Category Archives: Software-defined Datacenter

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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Commvault calling again

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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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Cloud silos after eliminating silos

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I love cloud computing. I love the economics and the agility of the cloud and how it changed IT forever. The cloud has solved some of the headaches of IT, notably the silos in operations, the silos in development and the silos in infrastructure.

The virtualization and abstraction of rigid infrastructures and on-premise operations have given birth to X-as-a-Service and Cloud Services. Along with this, comes cloud orchestration, cloud automation, policies, DevOps and plenty more. IT responds well to this and thus, public clouds services like Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platforms are dominating the landscape. Other cloud vendors like Rackspace, SoftLayer, Alibaba Cloud are following the leaders pack offering public, private, hybrid and specialized services as well.

In this pile, we can now see the certain “camps” emerging. Many love Azure Stack and many adore AWS Lambda. Google just had their summit here in Malaysia yesterday, appealing to a green field and looking for new adopters. What we are seeing is we have customers and end users adopting various public cloud services providers, their services, their ecosystem, their tools, their libraries and so on. We also know that many customers and end users having several applications on AWS, and some on Azure and perhaps looking for better deals with another cloud vendor. Multi-cloud is becoming flavour of the season, and that word keeps appearing in presentations and conversations.

Yes, multi-cloud is a good thing. Customers and end users would love it because they can get the most bang for their buck, if only … it wasn’t so complicated. There aren’t many “multi-cloud” platforms out there yet. Continue reading →

Pure Electric!

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I didn’t get a chance to attend Pure Accelerate event last month. From the blogs and tweets of my friends, Pure Accelerate was an awesome event. When I got the email invitation for the localized Pure Live! event in Kuala Lumpur, I told myself that I have to attend the event.

The event was yesterday, and I was not disappointed. Coming off a strong fiscal Q1 2018, it has appeared that Pure Storage has gotten many things together, chugging full steam at all fronts.

When Pure Storage first come out, I was one of the early bloggers who took a fancy of them. My 2011 blog mentioned the storage luminaries in their team. Since then, they have come a long way. And it was apt that on the same morning yesterday, the latest Gartner Magic Quadrant for Solid State Arrays 2017 was released.

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The changing face of storage

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“No, we are not a storage company anymore. We are a data management company now.“

I was reading a Forbes article interviewing NetApp’s CIO, Bill Miller. It was titled:

NetApp’s CIO Helps Drive Company’s Shift From Data Storage To Data Management

I was fairly surprised about the time it took for that mindset shift messaging from storage to data management. I am sure that NetApp has been doing that for years internally.

To me, the writing has been in the wall for years. But weak perception of storage, at least in this part of Asia, still lingers as that clunky, behind the glassed walls and crufty closets, noisy box of full of hard disk drives lodged with snakes and snakes of orange, turquoise or white cables. 😉

The article may come as a revelation to some, but the world of storage has changed indefinitely. The blurring of the lines began when software defined storage, or even earlier in the form of storage virtualization, took form. I even came up with my definition a couple of years ago about the changing face of storage framework. Instead of calling it data management, I called the new storage framework,  the Data Services Platform.

So, this is my version of the storage technology platform of today. This is the Data Services Platform I have been touting to many for the last couple of years. It is not just storage technology anymore; it is much more than that.

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Can NetApp do it a bit better?

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[Preamble: I was a delegate of Storage Field Day 12. My expenses, travel and accommodation were paid for by GestaltIT, the organizer and I was not obligated to blog or promote the technologies presented in this event]

In Day 2 of Storage Field Day 12, I and the other delegates were hustled to NetApp’s Sunnyvale campus headquarters. That was a homecoming for me, and it was a bit ironic too.

Just 8 months ago, I was NetApp Malaysia Country Manager. That country sales lead role was my second stint with NetApp. I lasted almost 1 year.

17 years ago, my first stint with NetApp was the employee #2 in Malaysia as an SE. That SE stint went by quickly for 5 1/2 years, and I loved that time. Those Fall Classics NetApp used to have at the Batcave and the Fortress of Solitude left a mark with me, and the experiences still are as vivid as ever.

