Category Archives: Hyperconvergence

Let there be light with Commvault Activate

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[Preamble: I have been invited by Commvault via GestaltIT as a delegate to their Commvault GO conference from Oct 9-11, 2018 in Nashville, TN, USA. My expenses, travel and accommodation are paid 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]

Nobody sees well in the dark.

I am piqued and I want to know more about Commvault Activate. The conversation started after lunch yesterday as the delegates were walking back to the Gaylord Opryland Convention Center. I was walking next to Patrick McGrath, one of Commvault marketing folks, and we struck up a conversation in the warm breeze. Patrick started sharing a bit of Commvault Activate and what it could do and the possibilities of many relevant business cases for the solution.

There was a dejà vu moment, bringing my thoughts back to mid-2009. I was just invited by a friend to join him to restructure his company, Real Data Matrix (RDM). They were a NetApp distributor, then Platinum reseller in the early and mid-2000s and they had fell into hard times. Most of their technical team had left them, putting them in a spot to retain one of the largest NetApp support contract in Malaysia at the time.

I wanted to expand on their NetApp DNA and I started to seek out complementary solutions to build on that DNA. Coming out of my gig at EMC, there was an interesting solution which tickled my fancy – VisualSRM. So, I went about seeking the most comprehensive SRM (storage resource management) solution for RDM, one which has the widest storage platforms support. I found Tek-Tools Software and I moved that RDM sign up as their reseller. We got their SE/Developer, Aravind Kurapati, from India to train the RDM engineers. We were ready to hit the market late-2009/early-2010 but a few weeks later, Tek-Tools was acquired by Solarwinds.

Long story short, my mindset about SRM was “If you can’t see your storage resource, you can’t manage your storage“.  Resource visibility is so important in SRM, and the same philosophy applies to Data as well. That’s where Commvault Activate comes in. More than ever, Data Insights is already the biggest differentiator in the Data-Driven transformation in any modern business today. Commvault Activate is the Data Insights that shines the light to all the data in every organization.

After that casual chat with Patrick, more details came up in the early access to Commvault embargoed announcements later that afternoon. Commvault Activate announcement came up in my Twitter feed.

Commvault Activate has a powerful dynamic Index Engine called the Commvault 4D Index and it is responsible to search, discover and learn about different types of data, data context and relationships within the organization. I picked up more information as the conference progressed and found out that the technology behind the Commvault Activate is based on the Apache Lucene Solr enterprise search and indexing platform, courtesy of Lucidworks‘ technology. Suddenly I had a recall moment. I had posted the Commvault and Lucidworks partnership a few months back in my SNIA Malaysia Facebook community. The pictures connected. You can read about the news of the partnership here at Forbes.

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Industry 4.0 secret gem with Dell

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[Preamble: I have been invited by Dell Technologies as a delegate to their upcoming Dell Technologies World from Apr 30-May 2, 2018 in Las Vegas, USA. My expenses, travel and accommodation will be paid by Dell Technologies, 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]

This may seem a little strange. How does Industry 4.0 relate to Dell Technologies?

Recently, I was involved in an Industry 4.0 consortium called Data Industry 4.0 (di 4.0). The objective of the consortium is to combine the foundations of 5S (seiri, seiton, seiso, seiketsu, and shitsuke), QRQC (Quick Response Quality Control) and Kaizen methodologies with the 9 pillars of Industry 4.0 with a strong data insight focus.

Industry 4.0 has been the latest trend in new technologies in the manufacturing world. It is sweeping the manufacturing industry segment by storm, leading with the nine pillars of Industry 4.0:

  • Horizontal and Vertical System Integration
  • Industrial Internet of Things
  • Simulation
  • Additive Manufacturing
  • Cloud Computing
  • Augmented Reality
  • Big Data and Analytics
  • Cybersecurity
  • Autonomous Robots

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Huawei Dorado – All about Speed

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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]

Since Storage Field Day 15 3 weeks ago, the thoughts of the session with Huawei lingered. And one word came to describe Huawei Dorado V3, their flagship All-Flash storage platform is SPEED.

