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2016 and Beyond…

Dec 23rd, 2015
by Martin Glassborow.
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Predictions are a mug’s game…the trick is to keep them as non-specific as possible and not name names…here are mine!

What is the future for storage in the Enterprise? 2016 is going to pan out to be an ‘interesting’ year; there’s company integrations and mergers to complete with more to come so I hear; cascading acquisitions seem likely as well.

There will IPOs; they will be ‘interesting’! People are looking for exits, especially from the flash market. A market that looks increasingly crowded with little to really tell between the players.

Every storage vendor is going to struggle with maintaining growth; technology changes has meant that it is likely that just to maintain current revenues that twice as much capacity is going to have to be shipped. Yet data efficiency improvements from thin-provisioning to compression to dedupe mean that customers are storing more data on less capacity.

Add in the normal year-on-year decline of the price of storage, this is a very challenging place.

Larger storage customers are becoming more mecurial about what they buy; storage administration has got so easy that changing storage vendors is not the big deal it used to be. The primary value these days of having some dedicated storage bods is that they should be pretty comfortable with any storage put in front of them.

As much as vendors like to think that we all get very excited by their latest bell or whistle; I’m afraid that we don’t any more. Does it make my job easier; can I continue to more with less or best case the same.

Data volumes do continue to grow but the amount of traditional primary data growth has slowed somewhat in my experience.

Data from instrumentation is a real growth area but much of this is transitory; collect, analyse, archive/delete…and as people start to see an ever increasing amount of money flowing to companies like Splunk expect some sharp intakes of breath.

Object Storage will continue to under-perform but probably less so. S3 will continue its rise as the protocol/API of choice for native object. Many file-stores will become object at the back-end but with traditional SMB/NFS front-ends. However, sync and share will make inroads formally into the enterprise space; products like Dropbox Enterprise will have an impact there.

Vendors will continue to wash their products in ‘Software Defined’ colours; customers will remain unimpressed. Open-source storage offerings will grow and cause more challenges in the market. Some vendors might decide to open-source some of their products; expect at least one large company to take this route and be accused of abandonware. And watch everyone try to change their strategy to match this.

An interesting year for many…so with that, I shall be off and wrap presents!

May you all have a Happy Christmas, a prosperous New Year and may your bits never rot!!

Object Lessons?

Dec 3rd, 2015
by Martin Glassborow.
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I was hoping that one of the things that I might be able to write about after HPE Discover was that HPE finally had a great solution for Scale-Out storage; either NAS or Object.

There had been hints that something was coming; yes, HPe had done work with Cleversafe and Scality for Object Storage but the hints were that they were doing something of their own. And with IBM having taken Cleversafe into their loving bosom, HPE are the only big player without their own object platform.

Turns out however that HPE’s big announcement was their ongoing partnership with Scality; now Scality is a good object platform but there are bits that need work as is the case with Cleversafe and the others.

I don’t think that I am the only one is left disappointed by the announcement and the not the only person who was thinking…why didn’t they just buy Scality?

Are HPE still thinking of doing their own thing? Well, it’s gone very quiet and there’s some sheepish looking people about and some annoyed HPErs wondering when they will get their story straight.

Like HPE’s Cloud strategy; confusion seems to reign.

If there is any take-away from the first HPE Discover….it seems that HPE are discovering slowly and the map that is being revealed has more in common with the Mappa Mundi than an Ordinance Survey map…vaguely right, bits missing and centralised on the wrong thing.

A Slight Return

Sep 10th, 2015
by Martin Glassborow.
1 comment

I intend to start updating here again occasionally as the itches begin to build up again and I feel the need to scratch. There’s a lot going in the industry and there’s a massive amount of confusion about where it’s going at the moment.

I’m having interesting conversations with industry figures, many of them are as confused privately as they are sure publicly. Few seem to know exactly how this all plays out and not just storage guys.

I had a conversation a couple of days ago that put the electricity supply model for compute back on the radar; the technology enablers are beginning to line up to make this much more feasible but is the will/desire there? This debate will carry on until we wake up and realise that it’s all changed again.

Flash and trash is still fascinating; vendors still playing games with pricing and comparisons that make little sense. Valuations out of control (maybe) and yet quite possibly we can see the time when flash does become the standard as the prices continue to fall and storage requirements continue to soar.

And a lastly, a big thanks to all those have offered support, prayers, kind thoughts to me over the past few months. It does help..watching people you love go through chemo isn’t fun but it does help reset your priorities a bit.

Punish the Pundits!!

Mar 19th, 2015
by Martin Glassborow.
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A day rarely goes by without someone declaring one technology or another is dead…and rarely a year goes by without someone declaring this is the year of whatever product they happen to be pimping or in favour of.