Despite what has happened in both stints and even outside the circle, I am still one of NetApp’s active cheerleaders in the Asia Pacific region. I even got accused by being biased as a community leader in the SNIA Malaysia Facebook page (unofficial but recognized by SNIA), because I was supposed to be neutral. I have put in 10 years to promote the storage technology community with SNIA Malaysia. [To the guy named Stanley, my response was be “Too bad, pick a religion“.]

The highlight of the SFD12 NetApp visit was of course, having lunch with Dave Hitz, one of the co-founders and the one still remaining. But throughout the presentations, I was unimpressed.

For me, the only one which stood out was CloudSync. I have read about CloudSync since NetApp Insight 2016 and yes, it’s a nice little piece of data shipping service between on-premise and AWS cloud.

Here’s how CloudSync looks like:

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FlashForward to Beyond

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The flash frenzy has reached its zenith in 2016. We now no longer are interested in listening to storage technology vendors touting the power of solid state storage (NAND Flash included) over spinning drives.

The capacity of 3D NAND Flash SSDs has reached a whopping 15.3TB (that is even bigger than the 12TB 7200RPM HDDs of today), and with deduplication and compression, the storage efficiency has reached a conservative 4:1 or 5:1. Effective capacity of most mid-end storage arrays can easily reach 1-2 Petabytes.

And flash and hybrid platforms have reached maturity in these few short years. So what is next?

The landscape has obviously changed. The performance landscape, the capacity landscape and all related to the storage data points have changed. And the speed of SSDs together with the up-and-coming NVMe and NVDIMM technology in new storage array controllers are also shifting the data bottlenecks to another part of the architecture. The development of I/O communications and interfaces has to change as well, to take advantage of the asynchronous I/Os in storage tiering and caching using NAND Flash.

With this mature and well understood landscape, it is time to take Flash to the next level. This next level comes in the form of an exciting end-user conference in Singapore on 25th April 2017. It is called FlashForward.

The 2016 FlashForward event in Europe has already garnered great support from the cream of the storage technologists around the world, and had fantastic feedbacks from the end-user attendees. That FlashForward event has also seen the birth of an international business and technology exchange in its inaugural introduction.  Yes, it is time to learn from the field experts, and it is time to build on the Flash Platform for new Data Services.

From the sponsorship package brochure I have received, it is definitely an event not to be missed.

The FlashForward Conference in Singapore is exquisitely procured by Evito Ltd, under the stewardship of Mr. Paul Talbut. Paul is a very seasoned veteran in the global circuit as an SNIA director of several initiatives. He has been immensely involved in the development of several SNIA chapters around the world, including South Asia, Malaysia, India, China, and even Brazil. He also leads by example with the SNIA Global Steering Committee (GSC); he is the SNIA Global Education Director and at one time, SNIA DPCO (Data Protection & Capacity Optimization) global proctor.

I have had the honour working with Paul for almost 8 years now, and I am sure he will lead the FlashForward Conference with valuable insights and experiences.

This is probably the greatest period for the industry and end users to get involved in the FlashForward Conference. For one, it is endorsed by SNIA, the vendor-neutral association which has been the growth beacon of the storage networking industry.

Secondly, it is the perfect opportunity for technology vendors to build their mindshare with end users and customers. And with the endorsement of the independent field experts and technology practitioners, end users would have a field day garnering approvals for their decisions, as well as learning the best practices to build upon the Flash technology they have implemented in their data center space.

The sponsorship packages are listed below, and I do encourage technology vendors, especially the All-Flash vendors to use the FlashForward conference as a platform to build their mindshare, and most of all, their branding. Continue reading →

Disaster Recovery has changed

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Simple and affordable Disaster Recovery? Sounds oxymoronic, right?

I have thronged the small medium businesses (SMBs) space in the past few months. I have seen many SMBs resort to the cheapest form they can get their hands on. It could be a Synology here or a QNAP there, and that’s their backup plan. That’s their DR plan. When disaster strikes, they just shrug their shoulders and accept their fate. It could be a human error, accidental data deletion, virus infection, data corruption and recently, RANSOMware! But these SMBs do not have the IT resources to deal with the challenges these “disasters” bring.

