Paradigm shift of Dev to Storage Ops

[ Disclosure: I was invited by GestaltIT as a delegate to their Storage Field Day 19 event from Jan 22-24, 2020 in the Silicon Valley USA. My expenses, travel, accommodation and conference fees were covered by GestaltIT, the organizer and I was not obligated to blog or promote the vendors’ technologies presented at the event. The content of this blog is of my own opinions and views ]

A funny photo (below) came up on my Facebook feed a couple of weeks back. In an honest way, it depicted how a developer would think (or the lack of thinking) about the storage infrastructure designs and models for the applications and workloads. This also reminded me of how DBAs used to diss storage engineers. “I don’t care about storage, as long as it is RAID 10“. That was aeons ago 😉

The world of developers and the world of infrastructure people are vastly different. Since cloud computing birthed, both worlds have collided and programmable infrastructure-as-code (IAC) have become part and parcel of cloud native applications. Of course, there is no denying that there is friction.

Welcome to DevOps!

The Kubernetes factor

Containerized applications are quickly defining the cloud native applications landscape. The container orchestration machinery has one dominant engine – Kubernetes.

In the world of software development and delivery, DevOps has taken a liking to containers. Containers make it easier to host and manage life-cycle of web applications inside the portable environment. It packages up application code other dependencies into building blocks to deliver consistency, efficiency, and productivity. To scale to a multi-applications, multi-cloud with th0usands and even tens of thousands of microservices in containers, the Kubernetes factor comes into play. Kubernetes handles tasks like auto-scaling, rolling deployment, computer resource, volume storage and much, much more, and it is designed to run on bare metal, in the data center, public cloud or even a hybrid cloud.

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Is General Purpose Object Storage disenfranchised?

[Disclosure: I am invited by GestaltIT as a delegate to their Storage Field Day 19 event from Jan 22-24, 2020 in the Silicon Valley USA. My expenses, travel, accommodation and conference fees will be covered by GestaltIT, the organizer and I am not obligated to blog or promote the vendors’ technologies to be presented at this event. The content of this blog is of my own opinions and views]

This is NOT an advertisement for coloured balls.

This is the license to brag for the vendors in the next 2 weeks or so, as we approach the 2020 new year. This, of course, is the latest 2019 IDC Marketscape for Object-based Storage, released last week.

My object storage mentions

I have written extensively about Object Storage since 2011. With different angles and perspectives, here are some of them:

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Commvault big bet

I woke up at 2.59am in the morning of Sept 5th morning, a bit discombobulated and quickly jumped into the Commvault call. The damn alarm rang and I slept through it, but I got up just in time for the 3am call.

As I was going through the motion of getting onto UberConference, organized by GestaltIT, I was already sensing something big. In the call, Commvault was acquiring Hedvig and it hit me. My drowsy self centered to the big news. And I saw a few guys from Veritas and Cohesity on my social media group making gestures about the acquisition.

I spent the rest of the week thinking about the acquisition. What is good? What is bad? How is Commvault going to move forward? This is at pressing against the stark background from the rumour mill here in South Asia, just a week before this acquisition news, where I heard that the entire Commvault teams in Malaysia and Asia Pacific were released. I couldn’t confirm the news in Asia Pacific, but the source of the news coming from Malaysia was strong and a reliable one.

What is good?

It is a big win for Hedvig. Nestled among several scale-out primary storage vendors and little competitive differentiation, this Commvault acquisition is Hedvig’s pay day.

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Minio – the minimalist object storage technology

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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