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Information Haze

Aug 17th, 2009
by Martin Glassborow.
3 comments

Chuck riffs off Zilla to talk about a personal cloud and what it may look like; at the moment so much of our personal informaton is dispersed across a variety of places, we do not have a cloud it's more like a mist or a general haze.

It's not just content such as photos, mp3s, blogs etc; it's also meta-data such as Amazon wish-lists, eBay purchase records, grocery shopping lists, my Linked-In contacts…information which describes our everyday lives, what we do and who we are.

I am in the process of scanning in the barcodes of all the books in our personal library and uploading them to LibraryThing; once those are in, you will probably be able to tell quite a lot about me. It might tell you more about me than my medical records but I probably don't mind you looking at what books I read but I would really object to my medical records becoming part of the public record.

What I need is a tool to help me manage all this information about myself. Some of which I am happy to be public knowledge, some which should always remain private.

Personal Information Management is a massively untapped area; how do we define the taxonomy of a life? And who are we going to trust to store this information, how are we going to ensure portability? These are complex things and I wonder who is going to solve them.

Cloud==Convergence==Service

Aug 11th, 2009
by Martin Glassborow.
No comments yet

I've had a few discussions recently with people about Storage Teams, how they are organised and what perhaps they should look like in the future. There is a feeling amongst many people who sit outside the storage arena that storage is a deep black art; the successor to the deep black art that was mainframe system programming. And for many years, the storage teams and the vendors have colluded in this.

Ask a storage manager to do something for you and there will often be a pursing of lips, an intake of breath and a comment, 'well I could give you that but that's not really the way it works'; or a narrowing of the eyes and a shaking of the head, 'Hmmm….complicated, it'll cost you!'.

Indeed, the storage monkey is the plumber of the infrastructure world! Or at least this is what it feels like looking in but this attitude/position is beginning to be challenged more and more; virtualisation has meant that generalists are becoming more common and infrastructure ownership is becoming blurred.

Who is the storage team when a Lefthand software appliance is deployed? Who is the storage team when a Sun 7000 gets deployed? In fact, arguably any NAS product has more in common with servers than traditional block storage arrays.

Who owns the converged network? Much of the resistance to iSCSI came from within the storage teams aided and abetted by the traditional vendors. However we now have FCoE and we now have the first commercially available FCoE array; so we are going to have to sort out the politics and the state of denial that we've all been in because FCoE is fibre channel and we can't get away with claiming anything different.

There will be a converged network and that network will be Ethernet; we can have two teams attempt to manage it or we can have one. I suspect that many will try the two teams approach, just as when I was first involved in deploying an IP network that we kept a seperate team to manage the SNA network. But eventually, the teams will merge and become one.

But I for one look forward to this; I look forward to the time where the storage team isn't begging the server team for root-level access to do something because they should all be one team and they should be pulling together to provide Service; not servers, storage and network but Service.

And I think that is the biggest win that the Cloud could give us. Technically we have been ready for the Cloud for some time; yes, the management tools are a bit lacking but we are ready. Politically and emotionally we need to move out of our infrastructure silos and move on.

This will causes some huge problems for some vendors in the future; it is going to be very hard to be just a storage vendor, just a server vendor or just a network vendor. I think you can get away with that for another two-three years but long-term, I think you might struggle.

Cloud==Death of Visio!

Aug 10th, 2009
by Martin Glassborow.
6 comments

Everyone else appears to be having a go at defining what 'Cloud Computing' is; is it a thing, is it a movement, is it an illusion, is it new or is it just old concepts rehashed?

Now having worked as an Infrastructure Architect in the past, I am quite happy with drawing clouds to represent 'something where magic' happens; most often it was the network, it was something which was commonly outsourced and certainly when my traffic ended up in the WAN, I didn't really care what happened as long as it came back out again meeting all my SLAs.

SLAs covered things such as performance, availability, security etc; so extending this idea to the actual compute and storage is not especially scarey. It is certainly going to make drawing diagrams alot easier; no-more incredibly detailed Visio diagrams, just a cloud and a label saying 'Magic Happens'.

So there you go, 'Cloud Computing' is where magic happens to data and it is the death of Visio! And I am sure that is a definition that we can all sign up to!

