Category Archives: Disaster Recovery

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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Commvault coming all together

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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]

This trip to the Commvault GO conference was pretty much a mission to find answers to their Hedvig acquisition just a month ago. It was an unprecedented move for Commvault and I, as an industry observer and pundit, took the news positively. I wrote in my blog about Commvault’s big bet and I liked their boldness in their approach.

But the news did not bode well back here in Malaysia. The local technology news portal, Data Storage Asean picked up the news in a rather unconvinced way. 2 long time Commvault partners I spoke to were obviously unhappy because the acquisition made little sense to them on the back of closing of the Commvault Malaysia office just weeks before this with more unsettling rumours of the Commvault team in Asia Pacific. The broken trust and the fear of what the future held for the Commvault customers in Malaysia and in the region were riding along with me on this trip.

But I have seen the beginning of the Commvault transformation from the Commvault GO conferences I have attended since 2017. This is my 3rd Commvault GO and I ended Day 1 with good vibes.

Here were some of my highlights in the first day. Continue reading →

Perils of avoiding BC and DR

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News in recent months have been unfavourable, even to the point of poignancy. Maybe I didn’t have all the details to place my opinion, but it has appeared that these recent events have neglected the practice of  BC (business continuity) and DR (disaster recovery).

The recent bad news

The most recent is one close to home. The KLIA (Kuala Lumpur International Airport) and KLIA2 operations were disrupted quite significantly for 4 days due to “network switch” failure. I followed the news and comments quite intently in those bad days, and I did not see any single comment discussing about BC or DR. If BC and DR were present at the airports, the airport operations would have been restored within minutes or hours, not days. Investigations are still on-going to find out what really happened in the KLIA/KLIA2 incident.

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The full force of Western Digital

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[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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Bridges to the clouds and more – NetApp NDAS

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[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]

The NetApp Data Fabric Vision

The NetApp Data Fabric vision has always been clear to me. Maybe it was because of my 2 stints with them, and I got well soaked in their culture. 3 simple points define the vision.

  • The Data Fabric is THE data singularity. Data can be anywhere – on-premises, the clouds, and more.
  • Have bridges, paths and workflows management to the Data, to move the data to wherever the data may be.
  • Work with technology partners to build tools and data systems to elevate the value of the data

That is how I see it. I wrote about the Transcendence of the Data Fabric vision 3+ years ago, and I emphasized the importance of the Data Pipeline in another NetApp blog almost a year ago. The introduction of NetApp Data Availability Services (NDAS) in the recently concluded Storage Field Day 18 was no different as NetApp constructs data bridges and paths to the AWS Cloud.

NetApp Data Availability Services

The NDAS feature is only available with ONTAP 9.5. With less than 5 clicks, data from ONTAP primary systems can be backed up to the secondary ONTAP target (running the NDAS proxy and the Copy to Cloud API), and then to AWS S3 buckets in the cloud.

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Clever Cohesity

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[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]

This is clever. This is very smart.

The moment the Cohesity App Marketplace pitch was shared at the Storage Field Day 18 session, somewhere in my mind, enlightenment came to me.

The hyperconverged platform for secondary data, or is it?

When Cohesity came into the scene, they were branded the latest unicorn alongside Rubrik. Both were gunning for the top hyperconverged platform for secondary data. Crazy money was pouring into that segment – Cohesity got USD250 million in June 2018; Rubrik received USD261 million in Jan 2019 – making the market for hyperconverged platforms for secondary data red-hot. Continue reading →

Catch up (fast) – IBM Spectrum Protect Plus

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[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]

The IBM Spectrum Protect Plus (SPP) team returned again for Storage Field Day 18, almost exactly 50 weeks when they introduced SPP to the Storage Field Day 15 delegates in 2018. My comments in my blog about IBM SPP were not flattering but the product was fairly new back then. I joined the other delegates to listen to IBM again this time around, and being open minded to listen and see their software upgrade.

Spectrum Protect Plus is NOT Spectrum Protect

First of all, it is important to call that IBM Spectrum Protect (SP)and IBM Spectrum Protect Plus (SPP) are 2 distinct products. The SP is the old Tivoli Storage Manager (TSM) while SPP is a more “modern” product, answering to virtualized environments and several public cloud service providers target platforms. To date, SP is version 8.1.x while SPP is introduced as version 10.1.4. There are “some” integration between SP and SPP, where SPP data can be “offloaded” to the SP platform for long term retention.

