Category Archives: Tech Field Day

Is Pure Play Storage good?

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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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Disaggregation or hyperconvergence?

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[Preamble: I have been invited by  GestaltIT as a delegate to their TechFieldDay from Oct 17-19, 2018 in the Silicon Valley USA. My expenses, travel and accommodation are 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]

There is an argument about NetApp‘s HCI (hyperconverged infrastructure). It is not really a hyperconverged product at all, according to one school of thought. Maybe NetApp is just riding on the hyperconvergence marketing coat tails, and just wanted to be associated to the HCI hot streak. In the same spectrum of argument, Datrium decided to call their technology open convergence, clearly trying not to be related to hyperconvergence.

Hyperconvergence has been enjoying a period of renaissance for a few years now. Leaders like Nutanix, VMware vSAN, Cisco Hyperflex and HPE Simplivity have been dominating the scene, and touting great IT benefits and eliminating IT efficiencies. But in these technologies, performance and capacity are tightly intertwined. That means that in each of the individual hyperconverged nodes, typically starting with a trio of nodes, the processing power and the storage capacity comes together. You have to accept both resources as a node. If you want more processing power, you get the additional storage capacity that comes with that node. If you want more storage capacity, you get more processing power whether you like it or not. This means, you get underutilized resources over time, and definitely not rightsized for the job.

And here in Malaysia, we have seen vendors throw in hyperconverged infrastructure solutions for every single requirement. That was why I wrote a piece about some zealots of hyperconverged solutions 3+ years ago. When you think you have a magical hammer, every problem is a nail. 😉

In my radar, NetApp and Datrium are the only 2 vendors that offer separate nodes for compute processing and storage capacity and still fall within the hyperconverged space. This approach obviously benefits the IT planners and the IT architects, and the customers too because they get what they want for their business. However, the disaggregation of compute processing and storage leads to the argument of whether these 2 companies belong to the hyperconverged infrastructure category.

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Oracle Cloud Infrastructure to prove skeptics wrong

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[Preamble: I have been invited by  GestaltIT as a delegate to their TechFieldDay from Oct 17-19, 2018 in the Silicon Valley USA. My expenses, travel and accommodation are 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]

The much maligned Oracle Cloud is getting a fresh reboot, starting with their Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), and significant enhancements and technology updates were announced at the Oracle Open World this week. I had the privilege to hear about Oracle Cloud’s new attack plan when they presented at Tech Field Day 17 last week.

Oracle Cloud has not have the best of days in recent months. Thomas Kurian’s resignation as their President of Product Development was highly publicized in a disagreement with CTO and founder, Larry Ellison over cloud software strategy. Then there was an on-going lawsuit about how Oracle was misrepresenting their cloud revenue growth, which puts Oracle in a bad light.

On the local front here in Malaysia, I have heard from the grapevine of the aggressive nature of Oracle personnel pushing partners and customers to adopt their cloud services using legal scare tactics on their database licensing. A buddy of mine, who was previously the cloud business development manager at CTC Global, also shared Oracle’s cloud shortcomings compared to Amazon Web Service and Microsoft Azure a year ago.

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure team aimed to turnover the bad perceptions, starting with the delegates of Tech Field Day 17, including yours truly.Their strategy was clear. Oracle Cloud Infrastructure runs the highest performance and the highest enterprise grade Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), bar none. Unlike the IBM Cloud, which in my opinion is a wishy-washy cloud service platform, Oracle Cloud’s ambition is solid.

They did a demo on JDEdwards EnterpriseOne application, and they continue to demonstrate their prowess running the highest performance computing experience ever, for all enterprise-grade workload. And that enterprise pedigree is clear.

Just this week, Amazon Prime Day had an outage. Amazon is in the process of weaning Oracle database from their entire ecosystem by 2020, and this outage clearly showed that the Oracle database and the enterprise applications would only run best on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.

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The Network is Still the Computer

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[Preamble: I have been invited by  GestaltIT as a delegate to their TechFieldDay from Oct 17-19, 2018 in the Silicon Valley USA. My expenses, travel and accommodation are 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]

Sun Microsystems coined the phrase “The Network is the Computer“. It became one of the most powerful ideologies in the computing world, but over the years, many technology companies have tried to emulate and practise the mantra, but fell short.

I have never heard of Drivescale. It wasn’t in my radar until the legendary NFS guru, Brian Pawlowski joined them in April this year. Beepy, as he is known, was CTO of NetApp and later at Pure Storage, and held many technology leadership roles, including leading the development of NFSv3 and v4.

Prior to Tech Field Day 17, I was given some “homework”. Stephen Foskett, Chief Cat Herder (as he is known) of Tech Field Days and Storage Field Days, highly recommended Drivescale and asked the delegates to pick up some notes on their technology. Going through a couple of the videos, Drivescale’s message and philosophy resonated well with me. Perhaps it was their Sun Microsystems DNA? Many of the Drivescale team members were from Sun, and I was previously from Sun as well. I was drinking Sun’s Kool Aid by the bucket loads even before I graduated in 1991, and so what Drivescale preached made a lot of sense to me.Drivescale is all about Scale-Out Architecture at the webscale level, to address the massive scale of data processing. To understand deeper, we must think about “Data Locality” and “Data Mobility“. I frequently use these 2 “points of discussion” in my consulting practice in architecting and designing data center infrastructure. The gist of data locality is simple – the closer the data is to the processing, the cheaper/lightweight/efficient it gets. Moving data – the data mobility part – is expensive.