What’s your problem?

Aug 10th, 2009
by Martin Glassborow.
6 comments

Now I'm a big technology fan and it often makes me laugh when I am advised to treat to company's money as I would treat my own…if I treated it like that, we'd have a data-centre full of wierd and wonderful gadgets; projects half completed and strange bits of kit that I liked the look of on eBay. But thankfully for the good of the company, I tend not to buy technology for technology's sake; it needs to meet a need and fix a problem.

So I find it incredibly frustrating that often purchasing decisions are made without defining the problem; the biggest trap to fall into is to allow yourself to bound the problem in the vocabulary that your incumbent has imparted with you. Instead of replication, you talk about SRDF; instead of point-in-time copies, you think in snaps, instead of shared storage, you think in terms of arrays. This all normal behaviour but it limits you.

When a vendor turns up touting their wares, you should be asking yourself; 'What problem does this solve?' Don't let the vendor convince you that you have a problem; it is all to easy for that to happen and once you allow them to do so, you are halfway along the route to purchase order.

Before the vendor turns up, think of the problems you are having and then as your introduction/brief; set the agenda, 'How does your product solve my problem? Not what problem has your product been designed to fix'.

But try to define the problem in neutral, non-vendor specific terms; this is especially important at refresh times because often you have allowed the problem to be bounded by what's possible with the kit you have today; try and define the problem in green-field terms, start with a broad-brush approach before diving into the nitty-gitty.

So what's your problem?

Network Appliance

Aug 9th, 2009
by Martin Glassborow.
8 comments

I read Dave Hitz's autobiography earlier this year; if you haven't, I can recommend it! Well worth reading and especially about the early days of NetApp as they are now called. Over twenty-five years ago, the founders of NetApp identified that they could build a networked storage device out of 'commodity' components, this device would be so simple and easy to manage that it would be almost appliance like!

The appliance would be targeted at the lower end of the market where there was little to no competition. This strategy worked and NetApp grew into a major player in the storage market. However interestingly enough, NetApp have almost completely vacated the low-end of the market and are pretty much focused in the mid range market and above; whether they play or want to play in the very high-end of the market i.e DMX, USP and DS8K country varies from which NetApp representative you talk too. Understandable I suppose, the margins in the high-end are much higher than the low-end and it's probably a much cooler market to be in.

But this has left a hole in the market; EMC identified this and bought Iomega; EMC's ix range are very creditable NAS boxes; in fact supporting both iSCSI and NAS protocols and certified against VMWare, these are very attractive boxes for both small businesses, development houses and anyone who wants to build a home lab.

Then there is Data Robotics with their Drobo Range. Data Robotics with their BeyondRAID technology are a company worth watching especially with the Drobo Pro range which is aimed fairly and squarely at the SMB market and has aspirations far above this. I really like the look of the Drobo range and if I was a storage company with money to spend; they might make an interesting acquisition.

And yet I bought neither of these? I've just bought the Synology DS409 with 4 Tbytes of disk. Why? I'd heard a lot of good things word of mouth and the new firmware will support iSCSI. I wanted iSCSI for my VMWare lab and unfortunately only the Drobo Pro supports this and much more expensive. The Iomega range is very attractive but the Synology box feels a lot more open and hack-friendly; it's also a little cheaper but I dare say I would have been very happy with the EMC-Iomega range.

But I couldn't buy an Network Storage Appliance from the original creators of the product range and that makes me kind of sad! 

I will do a review of the Synology at some point in the next couple of weeks; it's only been under my desk for 36 hours and it is already running beta firmware allowing it to do iSCSI and also TimeMachine for my Mac. It's a very impressive and attractive little box, security model is a little weak and it could do with a way to integrate easily into the cloud-storage providers.

The Bazzas

Aug 4th, 2009
by Martin Glassborow.
12 comments

So the Storage Vendors' Blog Poll has finished over at the Monkeys; I must admit the result was a bit of a surprise and I suspect that there has been a fair amount of ballot-box stuffing going on; I am not sure about hanging chads, more a case of vote early, vote often!

