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#awesomesauce

Mar 29th, 2010
by Martin Glassborow.
1 comment

Like modern-day fairy dust, #awesomesauce can be liberally applied to everyday objects and make them appear special but like fairy dust, the illusion often fades. 

#awesomesauce has many uses in the world of IT

    It can bring the appearance of coherence 

    It can make accidental seem deliberate 

    It can make visions appear as solid objects

    It can make short-sightedness appear as focus

    It can make profligacy appear virtuous 

    It can turn OEM to OWN

    It can turn partnership into eternal bliss

After consuming #awesomesauce you may believe many things and you will be compelled to tell the world of the #awesomesauce you have just consumed!

But #awesomesauce needs to be consumed with care; for it can lead to a funny taste in the mouth and general feelings of nausea from both the diners but also everyone in contact with the diners.

There is much #awsomesauce around at the moment, so beware the #awesomesauce and the purveyors of #awesomesauce as unlike the tales of magic and fairy dust; there are no frog princes, Robespierre saw to that!  

What is Dynamic?

Feb 21st, 2010
by Martin Glassborow.
No comments yet

There's a lot of talk about Dynamic Data Centres, Dynamic Infrastructures; mostly in a cloudy context and mostly as some over-arching architectural vendor-focused vision. At times, I wonder if when a vendor talks about a 'Dynamic Infrastructure'; if they actually mean, you can use as much of OUR infrastructure as you like? You can flex up and down on OUR infrastructure.

This is rather limiting from an end-user IT consumer's point of view because you still find yourselves locked into a vendor or a group of vendors. So it's only dynamic with constraints; actually, I think Amazon got it right in their naming, it's Elastic but not truly Dynamic.

So as a good architect/designer/bodge-it-and-scarper-type person, you should be asking this question every time; if I do this, can I get out? What is my exit plan? Can I change any key component of the stack without major process/capability impact? Is the lock-in which comes with any unique feature worth it? 

And when I say any component, I mean all the way up to the application. So as part of the non-functional requirements of any application, there should be

1) Data Export/Import

2) Archival

standards defined and actually implemented. This goes for any off-the-shelf application as well. 

For Cloud to truly change the way IT is done and delivered; this has to be done..otherwise the only way is vertically integrated stacks, which ultimately lead to long-term lock-in. There are still mainframes in existence, not only because they are the right platform for some workloads but also because people are struggling to unpick the complex interdependencies which exist.

iPad: The Cloud Angle

Jan 28th, 2010
by Martin Glassborow.
3 comments

There has to be a Cloud angle to every technology story these days, so I thought I'd take a stab at it for the iPad! 

Apple needs large Cloud enabled data-centres to support the iPad. Why?

The iPad could quite possibly be for many people the only computer they need; well, not this iPad but whatever comes after the iPad. But even this one will be good enough for some people but if the iPad is the only computer they need and have; they are going to need somewhere to keep all the content that they consume on the iPad and this is rapidly going to exceed the internal storage requirements of the iPad. So I expect fairly shortly that you will be able to back-up and store all the content that you consume, produce in Apple's cloud. I also expect that you will be able to share that content within your household; so if Mum, Dad and kids all have an iPad; then they will all be able to access the content bought.

One of things that has stopped me using iTunes to buy content is the idea that if I manage to trash my iTunes environment; I will end up purchasing all that content again. I am expecting Apple to allow me to back-up my iTunes content to the Cloud for a reasonable monthly subscription. And then I expect that Amazon et al will follow suit. 

So there you go, there's the obligatory cloud angle. I have some some thoughts on the device itself but they will wait.

Father Christmas Letters – The Last One

Dec 16th, 2009
by Martin Glassborow.
5 comments

Dear Father Christmas,

                                yes I
mean you, the real one who lives near the North Pole! I've got a few
requests for you; Christmas is a time for a giving and I've got some
ideas for some friends of mine

Chuck – A copy of December's Children by the Rolling Stones; you know the one, it's got a copy of 'Get Off of My Cloud' on it.

Val – I was thinking of something similar but sometimes I think he needs to lighten up, so I think a copy of this. He could join Charlie and Lola on a Cloud-hopping adventure.

Barry B – Perhaps a boxed set of The Fast Show or perhaps as a counter to his FAST aspirations, In Praise of Slow.

Barry W – Perhaps this would be good or considering he's a Master Inventor, this might be even better.

Mark – He could probably do with the afore mentioned In Praise of Slow but I know he'll never heed the advice; so as a media gadget head, this looks sweet.

Ian
– Can you hide his passport for the next six months or so; only let him
have it back for Le Mans and then hide it again. That and can you hire
him an assistant! Or just a case of this.

Chris – get him a Synology 509+ for his virtual lab. I don't think he's getting on too well with his Drobo.

Dan – well, he doesn't get anything as he keeps forgetting my Jelly Beans! Or perhaps a copy of this, I think he'll need it soon. Or at least a real version of this.

Stephen and all my other fellow authors at Gestaltit – MBPs all round but can you wait till the middle of the year for the next refresh.

Marc – for the master of StorageRap, just something to help hone his skills or perhaps this but most of all a big giant star for his door…he is our very own Storage Star.

