Category Archives: IoT

Intel IoT Revolution for Malaysia Industry 4.0

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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

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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 →

Dell go big with Cloud

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[Disclaimer: I have been 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 and accommodation are covered by Dell Technologies, the organizer and I am not obligated to blog or promote their technologies presented at this event. The content of this blog is of my own opinions and views]

Talk about big. Dell Technologies just went big with the Cloud.

The Microsoft Factor

Day 1 of Dell Technologies World 2019 (DTW19) started with a big surprise to many, including yours truly when Michael Dell, together with Pat Gelsinger invited Microsoft CEO, Satya Nadella on stage.

There was nothing new about Microsoft working with Dell Technologies. Both have been great partners since the PC days, but when they announced Azure VMware Solutions to the 15,000+ attendees of the conference, there was a second of disbelief, followed by an ovation of euphoria.

VMware solutions will run native on Microsoft Azure Cloud. The spread of vSphere, VSAN, vCenter, NSX-T and VMware tools and environment will run on Azure Bare Metal Infrastructure at multiple Azure locations. How big is that. Continue reading →

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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Sleepless in Malaysia with Object Storage

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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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The Big Elephant in IoT Storage

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It has been on my mind for a long time and I have been avoiding it too. But it is time to face the inevitable and just talk about it. After all, the more open the discussions, the more answers (and questions) will arise, and that is a good thing.

Yes, it is the big elephant in the room called Data Security. And the concern is going to get much worse as the proliferation of edge devices and fog computing, and IoT technobabble goes nuclear.

I have been involved in numerous discussions on IoT (Internet of Things) and Industrial Revolution 4.0. I have been in a consortium for the past 10 months, discussing with several experts of their field to face future with IR4.0. Malaysia just announced its National Policy for Industry 4.0 last week, known as Industry4WRD. Whilst the policy is a policy, there are many thoughts for implementation of IoT devices, edge and fog computing. And the thing that has been bugging me is related to of course, storage, most notably storage and data security.

Storage on the edge devices are likely to be ephemeral, and the data in these storage, transient. We can discuss about persistence in storage at the edge another day, because what I would like to address in the data security in these storage components. That’s the Big Elephant in the room I was relating to.

The more I work with IoT devices and the different frameworks (there are so many of them), I became further enlightened by the need to address data security. The proliferation and exponential multiplication of IoT devices at present and in the coming future have increased the attack vectors many folds. Many of the IoT devices are simplified components lacking the guards of data security and are easily exposed. These components are designed for simplicity and efficiency in mind. Things such as I/O performance, storage management and data security are probably the least important factors, because every single manufacturer and every single vendor are slogging to make their mark and presence in this wild, wild west world.

Picture from https://fcw.com/articles/2018/08/07/comment-iot-physical-risk.aspx

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