For one, I certainly am confused about IBM’s marketing and naming of both products, and I am sure many face the same predicament too. Continue reading →

Minio – the minimalist object storage technology

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The Marie Kondo Konmari fever is sweeping the world. Her decluttering and organizing the home methods are leading to a new way of life – Minimalism.

Complicated Storage Experience

Storage technology and its architecture are complex. We layer upon layer of abstraction and virtualization into storage design until at some stage, choke points lead to performance degradation, and management becomes difficult.

I recalled a particular training I attended back in 2006. I just joined Hitachi Data Systems for the Shell GUSto project. I was in Baltimore for the Hitachi NAS course. This was not their HNAS (their BlueArc acquisition) but their home grown NAS based on Linux. In the training, we were setting up NFS service. There were 36 steps required to setup and provision NFS and if there was a misstep, you start from the first command again. Coming from NetApp at the time, it was horrendous. NetApp ONTAP NFS setup and provisioning probably took 3 commands, and this Hitachi NAS setup and configuration was so much more complex. In the end, the experience was just unworldly for me.

Introducing Minio to my world, to Malaysia

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Quantum Corp should spin off Stornext

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What’s happening at Quantum Corporation?

I picked up the latest development news about Quantum Corporation. Last month, in December 2018, they secured a USD210 million financial lifeline to support their deflating business and their debts. And if you follow their development, they are with their 3rd CEO in the past 12 months, which is quite extraordinary. What is happening at Quantum Corp?

Quantum Logo (PRNewsFoto/Quantum Corp.)

Stornext – The Swiss Army knife of Data Management

I have known Quantum since 2000, very focused on the DLT tape library business. At that time, prior to the coming of LTO, DLT and its successor, SuperDLT dominated the tape market together with IBM. In 2006, they acquired ADIC, another tape vendor and became one of the largest tape library vendors in the world. From the ADIC acquisition, Quantum also got their rights on Stornext, a high performance scale out file system. I was deeply impressed with Stornext, and I once called it the Swiss Army knife of Data Management. The versatility of Stornext addressed many of the required functions within the data management lifecycle and workflows, and thus it has made its name in the Media and Entertainment space.

Jack of all trades, master of none

However, Quantum has never reached great heights in my opinion. They are everything to everybody, like a Jack of all trades, master of none. They are backup with their tape libraries and DXi series, archive and tiering with the Lattus, hybrid storage with QXS, and file system and scale-out with Stornext. If they have good business run rates and a healthy pipeline, having a broad product line is fine and dandy. But Quantum has been having CEO changes like turning a turnstile, and amid “a few” accounting missteps and a 2018 CEO who only lasted 5 months, they better steady their rocking boat quickly. Continue reading →

Storage and Data Management Planning crucial for Malaysian SMBs

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Hybrid IT for 2019 and beyond

2019 is here.

I am especially buoyed by the strong network storage industry footing in 2018, reported by The Register last week. 2018 was certainly a blowout year for storage infrastructure and storage software, both for on-premises and the cloud computing platforms. The AWS Outposts announcement over a month ago also just affirmed that the new world is Hybrid IT. And there is plenty to look forward to in 2019.

Malaysian Economic Doldrums

Things are not as rosy for the Malaysia economy in 2019. It will be a challenging 2019 as reported by the Edge, a local business publication. The GDP (gross domestic product) of the first half of 2018 shrunk, from 5.9% in 2017, to 4.65%, and it is estimated to be 4.9% in 2019. With an inexperienced new government, a weak currency, and more competitive economies emerging in ASEAN, Malaysia small and medium businesses (SMBs) could be challenged.

The knee jerk reaction would be to cut the IT spending and revert to buying on price. This has happened too often, because there are always other operating costs that may be more pressing. Furthermore, many of the SMBs are still aimless when it comes to transforming their businesses into the digital data era, groping in the dark and sputtering to get its worth with their IT investments. Often, many are misinformed and stumbled, resulting in much higher wastage and costs.

There is a local saying here:

“Good thing No Cheap; Cheap thing No Good“

And the saying is very apt to describe that there is value in investing well, and the price factor should not always be the main determinant criteria of buying IT infrastructure, software and services.

Many of these SMBs also lack experienced IT staff to manage their IT environment. There is also a hurried urgency to modernize IT, because a well-planned and executed IT strategy and operations would definitely increase their Competitive Advantage. Continue reading →