There were three blogs which I feel deserve special mention and I am going to award my own accolades! Firstly, the 'Barry Of Distinction' award i.e The BOD goes jointly to Barry Burke and Barry Whyte

Barry blogs with passion about his product believing strongly in the fact that his is the best product!

Barry believes that Barry's product is quite simply the wrong approach and technically flawed!

Barry believes that HDS lags his product and HDS generally can't do math!

Barry believes that Barry's product is simply all marketing and bluster!

Barry quite likes and respects Barry but would rather that Barry did not know it!

Barry is technically very knowledgeable but also has a wicked sense of humour!

So I am pleased to award the inaugural Barry of Distinction to Barry!

The blog which I was most amazed to see missing was that of Marc Farley! What can one say about Marc's Storagerap blog?

The SWCAA would simply be illegal in the UK but he's not in the UK and can get away with it!

The League of Suspcious Avatars? A mark of honour amongst fellow storage bloggers to appear in this! A true recognition of achievement!

And then there's Marc's raps! The music industry's loss is our gain (I think!!)

So I am please to award the inaugural Mark of Distinction to Marc!

Now, go and vote in the Monkey's non-vendor blog poll! I'd like it if you voted for me but there are many worthy bloggers mentioned, many of whom for this is not a paid endeavour and they deserve the recognition!!

Pots, Kettles, Stones and Glasshouses

May 22nd, 2009
by Martin Glassborow.
2 comments

I have a lot of sympathy for Chad's and Chuck's recent posts here and here on Oracle support for VMWare but I would have a lot more sympathy for them if EMC did not have such a track-record for using the support matrix as a marketing weapon.

EMC's continued refusal to certify another controller in front of their arrays, be it NetApp, HDS or IBM; makes their current spat with Oracle quite amusing from where I'm sitting. I know many customers who have requested that EMC certify NetApp v-class in front of various EMC arrays, this always met with an unequivocal NO with dark mutterings as there being issues. If you challenge EMC as to what the issues are, you generally get a lot hand-wafting and nothing more.

Now, we know that various EMC arrays work behind NetApp because there's an increasing number of customers who are doing so without EMC's certification but certification would be nice or at least an open discussion to as to what the problems are?

The support matrix should not be used as a marketing and sales tool; it should be used to genuinely add value to the customer/vendor relationship. So guys put your own houses in order before throwing stones!

Maintenance Madness

Apr 24th, 2009
by Martin Glassborow.
1 comment

Despite working for a vendor, David Merrill has a habit of posting some very good entries full of common sense; I find myself nodding in agreement with much of what he posts. His latest couple of entries here and here had me nodding in agreement; it's not just the vendors who are guilty of some dubious voodoo economics, I'm sure that most of us have put together business cases which if were really scrutinised, don't really stack up.

We often talk about trying to make capital acquistions cost neutral in less than eighteen months; a reduction in Opex to offset the capital cost. Vendors are often complicit in this, as I mentioned in my previous entry, inflated maintenance costs mean that is often cheaper to refresh and take the bundled maintenance offered with a new system than to continue to pay maintenance on the legacy kit.

However, if I examine the failures that we tend to have; it is generally the moving parts which fail; you know those things which spin at speed? Yes, the spinning rust. And if there is one thing which has fallen in cost; it is spinning rust.

Okay; with the very much older disks, vendors simply can't get new drives that small but I assume that most of you are aware that a large number of maintenance replacements are not actually new components? They can be previously failed and reconditioned components or perhaps pulled from arrays which have been migrated to the latest and greatest technology.

Maintenance in the IT industry is a fantastic example of Voodoo Economics…but hey it's green, well they are recycling and re-using! But remember, there is a third part to that; REDUCE!

Vendors don't have any real incentive to reduce maintenance costs; it firstly enables a constant upgrade treadmill because if you really had to evaluate the value of the new features, life would be a lot more complex but if you don't upgrade, maintenance is a very nice and high margin activity.

Actually EMC should be thanking companies like HDS and IBM; it enables people to keep their legacy arrays around for a lot longer and hence keep paying EMC high maintenance! And no I'm not saying that EMC's maintenance charges are especially high, there are much worse offenders out there!