Sunshine – well I'd get her this because I know she likes him. But perhaps this would be more appropriate.

And
for all my other friends, readers and twitters; a peaceful Christmas, a
prosperous New Year and general health and happiness!

Best Regards,

Storagebod

Not a Cloud Storage Problem

Nov 16th, 2009
by Martin Glassborow.
2 comments

Before we all get carried away and pick on Cloud Storage as a specific target; perhaps we should sit back and think. It is not Cloud Storage; it is the Public Cloud which is the problem; the most visible failures have been storage related, but let's be honest; without storage, you don't have a Cloud Environment.

Cloud providers of Storage, Compute etc need to be held up to the highest standards of availability. You would not outsource your computing environment to Accenture, Cap Gemini, IBM etc without doing your due diligence, or perhaps you would?

Actually, I can think of many cases where people have outsourced various key parts of their business without due diligence; web-hosting for example, lots of SMBs have hosted their websites on random web-hosting companies with very little in the way of investigation. We have simply got into the habit of trusting people and we have accepted the enthusiastic amateur who starts a business. 

But this business has got too big and important; but it aint a Cloud Storage problem! Stop throwing bricks at Cloud Storage; start holding the whole hosted computing business to account. Demand SLAs, verify SLAs, check insurances, ask for references, ask for evidence of best practise operating procedures. Be an informed consumer!

However, also accept that if you pay peanuts; you'll get monkeys. So don't just look at the cost, consider the value!

100% Virtualised? Let’s try for 99%

Nov 12th, 2009
by Martin Glassborow.
4 comments

A lot of posts and talks from people involved in VMware and especially when we start talking about the Private Cloud talk about 100% virtualised data centres. And there's always the nay-sayers like me who point out that there are niche applications which currently can't be virtualised. These include applications which run specialist hardware and applications which have real-time requirements; in my world of Broadcast Media, these are often one and the same.

But there a whole bunch of other applications; often niche and often from small vendors which can't be virtualised for no other reason than the fact that the vendor says they can't. And the reason? It's not been tested, often the applications have very restrictive hardware requirements which are basically dictated by the vendor's ability to test against multiple hardware variants and VMware (and other virtualisation technologies) is really just another hardware variant. I have a whole bunch of these where people swear blind that they can't be virtualised, I don't believe them.

So I'm going to have a go; fortunately, as well starting to build a new storage team, I have another job which involves running a test and integration department. Hence I have all the test cases etc for alot of these apps already built, so it should be just a case of opportunistically running these tests against a non-virtualised and a virtualised enviroment and seeing the differences. It's going to be a case of fitting it in when we can but we've managed to scrounge some fairly meaty hardware to build our new virtual environment on.

I still don't think you can virtualise everything; especially in an environment which has specialist requirements; in the same way it would be very hard for some environments to get rid of their mainframes, it will be hard for some environments to get rid of all the non-virtualised stuff and replacing all your non-x86 with x86 hardware. But with some work, we might be able to get rid of more than we can today.

An Exercise in Utility

Nov 9th, 2009
by Martin Glassborow.
1 comment

EMC and VMWare's coming together with Cisco is an exercise in Utility. If we take Nick Carr's analogy of comparing utility computing with the power-generation industry, what the VCE alliance could be said to be is an attempt to define a de-facto standard for the 'compute unit'. An attempt even to define what voltage the Cloud should run at.

This is not necessarily a bad thing and there will come a time when we do need a standard for the 'compute unit'; even a de-facto unit isn't necessarily a bad thing. De-facto standards happen all the time; the processor has almost become a de-facto standard in that of the Intel chip, the desk-top operating system standard is pretty much Windows (and this from a Linux/MacOS fan).

Around these 'standards'; an industry has been built and thrives. And where there are standards in computing, there are dissenting voices and where there are dissenting voices, little industries spring and thrive in their niche.

But considering where we are in the development of cloud computing and especially, the infrastructure as a service play; arguably this is a bold and a very risky play. Much of what is being offered is at least behind the scenes, the proverbial swan; 'graceful and elegant on the top, with little legs paddling like mad'. Perhaps this is why that this coming together is in the form of a services company? It's just too hard for a currently over-worked IT department to make the technology play nice together?

Thoughts on the Acadian Dream

Nov 3rd, 2009
by Martin Glassborow.
3 comments

So EMC, Cisco and VMware finally confirm their partnership and the formation of Acadia (that really ought to have an R in it!!); much rumoured and trailled by many over the past few months. Actually anything to do with Cisco seems to really struggle at keeping secret; more leaky than Cardiff on St David's Day.

So what does this mean to me as a customer and where's the value? Already a customer of EMC, Cisco and VMware; does this have value to me? Well, not at the moment as my infrastructure has a server component which is not Cisco. In fact, I wonder if the VMware value proposition might be damaged long-term if this is not played very carefully.

When EMC bought VMware; a lot of people were concerned whether EMC would turn out to be a good custodian but they did a much better job than I or anyone really thought they would. They just left VMware alone and let them carry on building partnerships with who-ever they wanted and allowed VMware to grow and develop.

