HDS Archives - Page 2 of 3

Time to Advocate Common Data Personality

By cfheoh | November 25, 2019 - 12:33 pm |November 25, 2019 Amazon Web Services, Analytics, API, Artificial Intelligence, Big Data, Commvault, Containers, Data Archiving, Data Availability, Data Management, Data Privacy, Data Protection, Data Security, Deep Learning, Digital Transformation, eDiscovery, Hadoop, Hadoop Clusters, HDS, Hedvig, Hitachi Vantara, InfluxDB, Machine Learning, MapReduce, Object Storage

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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 →

Did Cloud Kill LTFS?

By cfheoh | May 21, 2019 - 10:39 am |May 21, 2019 Acquisition, Backup, Business Continuity, Cloud, Data, Data Archiving, Data Availability, Data Domain, Data Management, Data Protection, Deduplication, DellEMC, Disks, EMC, ExaGrid, Falconstor, Filesystems, HDS, HPE, IBM, LTO, NAS, NetApp, Object Storage, Quantum Corporation, Strongbox, Tape, Tapes, Veritas

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I like LTFS (Linear Tape File System). I was hoping it would take off but it has not. And looking at its future, its significance is becoming less and less relevant. I look if Cloud has been a factor in the possible demise of LTFS in the next few years.

What is LTFS?

In a nutshell, Linear Tape File System makes LTO tapes look like a disk with a file system. It takes a tape and divides it into 2 partitions:

Index Partition (XML Index Schema with file names, metadata and attributes details)
Data Partition (where the data resides)

Diagram from https://www.snia.org/sites/default/orig/SDC2011/presentations/tuesday/DavidPease_LinearTape_File_System.pdf

It has a File System module which is implemented in supported OS of Unix/Linux, MacOS and Windows. And the mounted file system “tape partition” shows up as a drive or device.

Assassination attempts

There were many attempts to kill off tapes and so far, none has been successful.

Among the “tape-killer” technologies, I think the most prominent one is the VTL (Virtual Tape Library). There were many VTLs I encountered during my days in mid-2000s. NetApp had Alacritus and EMC had Clariion Disk Libraries. There were also IBM ProtecTIER, FalconStor VTL (which is still selling today) among others and Sepaton (read in reverse is “No Tapes’). Sepaton was acquired by Hitachi Data Systems several years back. Continue reading →

Minio – the minimalist object storage technology

By cfheoh | February 7, 2019 - 10:57 am |February 7, 2019 Amazon Web Services, Analytics, API, Appliance, Big Data, Cloud, Data, Data Archiving, Data Fabric, Data Management, Data Protection, Data Security, Deep Learning, Disaster Recovery, Edge Computing, Filesystems, Flash, FreeNAS, HDS, High Performance Computing, Hitachi Vantara, Industry 4.0, Katana Logic, Linux, Machine Learning, Minio, NAS, NetApp, NFS, Object Storage, Openstack, Redhat, Scale-out architecture, Tech Field Day

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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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Sleepless in Malaysia with Object Storage

By cfheoh | January 22, 2019 - 1:42 pm |January 22, 2019 Amazon, Amazon Web Services, Analytics, API, Big Data, Cloud, Cloudian, Clusters, Data Management, Deep Learning, DellEMC, Dropbox, Filesystems, Google, Hadoop, Hadoop Clusters, HDS, IDC, IoT, iSCSI, Linux, Machine Learning, Microsoft, Minio, NAS, NFS, Object Storage, OpenIO, Redhat, Security, swiftstack

Object Storage? What’s that?

For the past couple of months, I have been speaking with a few parties in Malaysia about object storage technology. And I was fairly surprised with the responses.

The 2 reports

For a start, I did not set out to talk about object storage. It kind of fell onto my lap. 2 recent Hitachi Vantara reports revealed that countries like Australia, Hong Kong and even South East Asian countries were behind in their understanding of what object storage was, and the benefits it brought to the new generation of web scale and enterprise applications.

In the first report, an IDC survey sponsored by Hitachi Vantara, mentioned that 41% of the enterprises in Australia are not aware of object storage technology. In a similar survey, this one pointing towards Hong Kong and China, the percentages were 38% and 35% respectively. I would presume that the percentages for countries in South East Asia would not fall too far from the apple tree.