My conversation with Huawei actually started the night before our planned session at their Santa Clara facility the next day. We had a evening get-together at Bourbon Levi’s Stadium. I was with my buddy, Ammar Zolkipli, who coincidentally was in the Silicon Valley for work. Ammar is from Hitachi Vantara Japan, and has been a good friend of mine for over 17 years now.

Shortly, the Huawei team arrived to join the camaraderie. And we introduced ourselves to Chun Liu, not knowing that he is the Chief Architect at Huawei. A big part of that evening was our conversation with him. Ammar and I have immersed in the Oil & Gas EP (Exploration & Production) data management and petrotechnical applications when he was in Schlumberger and after that a reseller of NetApp. I was a Consulting Engineer with NetApp back then. So, the 2 of us started blabbering (yeah, that would be us when we get together to talk technology).

I observed that Chun was very interested to find learn about real world application use cases that would push storage performance to its limits. And I guessed that the best type of I/O characteristics would be small block, random I/O and billions of them, with near-real time latency. After that evening I did some research and could only think of a few, such as deep analytics or some applications with needs for Monte Carlo simulations. Oh, well, maybe I would share that with Chun the following day.

The moment the session started, it was already about the speed prowess of Huawei Storage. It was like the greyhounds unleashed going after the rabbit. In the lineup, the Dorado series stood out.

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Own the Data Pipeline

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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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Cohesity SpanFS – a foundational shift

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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]

Cohesity SpanFS impressed me. Their filesystem was designed from ground up to meet the demands of the voluminous cloud-scale data, and yes, the sheer magnitude of data everywhere needs to be managed.

We all know that primary data is always the more important piece of data landscape but there is a growing need to address the secondary data segment as well.

Like a floating iceberg, the piece that is sticking out is the more important primary data but the larger piece beneath the surface of the water, which is the secondary data, is becoming more valuable. Applications such as file shares, archiving, backup, test and development, and analytics and insights are maturing as the foundational data management frameworks and fast becoming the bedrock of businesses.

The ability of businesses to bounce back after a disaster; the relentless testing of large data sets to develop new competitive advantage for businesses; the affirmations and the insights of analyzing data to reduce risks in decision making; all these are the powerful back engine applicability that thrust businesses forward. Even the ability to search for the right information in a sea of data for regulatory and compliance reasons is part of the organization’s data management application.

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Storage dinosaurs evolving too

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[Preamble: I am a delegate of Storage Field Day 15 from Mar 7-9, 2018. My expenses, travel and accommodation are paid for by GestaltIT, the organizer and I am 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 have been called a dinosaur. We storage networking professionals and storage technologists have been called dinosaurs. It wasn’t offensive or anything like that and I knew it was coming because the writing was on the wall, … or is it?

The cloud and the breakneck pace of all the technologies that came along have made us, the storage networking professionals, look like relics. The storage guys have been pigeonholed into a sunset segment of the IT industry. SAN and NAS, according to the non-practitioners, were no longer relevant. And cloud has clout (pun intended) us out of the park.

I don’t see us that way. I see that the Storage Dinosaurs are evolving as well, and our storage foundational knowledge and experience are more relevant that ever. And the greatest assets that we, the storage networking professionals, have is our deep understanding of data.

A little over a year ago, I changed the term Storage in my universe to Data Services Platform, and here was the blog I wrote. I blogged again just before the year 2018 began.

 

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My dilemma of stateful storage marriage

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I should be a love match maker.

I have been spending much hours in the past few months, thinking of stateful data in stateful storage containers and how they would consummate with distributed applications containers and functions-as-a-service (aka serverless, aka Lambda). It still hasn’t made much sense, and I have not solved this problem yet. Although there were bits and pieces that coming together and the jigsaw looked well enough to give a cackled reply, what I have now is still not good enough for me. I am still searching for answers, better than the ones I have now.

