Commvault big bet

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

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

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

Whither HPC, HPE?

HPE is acquiring Cray Inc. Almost 3 years ago, HPE acquired SGI. Back in 2017, HPE partnered WekaIO, and invested big in the latest Series C funding of WekaIO just weeks ago.

Cray, SGI and WekaIO are all strong HPC technology companies. Given the strong uptick in the HPC market, especially commercial HPC, we cannot deny HPE’s ambition to become the top SuperComputing and HPC vendor in the industry. Continue reading

Scaling new HPC with Composable Architecture

[Disclosure: I was invited by Dell Technologies as a delegate to their Dell Technologies World 2019 Conference from Apr 29-May 1, 2019 in the Las Vegas USA. Tech Field Day Extra was an included activity as part of the Dell Technologies World. My expenses, travel, accommodation and conference fees were covered by Dell Technologies, 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]

Deep Learning, Neural Networks, Machine Learning and subsequently Artificial Intelligence (AI) are the new generation of applications and workloads to the commercial HPC systems. Different from the traditional, more scientific and engineering HPC workloads, I have written about the new dawn of supercomputing and the attractive posture of commercial HPC.

Don’t be idle

From the business perspective, the investment of HPC systems is high most of the time, and justifying it to the executives and the investors is not easy. Therefore, it is critical to keep feeding the HPC systems and significantly minimize the idle times for compute, GPUs, network and storage.

However, almost all HPC systems today are inflexible. Once assigned to a project, the resources pretty much stay with the project, even when the workload processing of the project is idle and waiting. Of course, we have to bear in mind that not all resources are fully abstracted, virtualized and software-defined whereby you can carve out pieces of the hardware and deliver a percentage of that resource. Case in point is the CPU, where you cannot assign certain clock cycles of CPU to one project and another half to the other. The technology isn’t there yet. Certain resources like GPU is going down the path of Virtual GPU, and into the realm of resource disaggregation. Eventually, all resources of the HPC systems – CPU, memory, FPGA, GPU, PCIe channels, NVMe paths, IOPS, bandwidth, burst buffers etc – should be disaggregated and pooled for disparate applications and workloads based on demands of usage, time and performance.

Hence we are beginning to see the disaggregated HPC systems resources composed and built up the meet the diverse mix and needs of HPC applications and workloads. This is even more acute when a AI project might grow cold, but the training of AL/ML/DL workloads continues to stay hot

Liqid the early leader in Composable Architecture

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Connecting ideas and people with Dell Influencers

[Disclosure: I was invited by Dell Technologies as a delegate to their Dell Technologies World 2019 Conference from Apr 29-May 1, 2019 in the Las Vegas USA. My expenses, travel, accommodation and conference fees were covered by Dell Technologies, 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]

I just got home from Vegas yesterday after attending my 2nd Dell Technologies World as one of the Dell Luminaries. The conference was definitely a bigger one than the one last year, with more than 15,000 attendees. And there was a frenzy of announcements, from Dell Technologies Cloud to new infrastructure solutions, and more. The big one for me, obviously was Azure VMware Solutions officiated by Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger, with Michael Dell bringing together the union. I blogged about Dell jumping into the cloud in a big way.

AI Tweetup

In the razzmatazz, the most memorable moments were one of the Tweetups organized by Dr. Konstanze Alex (Konnie) and her team, and Tech Field Day Extra.

Tweetup was alien to me. I didn’t know how the concept work and I did google tweetup before that. There were a few tweetups on the topics of data protection and 5G, but the one that stood out for me was the AI tweetup.

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Is AI my friend?

I am sorry, Dave …

Let’s start this story with 2 supposed friends – Dave and Hal.

How do we become friends?

We have friends and we have enemies. We become friends when trust is established. Trust is established when there is an unsaid pact, a silent agreement that I can rely on you to keep my secrets private. I will know full well that you will protect my personal details with a strong conviction. Your decisions and your actions towards me are in my best interest, unbiased and would benefit both me and you.

I feel secure with you.

AI is my friend

When the walls of uncertainty and falsehood are broken down, we trust our friends more and more. We share deeper secrets with our friends when we believe that our privacy and safety are safeguarded and protected. We know well that we can rely on them and their decisions and actions on us are reliable and unbiased.

AI, can I count on you to protect my privacy and give me security that my personal data is not abused in the hands of the privileged few?

AI, can I rely on you to be ethical, unbiased and give me the confidence that your decisions and actions are for the benefit and the good of me, myself and I?

My AI friends (maybe)

As I have said before, I am not a skeptic. When there is plenty of relevant, unbiased data fed into the algorithms of AI, the decisions are fair. People accept these AI decisions when the degree of accuracy is very close to the Truth. The higher the accuracy, the greater the Truth. The greater the Truth, the more confident people are towards the AI system.

Here are some AI “friends” in the news:

But we have to careful here as well. Accuracy can be subjective, paradoxical and enigmatic. When ethics are violated, we terminate the friendship and we reject the “friend”. We categorically label him or her as an enemy. We constantly have to check, just like we might, once in a while, investigate on our friends too.

In Conclusion

AI, can we be friends now?