Investment Strategies and Virtualisation

Apr 21st, 2009
by Martin Glassborow.
1 comment

I sat in a meeting today where the subject of how often you refresh your storage infrastructure came up. I know that many companies are working on a three-five year model but we were discussing whether this should be increased to seven and what needs to happen to make this so.

There are a few reasons why we were coming to this conclusion; firstly spinning rust in the Enterprise is probably at it's peak and actually anything over the current maximum size of a spindle has potentially limited use i.e anything over a 1-2 terabyte drive is not especially useful for shared storage infrastructure. Please note, I say shared storage infrastructure!

Larger drives may still have a place to play in your archive tier but even that is debatable. And if you look at most Enterprise end-user desktops; they often have rather small local drives. It is the home-user and their insatiable demand for storage which really drives the size of spindles now.

We also know that the performance of the spinning rust is probably not going to improve dramatically. So what does change? Well, yes we have the introduction of SSDs and a couple of things mean that a four-five refresh cycle for that technology is probably sensible. And then there are the storage controllers themselves; these don't especially wear out but technology does move on. 

But the current designs of arrays mean that when we refresh; we are forced to refresh the lot. We are also forced to refresh by overly inflated maintenance costs. Let's be honest; most refreshes are justified by cost savings on the OpEX i.e maintenance. Even if I go to a virtualised infrastructure as espoused by HDS or IBM; these maintenance costs still mean it is often more attractive to refresh rather than sweat the asset.

However the current economic climate means that we are now more closely beginning to examine the model of keeping things for longer and examining our maintenance budgets very carefully. Dropping maintenance for software which is now stable and at terminal releases; potentially talking to third-party maintenance organisations who are much more willing to support legacy kit at a reasonable cost.

And we are considering strategies which enable us to continue to make use of kit for longer. VMWare's announcements today allowing replication and thin-provisioning at the hypervisor layer for example.  So funnily enough, EMC have come round to external storage virtualisation; you just buy it from VMWare as a software product.

It'll be interesting to see what other traditional storage related functionality makes its way into the hypervisor. And at what point EMC realise that they are actually selling 'traditional' storage virtualisation but as a software product and at which point that they do become a software company.

Funny old world, as EMC slowly catalyzes into a software butterfly selling storage virtualisation, Oracle becomes a hardware grub. And in the space of a week; EMC 'kill' DMX with V-MAX, then they kill V-MAX with vSphere. Now that's what I call progress!

Oracular Spectacular

Apr 20th, 2009
by Martin Glassborow.
1 comment

I'm just not sure about this one; I could have seen the IBM acquistion of Sun being very destructive and ripping the guts out of Sun. But I'm not sure that this is really much better; it is as has been pointed out an extremely defensive move by Oracle. However, a defensive move to buy a company which Oracle probably does not really understand. But does anyone really understand Sun in it's present guise because it is obvious that the current management don't!?

A software company buying a software company pretending to be a hardware company would make sense if it was to kill the hardware side of things and just leverage the software. But at the moment, Oracle seem to want to continue with the hardware side of things and even continue with the Sparc franchise. And it was bad enough dealing with Sun to get support for our Storagetek silos; dealing with Oracle fills me with horror!

As for what it means for storage? Exadata is probably dead in the water in it's current form. The ZFS lawsuit becomes NetApp vs Oracle; it feels almost an unfair fight. And of course the NetApp sales-guys are going to probably have to change the 'Oracle uses NetApp for all it's development storage' line.

As for Pillar, well Pillar are always at pains to both stress the Larry relationship but also that they are nothing to do with Oracle; it's one of the more schizoid sales pitches but I don't see anything changing with Pillar.

I am also quite excited by the carnage that maybe wrought in Sun…why? Am I some kind of voyeuristic sadist? No,  I think that we might see a mass exodus (as we would of with IBM) of some very talented engineers who are determined to show the world how good they are and we might get some exciting new start-ups. If I was a VC/company with cash to burn; I'd be looking at what flotsam and jetsam is washed up from wreck and wondering what I could make from it all.

There is also something about the whole deal which leaves me feeling uneasy, last time I had that feeling, Compaq bought DEC. One hopes that Larry's eyes are not too big for Oracle's belly; I mean HP don't have an enterprise database yet….but give it a few years!

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