How is Malaysia doing?

However, I worry that the percentage number could be far more dire in Malaysia. In the past 2 months, responses from several conversations painted a darker hue about object storage technology with the companies in Malaysia. These included a reasonable sized hosting company, a well-established systems integrator, a software development company, several storage practitioners in Openstack and a DellEMC’s regional consultant for unstructured data. The collective conclusion was object storage technology was relatively unknown (probably similar to the percentages to the IDC/Hitachi Vantara reports), but it appeared to be shunned at this juncture. In web scale applications, Redhat Ceph block and files appeared popular in contrast to Openstack Swift. In enterprise applications, it was a toss of iSCSI and NFS.

Image from https://zdnet4.cbsistatic.com/hub/i/r/2018/04/24/c79e9dfb-b4a9-46bb-b831-f2c57fdf8a1d/resize/470xauto/5e4846d1bc7a034c382baf6dcbb612ed/cloud-storage.jpg

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Is Pure Play Storage good?

By cfheoh | November 13, 2018 - 3:16 am |November 15, 2018 Acquisition, Analytics, Appliance, Artificial Intelligence, Cloud, Cloudian, Cohesity, Data Management, Data Protection, Data Security, Datera, Datrium, Deep Learning, Dell, DellEMC, Drivescale, E8 Storage, EMC, Excelero, Flash, Gartner, Hammerspace, HDS, Hedvig, Hitachi Vantara, Huawei, IBM, Kaminario, NetApp, Nimble Storage, Nutanix, NVMe, Panasas, Promise Technology, Pure Storage, Ryuusi, Scale-out architecture, Server SAN, Software Defined Storage, Software-defined Datacenter, Solid State Devices, Storage Field Day, Storage Market Share, Tech Field Day, Tegile, Tintri, Unified Storage, Violin Memory, WekaIO, XtremIO

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I post storage and cloud related articles to my unofficial SNIA Malaysia Facebook community (you are welcomed to join) every day. It is a community I started over 9 years ago, and there are active live banters of the posts of the day. Casual, personal were the original reasons why I started the community on Facebook rather than on LinkedIn, and I have been curating it religiously for the longest time.

The Big 5 of Storage (it was Big 6 before this)

Looking back 8-9 years ago, the storage vendor landscape of today has not changed much. The Big 5 hegemony is still there, still dominating the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Enterprise and Mid-end Arrays, and is still there in the All-Flash quadrant as well, albeit the presence of Pure Storage in that market.

The Big 5 of today – Dell EMC, NetApp, HPE, IBM and Hitachi Vantara – were the Big 6 of 2009-2010, consisting of EMC, NetApp, Dell, HP, IBM and Hitachi Data Systems. The All-Flash, or Gartner calls it Solid State Arrays (SSA) market was still an afterthought, and Pure Storage was just founded. Pure Storage did not appear in my radar until 2 years later when I blogged about Pure Storage’s presence in the market.

Here’s a look at the Gartner Magic Quadrant for 2010:

We see Pure Play Storage vendors in the likes of EMC, NetApp, Hitachi Data Systems (before they adopted the UCP into their foray), 3PAR, Compellent, Pillar Data Systems, BlueArc, Xiotech, Nexsan, DDN and Infortrend. And when we compare that to the 2017 Magic Quadrant (I have not seen the 2018 one yet) below:

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Own the Data Pipeline

By cfheoh | March 27, 2018 - 9:50 am |March 27, 2018 Analytics, API, Backup, Big Data, Cloud, Data, Data Archiving, Data Availability, Data Fabric, Data Management, Disaster Recovery, Filesystems, FreeNAS, Hadoop, Hadoop Clusters, HDS, High Performance Computing, Hitachi Vantara, Hyperconvergence, Machine Learning, NAS, NetApp, NFS, Reliability, ROBO, Software Defined Storage, Software-defined Datacenter, Storage Field Day, Storage Tiering, Virtualization

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[Preamble: I was a delegate of Storage Field Day 15 from Mar 7-9, 2018. My expenses, travel and accommodation were paid for by GestaltIT, the organizer and I was not obligated to blog or promote the technologies presented at this event. The content of this blog is of my own opinions and views]

I am a big proponent of Go-to-Market (GTM) solutions. Technology does not stand alone. It must be in an ecosystem, and in each industry, in each segment of each respective industry, every ecosystem is unique. And when we amalgamate data, the storage infrastructure technologies and the data management into the ecosystem, we reap the benefits in that ecosystem.

