Unstructured Data Observability with Datadobi StorageMAP

Let’s face it. Data is bursting through its storage seams. And every organization now is storing too much data that they don’t know they have.

By 2025, IDC predicts that 80% the world’s data will be unstructured. IDC‘s report Global Datasphere Forecast 2021-2025 will see the global data creation and replication capacity expand to 181 zettabytes, an unfathomable figure. Organizations are inundated. They struggle with data growth, with little understanding of what data they have, where the data is residing, what to do with the data, and how to manage the voluminous data deluge.

The simple knee-jerk action is to store it in cloud object storage where the price of storage is $0.0000xxx/GB/month. But many IT departments in these organizations often overlook the fact that that the data they have parked in the cloud require movement between the cloud and on-premises. I have been involved in numerous discussions where the customers realized that they moved the data in the cloud moved too frequently. Often it was an erred judgement or short term blindness (blinded by the cheap storage costs no doubt), further exacerbated by the pandemic. These oversights have resulted in expensive and painful monthly API calls and egress fees. Welcome to reality. Suddenly the cheap cloud storage doesn’t sound so cheap after all.

The same can said about storing non-active unstructured data on primary storage. Many organizations have not been disciplined to practise good data management. The primary Tier 1 storage becomes bloated over time, grinding sluggishly as the data capacity grows. I/O processing becomes painfully slow and backup takes longer and longer. Sounds familiar?

The A in ABC

I brought up the ABC mantra a few blogs ago. A is for Archive First. It is part of my data protection consulting practice conversation repertoire, and I use it often to advise IT organizations to be smart with their data management. Before archiving (some folks like to call it tiering, but I am not going down that argument today), we must know what to archive. We cannot blindly send all sorts of junk data to the secondary or tertiary storage premises. If we do that, it is akin to digging another hole to fill up the first hole.

We must know which unstructured data to move replicate or sync from the Tier 1 storage to a second (or third) less taxing storage premises. We must be able to see this data, observe its behaviour over time, and decide the best data management practice to apply to this data. Take note that I said best data management practice and not best storage location in the previous sentence. There has to be a clear distinction that a data management strategy is more prudent than to a “best” storage premises. The reason is many organizations are ignorantly thinking the best storage location (the thought of the “cheapest” always seems to creep up) is a good strategy while ignoring the fact that data is like water. It moves from premises to premises, from on-prem to cloud, cloud to other cloud. Data mobility is a variable in data management.

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Backup – Lest we forget

World Backup Day – March 31st

Last week was World Backup Day. It is on March 31st every year so that you don’t lose your data and become an April’s Fool the next day.

Amidst the growing awareness of the importance of backup, no thanks to the ever growing destructive nature of ransomware, it is important to look into other aspects of data protection – both a data backup/recovery and a data security –  point of view as well.

3-2-1 Rule, A-B-C and Air Gaps

I highlighted the basic 3-2-1 rule before. This must always be paired with a set of practised processes and policies to cultivate all stakeholders (aka the people) in the organization to understand the importance of protecting the data and ensuring data recoverability.

The A-B-C is to look at the production dataset and decide if the data should be stored in the Tier 1 storage. In most cases, the data becomes less active and these datasets may be good candidates to be archived. Once archived, the production dataset is smaller and data backup operations become lighter, faster and have positive causation as well.

Air gaps have returned to prominence since the heightened threats on data in recent years. The threats have pushed organizations to consider doing data offsite and offline with air gaps. Cost considerations and speed of recovery can be of concerns, and logical air gaps are also gaining style as an acceptable extra layer of data. protection.

Backup is not total Data Protection cyberdefence

If we view data protection more holistically and comprehensively, backup (and recovery) is not the total data protection solution. We must ignore the fancy rhetorics of the technology marketers that backup is the solution to ensure data protection because there is much more than that.

The well respected NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology) Cybersecurity Framework places Recovery (along with backup) as the last pillar of its framework.

NIST Cybersecurity Framework

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Right time for Andrew. The Filesystem that is.