In fact, of the possible suitors for VMware, EMC turned out to be ideal as they didn't have a server platform to push and there no real reason to make VMware work better on one company's server as opposed to some-one elses. Good job EMC!

But now this partnership could throw all this good work and custodianship up in the air. Ever since VMware became an independant company again and since the departure of Diane Greene; EMC's influence has been noticably growing or at least, as a customer, I feel that EMC and VMware work a lot closer than they have in the past. Actually conversations I have had suggest that this closeness is only the start and now we have this JV with Cisco.

So there is now potential for VMware to be tuned to work better on one server platform as opposed to another and this is worrying. Yes I get the 'one throat to choke' argument and I remember EMC railling against this argument when IBM used it!

This 'Bod is going to be watching developments very carefully; it's worrying when Microsoft could hold up their hypervisor as an example of infrastructure neutrality and whisper ever so quietly but insistently, 'How neutral is VMware, think of the risk of being locked into their hardware and software…they are no more open than us!'

If VMware take the compelling route of adding value to the partnership by tuning their software to run better on EMC/Cisco kit; their value to me, even as an existing EMC/Cisco customer is a lot less. I look to the hypervisor to give me infrastructure neutrality and common capability; I hope VMware maintain this ethos.

I'd be very sad to see this change; I've been a customer of VMware and I mean *me* personally since VMware Workstation version 1 when they made the sensible decision to release a hobbyist/student license at a decent price.

World of Storcraft

Nov 2nd, 2009
by Martin Glassborow.
2 comments

Many of my storage buddies are World of Warcraft addicts or recovering addicts at least; I've recently fallen back off the wagon after seeing the videos for the next expansion and was inspired to start playing again.

Actually levelling a character in Warcraft has many similarities with the world of storage management and administration; it is mostly a matter of repetitive grind, repeating processes over and over again. Yet for some reason, us addicts seem to enjoy it. When I consider many of buddies who play, most of them are fairly senior and have moved away from the daily grind of storage allocations and obviously have had to replace it with another regular grind.

Pretty much the whole of the Player versus Environment (player versus machine) content is actually a simple decision tree;  if this event, trigger this action etc and at one point, there was functionality built into the Warcraft scripting engine to allow whole encounters to be automated but when Blizzard released the first expansion, they removed much of the functionality which allowed play to be automated and the decisions now pretty much always have to be driven by a human.

Why? Because using an automated engine allowed an unfair advantage to be developed and could have led to an escalating war of Bots as opposed to human beings; machines are much better at reacting and responding to simple decision tree based events than humans but where was the fun in that?

But this is precisely what we want to get to in Storage Management; we want fully automated storage management, tools like FAST etc are key and we certainly want decent scripting interfaces to allow us to build our own automation! Actually perhaps Blizzard should get involved because once all the Lun monkeys are freed from the repetitve grind of storage allocations, they'd be freed up to play Warcraft and further fill their coffers!

Not a Cloud Post!

Oct 22nd, 2009
by Martin Glassborow.
1 comment

Currently I have a whole bunch of blog posts half-written but at the moment inspiration seems to have gone a bit south. So I thought I would post on something completely different although it'll probably mutate into something familiar.

Now anyone who watches my twitter feed will probably have seen a few tweets on Spotify, the streaming music service available in some countries in Europe and coming soon I believe to the States. Although not the only streaming service available; it is in my opinion one of the best, it has a great selection of music covering all genres (I recently discovered that it has a growing classical selection) and it has great clients available for Mac and Windows but no Linux at the moment.

It also has two great mobile clients, one for Android and one for iPhone. If you want to use the mobile client, you must pay for the premium service but if you are happy with your music being interupted by adverts every now and then, the desktop version is free.

Now Spotify and services like it in many ways embody what to me is the real beauty of the Cloud model; a service which can be accessed anywhere from many devices but at the end of the day, the end product is the same, music streamed to my ears.

But this post isn't about Cloud, it came about after a brief MSN chat with a good friend of mine who specialises in all things Web 2.0 and especially getting useful information from the Internet; he's been training librarians and all kinds of other people how to use the Internet for years. And he mentioned that he had recently given a talk on how things like Spotify change things; it breaks the link between the physical instantention of the artifact and moves it completely into a virtual world and in doing so, it changes certain value assumptions.

Spotify for example has millions of tracks, now they are all searchable and I can just search for an artist and play their content; certainly, that's often how I use it but it also has the concept of playlists and publically shareable play-lists and it is these which will become more and more treasured and valuable.

Of course, it would be really useful if I could take Spotify playlist and then point it at another service such as Sky Songs and if playlists were portable. Or even take my iTunes database and point that at Spotify. I guess what we are talking about is portable metadata formats or at least gateways between services, in the Cloud or perhaps just stored locally.

Oh heck, this was a Cloud post anyway! We need to ensure that when we are building services or consuming services that in order to truly leverage the power of the Cloud, that we think about portability and flexiliblity. My playlists are currently locked into Spotify (and iTunes) but I am actively thinking about how I get round this and build a truly portable store; we need to think about this in our work lives as well.

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