Data moves in the ecosystem, from system to system, north to south, east to west and vice versa, random, sequential, ad-hoc. Data acquires different statuses, different roles, different relevances in its lifecycle through the ecosystem. From it, we derive the flow, a workflow of data creating a data pipeline. The Data Pipeline concept has been around since the inception of data.

To illustrate my point, I created one for the Oil & Gas – Exploration & Production (EP) upstream some years ago.

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Commvault calling again

By cfheoh | October 31, 2017 - 8:27 pm |October 31, 2017 Actifio, Analytics, Appliance, Backup, Big Data, Business Continuity, Cloud, Commvault, Data, Data Archiving, Data Availability, Data Management, Deduplication, Disaster Recovery, Filesystems, Gartner, HDS, Hyperconvergence, IBM, NetApp, Reliability, Security, Software Defined Storage, Software-defined Datacenter, Tape, Tapes, Unified Storage, Veritas, Virtualization

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[Preamble: I will be a delegate of Storage Field Day 14. My expenses, travel and accommodation are paid for by GestaltIT, the organizer and I am not obligated to blog or promote the technologies presented in this event]

I am off to the US again next Monday. I am attending Storage Field Day 14 and it will be a 20+ hour long haul flight. But this SFD has a special twist, because I will be Washington DC first for Commvault GO 2017 conference. And I can’t wait.

My first encounter with Commvault goes way back in early 2001. I recalled they had their Galaxy version but in terms of market share, they were relatively small compared to Veritas and IBM at the time. I was with NetApp back then, and customers in Malaysia hardly heard of them, except for the people in Shell IT International (SITI). For those of us in the industry, we all knew that SITI worldwide had an exclusive Commvault fork just for them.

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The reverse wars – DAS vs NAS vs SAN

By cfheoh | March 13, 2015 - 9:54 am |March 13, 2015 10Gigabit Ethernet, Appliance, ATA over Ethernet, Avere, CIFS, Cloud, Data, Disks, EMC, Fibre Channel, Filesystems, HDS, High Performance Computing, Hyperconvergence, iSCSI, Linux, Memory Cloud, Microsoft, NAS, NetApp, Nexenta, NFS, Nutanix, NVMe, Object Storage, Open Compute Project, Openstack, Panasas, PCIe, Performance Benchmark, Performance Caching, Scale-out architecture, SCSI, Seagate, Server SAN, Simplivity, SMB, Software Defined Storage, Solaris, Solid State Devices, Storage Optimization, Storage Tiering, Unified Storage, Virident, Virsto, Virtualization, VMware, XtremIO

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It has been quite an interesting 2 decades.

In the beginning (starting in the early to mid-90s), SAN (Storage Area Network) was the dominant architecture. DAS (Direct Attached Storage) was on the wane as the channel-like throughput of Fibre Channel protocol coupled by the million-device addressing of FC obliterated parallel SCSI, which was only able to handle 16 devices and throughput up to 80 (later on 160 and 320) MB/sec.

NAS, defined by CIFS/SMB and NFS protocols – was happily chugging along the 100 Mbit/sec network, and occasionally getting sucked into the arguments about why SAN was better than NAS. I was already heavily dipped into NFS, because I was pretty much a SunOS/Solaris bigot back then.

When I joined NetApp in Malaysia in 2000, that NAS-SAN wars were going on, waiting for me. NetApp (or Network Appliance as it was known then) was trying to grow beyond its dot-com roots, into the enterprise space and guys like EMC and HDS were frequently trying to put NetApp down.

“It’s a toy…” was the most common jibe I got in regular engagements until EMC suddenly decided to attack Network Appliance directly with their EMC CLARiiON IP4700. EMC guys would fondly remember this as the “NetApp killer“. Continue reading →

Why demote archived data access?