[Apology: sorry about the Cyberdyne link 😉 ]

[This blog was posted in LinkedIn on Apr 19th 2019]

Data Privacy First before AI Framework

A few days ago, I discovered that Malaysia already had plans for a National Artificial Intelligence (AI) Framework. It is led by Malaysia Digital Economy Corporation (MDEC) and it will be ready by the end of 2019. A Google search revealed a lot news and announcements, with a few dating back to 2017, but little information of the framework itself. Then again, Malaysia likes to take the “father knows best” approach, and assumes that what it is doing shouldn’t be questioned (much). I will leave this part as it is, because perhaps the details of the framework is under the OSA (Official Secrets Act).

Are we AI responsible or are we responsible for AI?

But I would like to highlight the data privacy part that is likely to figure strongly in the AI Framework, because the ethical use of AI is paramount. It will have economical, social and political impact on Malaysians, and everybody else too. I have written a few articles on LinkedIn about ethics, data privacy, data responsibility, impact of AI. You can read about them in the links below:

I may sound like a skeptic of AI. I am not. I believe AI will benefit mankind, and bring far reaching developments to the society as a whole. But we have to careful and this is my MAIN concern when I voice about AI. I continue to question the human ethics and the human biases that go into the algorithms that define AI. This has always been the crux of my gripes, my concerns, my skepticism of everything we call AI. I am not against AI but I am against the human flaws that shape the algorithms of AI.

Everything is a Sheep (or a Giraffe)

A funny story was shared with me last year. It was about Microsoft Azure computer vision algorithm in recognizing visuals in photos. Apparently the algorithm of the Microsoft Azure’s neural network was fed with some overzealous data of sheep (or giraffes), and the AI system started to point out that every spot that it “saw” was either a sheep, or any vertical long ones was a giraffe.

In the photo below, there were a bunch of sheep on a tree. Check out the tags/comments in the red rectangle published by the AI neural network software below and see how both Microsoft Azure and NeutralTalk2 “saw” in the photo. You can read more about the funny story here.

This proves my point that if you feed the learning system and the AI behind it with biased and flawed information, the result can be funny (in this case here) or disastrous. Continue reading

The full force of Western Digital

[Preamble: I have been invited by GestaltIT as a delegate to their Tech Field Day for Storage Field Day 18 from Feb 27-Mar 1, 2019 in the Silicon Valley USA. My expenses, travel and accommodation were covered by GestaltIT, 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]

3 weeks after Storage Field Day 18, I was still trying to wrap my head around the 3-hour session we had with Western Digital. I was like a kid in a candy store for a while, because there were too much to chew and I couldn’t munch them all.

From “Silicon to System”

Not many storage companies in the world can claim that mantra – “From Silicon to Systems“. Western Digital is probably one of 3 companies (the other 2 being Intel and nVidia) I know of at present, which develops vertical innovation and integration, end to end, from components, to platforms and to systems.

For a long time, we have always known Western Digital to be a hard disk company. It owns HGST, SanDisk, providing the drives, the Flash and the Compact Flash for both the consumer and the enterprise markets. However, in recent years, through 2 eyebrow raising acquisitions, Western Digital was moving itself up the infrastructure stack. In 2015, it acquired Amplidata. 2 years later, it acquired Tegile Systems. At that time, I was wondering why a hard disk manufacturer was buying storage technology companies that were not its usual bread and butter business.

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WekaIO controls their performance destiny

[Preamble: I have been invited by GestaltIT as a delegate to their Tech Field Day for Storage Field Day 18 from Feb 27-Mar 1, 2019 in the Silicon Valley USA. My expenses, travel and accommodation were covered by GestaltIT, 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]

I was first introduced to WekaIO back in Storage Field Day 15. I did not blog about them back then, but I have followed their progress quite attentively throughout 2018. 2 Storage Field Days and a year later, they were back for Storage Field Day 18 with a new CTO, Andy Watson, and several performance benchmark records.

Blowout year

2018 was a blowout year for WekaIO. They have experienced over 400% growth, placed #1 in the Virtual Institute IO-500 10-node performance challenge, and also became #1 in the SPEC SFS 2014 performance and latency benchmark. (Note: This record was broken by NetApp a few days later but at a higher cost per client)

The Virtual Institute for I/O IO-500 10-node performance challenge was particularly interesting, because it pitted WekaIO against Oak Ridge National Lab (ORNL) Summit supercomputer, and WekaIO won. Details of the challenge were listed in Blocks and Files and WekaIO Matrix Filesystem became the fastest parallel file system in the world to date.

Control, control and control

I studied WekaIO’s architecture prior to this Field Day. And I spent quite a bit of time digesting and understanding their data paths, I/O paths and control paths, in particular, the diagram below:

Starting from the top right corner of the diagram, applications on the Linux client (running Weka Client software) and it presents to the Linux client as a POSIX-compliant file system. Through the network, the Linux client interacts with the WekaIO kernel-based VFS (virtual file system) driver which coordinates the Front End (grey box in upper right corner) to the Linux client. Other client-based protocols such as NFS, SMB, S3 and HDFS are also supported. The Front End then interacts with the NIC (which can be 10/100G Ethernet, Infiniband, and NVMeoF) through SR-IOV (single root IO virtualization), bypassing the Linux kernel for maximum throughput. This is with WekaIO’s own networking stack in user space. Continue reading