The changing face of storage

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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Don’t get too drunk on Hyper Converged

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

The transcendence of Data Fabric

The Register wrote a damning piece about NetApp a few days ago. I felt it was irresponsible because this is akin to kicking a man when he’s down. It is easy to do that. The writer is clearly missing the forest for the trees. He was targeting NetApp’s Clustered Data ONTAP (cDOT) and missing the entire philosophy of NetApp’s mission and vision in Data Fabric.

I have always been a strong believer that you must treat Data like water. Just like what Jeff Goldblum famously quoted in Jurassic Park, “Life finds a way“, data as it moves through its lifecycle, will find its way into the cloud and back.

And every storage vendor today has a cloud story to tell. It is exciting to listen to everyone sharing their cloud story. Cloud makes sense when it addresses different workloads such as the sharing of folders across multiple devices, backup and archiving data to the cloud, tiering to the cloud, and the different cloud service models of IaaS, PaaS, SaaS and XaaS.

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How valuable is your data anywhere?

I was a speaker at the Data Management and Document Control conference 2 weeks’s ago. It was a conference aimed at the Oil & Gas industry, and my presentation was primarily focused on Data in Exploration & Production (E&P) segment of the industry. That’s also the segment that brings in the mega big bucks!

The conversations with the participants have validated and strengthened the fact that no matter how we talk about how valuable data is to the organization, how data is the asset of the organization, the truth is most organization SUCKS big time when it comes to data management. The common issues faced in the E&P data management in Oil & Gas are probably quite similar to many other industries. For the more regulated industries such as banking, financial institutions, governments and telecommunications, data management, I would assume, is a tad better.

The fact of the matter is there little technology change in the past decade in data storage, data protection and data movement. There are innovations from a technology point of view but most technology innovations do not address the way data could be better managed, especially from a data consolidation point of view.

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Convergence data strategy should not forget the branches

The word “CONVERGENCE” is boiling over as the IT industry goes gaga over darlings like Simplivity and Nutanix, and the hyper-convergence market. Yet, if we take a step back and remove our emotional attachment from the frenzy, we realize that the application and implementation of hyper-convergence technologies forgot one crucial elementThe other people and the other offices!

ROBOs (remote offices branch offices) are part of the organization, and often they are given the shorter end of the straw. ROBOs are like the family’s black sheeps. You know they are there but there is little mention of them most of the time.

Of course, through the decades, there are efforts to consolidate the organization’s circle to include ROBOs but somehow, technology was lacking. FTP used to be a popular but crude technology that binds the branch offices and the headquarter’s operations and data services. FTP is still used today, in countries where network bandwidth costs a premium. Data cloud services are beginning to appear of part of the organization’s outreaching strategy to include ROBOs but the fear of security weaknesses, data breaches and misuses is always there. Often, concerns of the weaknesses of the cloud overcome whatever bold strategies concocted and designed.

For those organizations in between, WAN acceleration/optimization techonolgy is another option. Companies like Riverbed, Silverpeak, F5 and Ipanema have addressed the ROBOs data strategy market well several years ago, but the demand for greater data consolidation and centralization, tighter and more effective data management and data control to meet the data compliance and data governance requirements, has grown much more sophisticated and advanced. Continue reading