since Commvault GO 2019. It was sparked when Don Foster, VP of Storage Solutions of Commvault answered a question posted by one of the analysts. What he said made a connection, as I was searching for the better insights to how Commvault and Hedvig would end up to be together.

Data Deluge is a swamp thing now

Several years ago, I heard Stephen Brobst, CTO of Teradata brought up the term “Data Swamp“. It was the anti- part of the Data Lakes, and this was back when Data Lakes and Hadoop were all the rage. His comments were raw, honest and it was leading to the truth out there.

Source: https://www.deviantart.com/rhineville/art/God-that-Crawls-Detail-2-291228644

I was enamoured by his thoughts at the time, and today, his comments about the Data Swamp manifested itself. Continue reading →

Brainy Commvault

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[Disclosure: I was invited by Commvault as a Media person and Social Ambassador to their Commvault GO 2019 Conference and also a Tech Field Day eXtra delegate from Oct 13-17, 2019 in the Denver CO, USA. My expenses, travel, accommodation and conference fees were covered by Commvault, the organizer and I was not obligated to blog or promote their technologies presented at this event. The content of this blog is of my own opinions and views]

The waltz across the Commvault-Hedvig mine field will not be easy. Commvault will have a lot of open discussions about their acquisition of Hedvig and how Hedvig “primary storage platform” will fit into a “secondary storage framework” of Commvault. The outcome of this consummation is yet to appear as a structured form. The storyline will eventually form as Commvault’s diligence to define their strategy moving forward.

Day 1

Day 1 was my open day at Commvault GO. I was absorbing the first impressions of Commvault again even though this was my third Commvault GO, after Washington DC and Nashville in 2017 and 2018 respectively. There was certainly a “startup” feeling again in Commvault since the appointment of Sanjay Mirchandani as CEO 9 months ago.

A lot of excitement and buzz were generated around the metallic, the Commvault venture into Software-as-a-Service (SaaS). The SaaS solution is targeted at the mid-market for organizations with 500-2500 staff count. Its simplicity and pricing were the 2 things which gave me a good feeling all over. There is even a 45-day trial for metallic.

Getting Brainy

My Day 2 itinerary was more specific because my agenda for this trip was to seek answers to the realization of Commvault-Hedvig.

Commvault took the distinction of using the vision of a DataBrain (#databrain) to define their strategy. From the picture below, the left and right hemisphere of the DataBrain forms the Storage Management piece on the left and Data Management on the right.

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Data Renaissance in Oil and Gas

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The Oil and Gas industry, especially in the upstream Exploration and Production (EP) sector, has been enjoying a renewed vigour in the past few years. I have kept in touch with the developments of the EP side because I always have a soft spot for the industry. I have engaged in infrastructure and solutions in the petrotechnical side in my days at Sun Microsystems back in the late 90s. The engagements with EP intensified in my first stint at NetApp, wearing the regional Oil & Gas consulting engineer here in South Asia for almost 6 years. Then, with Interica in 2014, I was dealing with subsurface data and seismic interpretation technology. EP is certainly an exciting sector to cover because there are so much technical work involved and the technologies, especially the non-IT, are breath taking.

I have been an annual registrant to the Digital Energy Journal events since 2013, except last year, and I have always enjoyed their newsletter. This week I attended Digital Energy 2-day conference again, and I was taken in by the exciting times in EP. Here are a few of my views and trends observation in this data renaissance.

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Commvault big bet

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I woke up at 2.59am in the morning of Sept 5th morning, a bit discombobulated and quickly jumped into the Commvault call. The damn alarm rang and I slept through it, but I got up just in time for the 3am call.

As I was going through the motion of getting onto UberConference, organized by GestaltIT, I was already sensing something big. In the call, Commvault was acquiring Hedvig and it hit me. My drowsy self centered to the big news. And I saw a few guys from Veritas and Cohesity on my social media group making gestures about the acquisition.

I spent the rest of the week thinking about the acquisition. What is good? What is bad? How is Commvault going to move forward? This is at pressing against the stark background from the rumour mill here in South Asia, just a week before this acquisition news, where I heard that the entire Commvault teams in Malaysia and Asia Pacific were released. I couldn’t confirm the news in Asia Pacific, but the source of the news coming from Malaysia was strong and a reliable one.

What is good?

It is a big win for Hedvig. Nestled among several scale-out primary storage vendors and little competitive differentiation, this Commvault acquisition is Hedvig’s pay day.

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Intel IoT Revolution for Malaysia Industry 4.0

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Intel rocks!

I have been following Intel for a few years now, a big part was for their push of the 3D Xpoint technology. Under the Optane brand, Intel has several forms of media types, addressing persistent memory to storage class and solid state storage. Intel, in recent years, has been more forefront with their larger technology portfolio and it is not just about their processors anymore. One of the bright areas I am seeing myself getting more engrossed in (and involved into) is their IoT (Internet of Things) portfolio, and it has been very exciting so far.

Intel IoT and Deep Learning Frameworks

The efforts of the Intel IoTG (Internet of Things Group) in Asia Pacific are recognized rapidly. The drive of the Industry 4.0 revolution is strong. And I saw the brightest spark of the Intel folks pushing the Industry 4.0 message on homeground Malaysia.

After the large showing by Intel at the Semicon event 2 months ago, they turned up a notch in Penang at their own Intel IoT Summit 2019, which concluded last week.

At the event, Intel brought out their solid engineering geeks. There were plenty of talks and workshops on Deep Learning, AI, Neural Networks, with chatters on Nervana, Nauta and Saffron. Despite all the technology and engineering prowess of Intel was showcasing, there was a worrying gap.

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Digital Transformation means Change in People

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I wrote about Digital Transformation a few weeks ago. In the heart of it, People are the real key to the transformation of every organization. Following up what I described earlier, Change is the factor that People in every organization have to embrace.

Drowning and going blind

We are swarmed by technology. We are inundated with everything digital and we are attracted to the latest buzz and hype. In the sea of it all, these things have made us, the People reliant of technology. This reliance, this needy dependency, has made us complacent. We settle because the boring and mundane tasks have been taken away from us. Moreover, the constant firehose feeding our lives has created “digital drowning“, a situation I would like describe as gasping for a breather to think clearly. We are bogged by digital quagmire, blinded by what shiny things and we lose sight of the strategic focus.

We shrivel and we go back to what we think is our comfort zone.

Change is constant and uncomfortable

I once read that our known comfort zone is no longer our safety zone. That idea of everyone’s safety zone has been obliterated aeons ago. I love the following quote from Seth Godin, my absolute marketing guru.

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As he rightly pointed out, “There is no ‘ever after’. There’s just the chaos of now“. We don’t arrive at a comfortable place after the change. There is no comfortable place or safety place for that matter … at all. The Digital Transformation or what ever Information Age we described our generation earlier, is constant change. We have to ride the hungry bear and we have to saddle the ferocious dragon at all times. We have to learn to ride the bucking bronco!

So, we learn. We change and change. Continue reading →