I couldn’t hold my excitement when I discovered Auristor® early last week. I stumbled upon this Computerweekly article “Want to side step Public Cloud? Auristor® offers global file storage.” Given the many news not exactly praising the public cloud storage vendors nowadays, the article’s title caught my attention. Immediately Andrew File System (AFS) was there. I was perplexed at first because I have never seen or heard a commercial version of AFS before. This news gave me goosebumps.

For the curious, I am sure many will ask who is this Andrew anyway? What is my relationship with this Andrew?

One time with Andrew

A bit of my history. I recalled quite vividly helping Intel in Penang, Malaysia to implement their globally distributed file caching mechanism with the NetApp® filer’s NFS. It was probably 2001 and I believed Intel wanted to share their engineering computing (EC) files between their US facilities and Intel Penang Design Center (PDC). As I worked along with the Intel folks, I found out that this distributed file caching technology was called Andrew File System (AFS).

Although I couldn’t really recalled how the project went, I remembered it being a bed of bugs at that time. But being the storage geek that I am, I obviously took some time to get to know Andrew the File System. 20 years have gone by, and I never really thought of AFS coming out as a commercial solution or even knew of it as one, until Auristor®,

Auristor Logo

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Falconstor Software Defined Data Preservation for the Next Generation

Falconstor® Software is gaining momentum. Given its arduous climb back to the fore, it is beginning to soar again.

Tape technology and Digital Data Preservation

I mentioned that long term digital data preservation is a segment within the data lifecycle which has merits and prominence. SNIA® has proved that this is a strong growing market segment through its 2007 and 2017 “100 Year Archive” surveys, respectively. 3 critical challenges of this long, long-term digital data preservation is to keep the archives

  • Accessible
  • Undamaged
  • Usable

For the longest time, tape technology has been the king of the hill for digital data preservation. The technology is cheap, mature, and many enterprises has built their long term strategy around it. And the pulse in the tape technology market is still very healthy.

The challenges of tape remain. Every 5 years or so, companies have to consider moving the data on the existing tape technology to the next generation. It is widely known that LTO can read tapes of the previous 2 generations, and write to it a generation before. The tape transcription process of migrating digital data for the sake of data preservation is bad because it affects the structural integrity and quality of the content of the data.

In my times covering the Oil & Gas subsurface data management, I have seen NOCs (national oil companies) with 500,000 tapes of all generations, from 1/2″ to DDS, DAT to SDLT, 3590 to LTO 1-7. And millions are spent to transcribe these tapes every few years and we have folks like Katalyst DM, Troika and more hovering this landscape for their fill.

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Commvault coming all together

[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

Data Renaissance in Oil and Gas

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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We got to keep more data

Guess which airport has won the most awards in the annual Skytrax list? Guess which airport won 480 awards since its opening in 1981? Guess how this airport did it?

Data Analytics gives the competive edge.

Serving and servicing more than 65 million passengers and travellers in 2018, and growing, Changi Airport Singapore sets a very high level customer service. And it does it with the help of technology, something they call Smart (Service Management through Analytics and Resource Transformation) Airport. In an ultra competitive and cut-throat airline business, the deep integration of customer-centric services and the ultimate traveller’s experience are crucial to the survival and growth of airlines. And it has definitely helped Singapore Airlines to be the world’s best airlines in 2018, its 4th win.

To achieve that, Changi Airport relies on technology and lots of relevant data for deep insights on how to serve its customers better. The details are well described in this old news article.

Keep More Relevant Data for Greater Insights

When I mean more data, I do not mean every single piece of data. Data has to be relevant to be useful.

How do we get more insights? How can we teach systems to learn? How to we develop artificial intelligence systems? By having more relevant data feeding into data analytics systems, machine learning and such.

As such, a simple framework for building from the data ingestion, to data repositories to outcomes such as artificial intelligence, predictive and recommendations systems, automation and new data insights isn’t difficult to understand. The diagram below is a high level overview of what I work with most of the time. Continue reading

Clever Cohesity

[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