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The Dell EMC Data Bunker

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[Preamble: I have been invited by  GestaltIT as a delegate to their TechFieldDay from Oct 17-19, 2018 in the Silicon Valley USA. My expenses, travel and accommodation are 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]

Another new announcement graced the Tech Field Day 17 delegates this week. Dell EMC Data Protection group announced their Cyber Recovery solution. The Cyber Recovery Vault solution and services is touted as the “The Last Line of Data Protection Defense against Cyber-Attacks” for the enterprise.

Security breaches and ransomware attacks have been rampant, and they are reeking havoc to organizations everywhere. These breaches and attacks cost businesses tens of millions, or even hundreds, and are capable of bring these businesses to their knees. One of the known practices is to corrupt backup metadata or catalogs, rendering operational recovery helpless before these perpetrators attack the primary data source. And there are times where the malicious and harmful agent could be dwelling in the organization’s network or servers for long period of times, launching and infecting primary images or gold copies of corporate data at the opportune time.

The Cyber Recovery (CR) solution from Dell EM focuses on Recovery of an Isolated Copy of the Data. The solution isolates strategic and mission critical secondary data and preserves the integrity and sanctity of the secondary data copy. Think of the CR solution as the data bunker, after doomsday has descended.

The CR solution is based on the Data Domain platforms. Describing from the diagram below, data backup occurs in the corporate network to a Data Domain appliance platform as the backup repository. This is just the usual daily backup, and is for operational recovery.

Diagram from Storage Review. URL Link: https://www.storagereview.com/dell_emc_releases_cyber_recovery_software

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Hammering Next Gen Hybrid Clouds

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[Preamble: I have been invited by  GestaltIT as a delegate to their TechFieldDay from Oct 17-19, 2018 in the Silicon Valley USA. My expenses, travel and accommodation are paid 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]

Hammerspace came out of stealth 2 days ago. Their objective? To rule the world of data for hybrid clouds and multi-clouds, and provide “unstructured data anywhere on-demand“. That is a bold statement, for a company that is relatively unknown, except for its deep ties with the now defunct Primary Data. Primary Data’s Chairman, David Flynn, is the head honcho at Hammerspace.

The Hammerspace technology has come the right time in my opinion because the entire cloud, multi-cloud and hybrid cloud stories have become fractured, siloed. The very thing that cloud computing touted to fix has brought back the same set of problems. At the same time, not every application was developed for the cloud. Applications rely on block storage services, or NAS protocols, or the de facto S3 protocols for storage repositories. However, the integration and communication between applications break down when these on-premises applications are moving to the cloud, or when applications residing the cloud are moved back to on-premises for throughput delivery, or even applications residing at the edge.

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My first TechFieldDay

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[Preamble: I have been invited by  GestaltIT as a delegate to their TechFieldDay from Oct 17-19, 2018 in the Silicon Valley USA. My expenses, travel and accommodation are paid 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]

I have attended a bunch of Storage Field Days over the years but I have never attended a Tech Field Day. This coming week, I will be attending their 17th edition, TechFieldDay 17, but my first. I have always enjoyed Storage Field Days. Everytime I joined as a delegate, there were new things to discover but almost always, serendipity happened.

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The Commvault 5Ps of change

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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]

I am a delegate of Commvault GO 2018 happening now in Nashville, Tennessee. I was also a delegate of Commvault GO 2017 held at National Harbor, Washington D.C. Because of scheduling last year, I only managed to stay about a day and a half before flying off to the West Coast. This year I was given the opportunity to experience the full conference at Commvault GO 2018. And I was able to savour the energy, the mindset and the culture of Commvault this time around.

Make no mistakes folks, BIG THINGS are happening with Commvault. I can feel it with their people, with their partners and their customers at the GO conference. How so?

For one, Commvault is making big changes, from People, Process, Pricing, Products and Perception (that’s 5 Ps). Starting with Products, they have consolidated from 20+ products into 4, and simplifying the perception of how the industry sees Commvault. The diagram below shows the 4 products portfolio.

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Dell Technologies World – Every IT needs

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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]

I have been invited as a delegate to the upcoming Dell Technologies World (previously known as Dell EMC World) from April 30th to May 3rd, 2018. I am excited because a vision has been playing in my mind since I got the invitation, and that vision is the geek in me goes bonkers. It is much like a going into a Supermarket Sweep game show, except there is no time limit and it will be technology, technology and more technology!

Since Dell acquired EMC in 2015, they have been getting a bit of criticism from almost everyone. The general feeling was that that USD67 billion acquisition of EMC was too big for Dell to swallow. 2 years on, and counting, I must say that the integration of both companies have gone extremely well. And it is just not the facade of the integration, but internally as well. This is what I have gathered from the many friends of both companies and ex-colleagues at EMC in South Asia. (I was a TC for the IP Storage solutions and was also the Regional Oil & Gas consultant during my stint at EMC from 2007-2009)

Dell Technologies is now the only company in the world which has almost every segment of the IT market covered. From x86 gears for the consumers and enterprise, to security needs, data analytics and IOT, and of course, storage tech, Dell Technologies is addressing every IT needs for any company, and that is a good time. How so?

It is about choice. It is about the customers.

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