By cfheoh | March 10, 2015 - 1:21 pm |March 10, 2015 10Gigabit Ethernet, Appliance, Avere, Big Data, CIFS, Cloud, Data, Data Archiving, Data Availability, Data Management, Disks, EMC, Filesystems, HDS, High Performance Computing, NAS, NetApp, Nexenta, NFS, Performance Benchmark, Performance Caching, Reliability, ROBO, SATA, Scale-out architecture, SMB, Solid State Devices, Storage Optimization, Storage Tiering, Tape

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We are all familiar with the concept of data archiving. Passive data gets archived from production storage and are migrated to a slower and often, cheaper storage medium such tapes or SATA disks. Hence the terms nearline and offline data are created. With that, IT constantly reminds users that the archived data is infrequently accessed, and therefore, they have to accept the slower access to passive, archived data.

The business conditions have certainly changed, because the need for data to be 100% online is becoming more relevant. The new competitive nature of businesses dictates that data must be at the fingertips, because speed and agility are the new competitive advantage. Often the total amount of data, production and archived data, is into hundred of TBs, even into PetaBytes!

The industries I am familiar with – Oil & Gas, and Media & Entertainment – are facing this situation. These industries have a deluge of files, and unstructured data in its archive, and much of it dormant, inactive and sitting on old tapes of a bygone era. Yet, these files and unstructured data have the most potential to be explored, mined and analyzed to realize its value to the organization. In short, the archived data and files must be democratized!

The flip side is, when the archived files and unstructured data are coupled with a slow access interface or unreliable storage infrastructure, the value of archived data is downgraded because of the aggravated interaction between access and applications and business requirements. How would organizations value archived data more if the access path to the archived data is so damn hard???!!!

An interesting solution fell upon my lap some months ago, and putting A and B together (A + B), I believe the access path to archived data can be unbelievably of high performance, simple, transparent and most importantly, remove the BLOODY PAIN of FILE AND DATA MIGRATION! For storage administrators and engineers familiar with data migration, especially if the size of the migration is into hundreds of TBs or even PBs, you know what I mean!

I have known this solution for some time now, because I have been avidly following its development after its founders left NetApp following their Spinnaker venture to start Avere Systems.

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Praying to the hypervisor God

By cfheoh | October 5, 2014 - 2:25 pm |October 5, 2014 10Gigabit Ethernet, API, Appliance, Cisco, Cloud, Datacore, Deduplication, Dell, Disks, EMC, Filesystems, Gartner, HDS, HP, IBM, Microsoft, NetApp, Nexenta, Nutanix, NVMe, Open Compute Project, Openstack, Oracle, PCIe, Scale-out architecture, ScaleMP, Server SAN, Simplivity, SNIA, Software Defined Storage, Software-defined Datacenter, Solaris, Solid State Devices, Storage Market Share, Storage Optimization, Storage Tiering, Tintri, Violin Memory, Virident, Virsto, Virtualization, VMware

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I was reading a great article by Frank Denneman about storage intelligence moving up the stack. It was pretty much in line with what I have been observing in the past 18 months or so, about the storage pendulum having swung back to DAS (direct attached storage). To be more precise, the DAS form factor I am referring to are physical server hardware that houses many disk drives.

Like it or not, the hypervisor has become the center of the universe in the IT space. VMware has become the indomitable force in the hypervisor technology, with Microsoft Hyper-V playing catch-up. The seismic shift of these 2 hypervisor technologies are leading storage vendors to place them on to the altar and revering them as deities. The others, with the likes of Xen and KVM, and to lesser extent Solaris Containers aren’t really worth mentioning.

This shift, as the pendulum swings from networked storage back to internal “direct-attached” storage are dictated by 4 main technology factors:

The x86 server architecture
Software-defined
Scale-out architecture
Flash-based storage technology

Anyone remember Thumper? Not the Disney character from the Bambi movie!

When the SunFire X4500 (aka Thumper) was first released in (intermission: checking Wiki for the right year) in 2006, I felt that significant wound inflicted in the networked storage industry. Instead of the usual 4-8 hard disk drives in the all the industry servers at the time, the X4500 4U chassis housed 48 hard disk drives. The design and architecture were so astounding to me, I even went and bought a 1U SunFire X4150 for my personal server collection. Such was my adoration for Sun’s technology at the time.

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