Recently I attended a Business Continuity Institute forum organized by the Malaysian Chapter. Several vendors and practitioners spoke about the organization’s preparedness and readiness for DR. And I would like to stress the words “preparedness” and “readiness”. In the infrastructure world, we often put redundancy into the DR planning, and this means additional cost. SMBs cannot afford this redundancy. Furthermore, larger organizations have BC and DR coordinators who are dedicated for the purpose of BC and DR. SMBs probably has a person who double up an the IT administrator.

However, for IT folks, virtualization and cloud technologies are beginning to germinate a new generation of DR solutions. DR solutions which are able to address the simplicity of replication and backup, and at the same time affordable. Many are beginning to offer DR-as-a-Service and indeed, DR-as-a-Service has become a Gartner Magic Quadrant category. Here’s a look at the 2016 Gartner Magic Quadrant for DR-as-a-Service.

gartner-mq-dr-as-a-service-2016

And during these few months, I have encountered 3 vendors in this space. They are sitting in the Visionaries quadrant. One came to town and started smashing laptops to jazz up their show (I am not going to name that vendor). Another kept sending me weird emails, sounding kind of sleazy like “Got time for a quick call?”

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Let’s smoke the storage peace pipe

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NVMe (Non-Volatile Memory Express) is upon us. And in the next 2-3 years, we will see a slew of new storage solutions and technology based on NVMe.

Just a few days ago, The Register released an article “Seventeen hopefuls fight for the NVMe Fabric array crown“, and it was timely. I, for one, cannot be more excited about the development and advancement of NVMe and the upcoming NVMeF (NVMe over Fabrics).

This is it. This is the one that will end the wars of DAS, NAS and SAN and unite the warring factions between server-based SAN (the sexy name differentiating old DAS and new DAS) and the networked storage of SAN and NAS. There will be PEACE.

Remember this?

nutanix-nosan-buntingNutanix popularized the “No SAN” movement which later led to VMware VSAN and other server-based SAN solutions, hyperconverged techs such as PernixData (acquired by Nutanix), DataCore, EMC ScaleIO and also operated in hyperscalers – the likes of Facebook and Google. The hyperconverged solutions and the server-based SAN lines blurred of storage but still, they are not the usual networked storage architectures of SAN and NAS. I blogged about this, mentioning about how the pendulum has swung back to favour DAS, or to put it more appropriately, server-based SAN. There was always a “Great Divide” between the 2 modes of storage architectures. Continue reading →

Don’t get too drunk on Hyper Converged

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I hate the fact that I am bursting the big bubble brewing about Hyper Convergence (HC). I urge all to look past the hot air and hype frenzy that are going on, because in the end, the HC platforms have to be aligned and congruent to the organization’s data architecture and business plans.

The announcement of Gartner’s latest Magic Quadrant on Integrated Systems (read hyper convergence) has put Nutanix as the leader of the pack as of August 2015. Clearly, many of us get caught up because it is the “greatest feeling in the world”. However, this faux feeling is not reality because there are many factors that made the pack leaders in the Magic Quadrant (MQ).

Gartner MQ Integrated Systems Aug 2015

First of all, the MQ is about market perception. There is no doubt that the pack leaders in the Leaders Quadrant have earned their right to be there. Each company’s revenue, market share, gross margin, company’s profitability have helped put each as leaders in the pack. However, it is also measured by branding, marketing, market perception and acceptance and other intangible factors.

Secondly, VMware EVO: Rail has split the market when EMC has 3 HC solutions in VCE, ScaleIO and EVO: Rail. Cisco wanted to do their own HC piece in Whiptail (between the 2014 MQ and 2015 MQ reports), and closed down Whiptail when their new CEO came on board. NetApp chose EVO: Rail and also has the ever popular FlexPod. That is why you see that in this latest MQ report, NetApp and Cisco are interpreted independently whereas in last year’s report, it was Cisco/NetApp. Market forces changed, and perception changed.  Continue reading →