The CAP theorem is in center of my mind. Distributed data, distributed states of data are on my mind. And by the looks of things, the computing world is heading towards containers and serverless computing too. Both distributed applications containers and serverless computing make a lot of sense. If we were to engage a whole new world of fog computing, edge computing, IoT, autonomous systems, AI, and other real-time computing, I would say that the future belongs to decentralization. Cloud Computing and having edge systems and devices getting back to the cloud for data is too slow. The latency of micro- or even nano-seconds is just not good enough. If we rely on the present methods to access the most relevant data, we are too late.

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Of Object Storage, Filesystems and Multi-Cloud

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Data storage silos everywhere. The early clarion call was to eliminate IT data storage silos by moving to the cloud. Fast forward to the present. Data storage silos are still everywhere, but this time, they are in the clouds. I blogged about this.

Object Storage was all the rage when it first started. AWS, with its S3 (Simple Storage Service) offering, started the cloud storage frenzy. Highly available, globally distributed, simple to access, and fitted superbly into the entire AWS ecosystem. Quickly, a smorgasbord of S3-compatible, S3-like object-based storage emerged. OpenStack Swift, HDS HCP, EMC Atmos, Cleversafe (which became IBM SpectrumScale), Inktank Ceph (which became RedHat Ceph), Bycast (acquired by NetApp to be StorageGrid), Quantum Lattus, Amplidata, and many more. For a period of a few years prior, it looked to me that the popularity of object storage with an S3 compatible front has overtaken distributed file systems.

What’s not to like? Object storage are distributed, they are metadata rich (at a certain structural level), they are immutable (hence secure from a certain point of view), and some even claim self-healing (depending on data protection policies). But one thing that object storage rarely touted dominance was high performance I/O. There were some cases, but they were either fronted by a file system (eg. NFSv4.1 with pNFS extensions), or using some host-based, SAN-client agent (eg. StorNext or Intel Lustre). Object-based storage, in its native form, has not been positioned as high performance I/O storage.

A few weeks ago, I read an article from Storage Soup, Dave Raffo. When I read it, it felt oxymoronic. SwiftStack was just nominated as a visionary in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Distributed File Systems and Object Storage. But according to Dave’s article, Swiftstack did not want to be “associated” with object storage that much, even though Swiftstack’s technology underpinning was all object storage. Strange.

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The power of E8

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[Preamble: I was a delegate of Storage Field Day 14 from Nov 8-10, 2017. 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]

E8 Storage technology update at Storage Field Day 14 was impressive. Out of the several next generation NVMe storage technologies I have explored so far, E8 came out as the most complete. It was no surprise that they won the “Best of Show” in the Flash Memory Summits for the “Most Innovative Flash Memory Technology” in 2016 and “Most Innovative Flash Memory Enterprise Business Application” for 2017.

Who is E8 Storage?

They came out of stealth in August 2016 and have been making waves with very impressive stats. When E8 was announced, their numbers were more than 10 million IOPS, with 100µsecs for reads and 40µsecs for writes. And in the SFD14 demo, they reached and past the 10 million IOPS numbers.

The design philosophy of E8 Storage is different than the traditional dual controller scale-up storage architecture design or the multi-node scale-out cluster design. In fact, from a 30,000 feet view, it is quite similar to a “SAN-client” design advocated by Lustre, leveraging a very high throughput, low latency network.

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Commvault UDI – a new CPUU

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[Preamble: I am 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 at this event. The content of this blog is of my own opinions and views]

I am here at the Commvault GO 2017. Bob Hammer, Commvault’s CEO is on stage right now. He shares his wisdom and the message is clear. IT to DT. IT to DT? Yes, Information Technology to Data Technology. It is all about the DATA.

The data landscape has changed. The cloud has changed everything. And data is everywhere. This omnipresence of data presents new complexity and new challenges. It is great to get Commvault acknowledging and accepting this change and the challenges that come along with it, and introducing their HyperScale technology and their secret sauce – Universal Dynamic Index.

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