And yet, you can oft find dead technologies in rude health and rarely does it actually turn out to be the year of the product it is supposed to be the year of.

It turns out that pundits (including me) really have little idea what technology is going to die or fly. And that is what makes the industry fun and interesting.

The storage industry is especially good for this; SAN is dead, DAS lives, NAS is obsolete, Object is the future, iSCSI will never work, Scale Up, Scale Out…

We know nothing…

The only thing we do know is that data volumes will keep getting bigger and we need somewhere to put it.

In the past three months; I’ve seen technologies in what everyone will have you believe are innovation-free zones that have made me stop and think ‘But I thought that was going to die….’

Yes we have far too many start-ups in some parts of the industry; far too many people have arrived at where they thought the puck was going to be.

A few people seem to be skating round where the puck was.

And there’s a few people who have picked the puck, stuck in their pocket and hidden it.

So my prediction for the next eighteen months…

‘Bumpy….with the chance of sinkholes!’

My advice…

‘Don’t listen to the pundits, we know nothing….we just love the shinies!!’

A Continuum of Theft…

Mar 6th, 2015
by Martin Glassborow.
1 comment

Apologies, this is a bit rambling but I needed to get some ideas down…and it’s my blog so I’ll ramble if I want to!!

We’ve been talking about Cloud in one form or another for many years now; this current iteration of utility computing that has come to be known as Cloud might actually be a thing. And yet, for all of the talk and all of the noise; traditional IT does seem to rumble on.

Some analysts will have you believe that we have entered an era of bimodal computing; traditional IT and the new agile movement. Traditional IT that cannot change fast enough to meet today’s business needs and this new marvellous agile computing that is changing the world and business.

It seems that the way to move forward is to abandon the old and go headlong into the new. We’ll just stop doing that and start doing this; it’s all very easy. But we have a problem, we don’t live in a bimodal world; we don’t live in a world of absolutes and there is certainly no one solution that fits all.

And this change involves people; most people, even technologists don’t really like change, even if we accept that change is necessary. Change brings opportunity but it is also dangerous and uncomfortable. I don’t think that the analysts often take account of the fact that organisations really run on people and not machines.

Actually, I’ll take back what I said; many people do enjoy change but they like it at a measured rate. This is important to embrace and understand; it’ll allow us to build a model that does work and to take things forward, a model that doesn’t require massive leaps of faith.

We absolutely need those daredevils who are going come up ideas that have potential to change the world; the test-pilots, the explorers, the people with a vision for change. Few organisations can sustain themselves with just those people; not over any long period; they make mistakes, they crash, their luck runs out and they never finish anything!

What organisations really need are people who are capable of taking on the new ideas and making them the new normal but without sacrificing the current stability of the services currently provided. These people are not blockers; they are your implementers, finishers and they are the core of your organisation.

Then you need people to run the new normal now that it has become boring. Every now and then, you need to give them a poke and hopefully one of them will throw their hands up in horror and decide that they fancy taking a leap off a cliff; they can run round to the start of the cycle and help bring in next iteration of technology. I think there’s huge value in joining these folks up with those at the start of the process.

IT tends to be somewhat cyclical; you only have to listen to the greybeards talking about mainframe to realise this. The only question in my mind is how much faster we can get the cycles to go. It’s not bimodal; I know some think it is trimodal..it’s probably a lot more graduated than that.

Some people will live all their careers in one stage of the cycle or another; a few will live at the extremes but many of us will move between phases as we feel enthused or otherwise.

Friday Doom

Mar 6th, 2015
by Martin Glassborow.
2 comments

More and more people seem to think that we are moving to some kind of bimodal storage environment where all your active data sits on AFA and everything else in an object store.

Or as I like to think of it; your data comes rushing in as an unruly torrent and becomes becalmed in a big data swamp which stinks up the place; it then sits and rots for many years, eventually becoming the fuel that you run your business on and leads to the destruction of the planet due to targeted advertising of tat that people simply must have!

So just say No to Flash and No to Object Storage!

What Year Is This?

Mar 4th, 2015
by Martin Glassborow.
3 comments

I had hoped we’d moved beyond the SPC-1 benchmarketing but it appears not. If you read Hu’s blog; you will find that the VSP G1000 is

the clear leader in storage performance against the leading all flash storage arrays!

But when you look at the list, there are so many flash arrays missing from the list that it is hardly worth bothering with. No Pure, no Solidfire, no Violin and obviously no EMC (obviously because they don’t play the SPC game). Now, I haven’t spoken to the absentees whether they intend to both with the SPC benchmarketing exercise; I suspect most don’t intend too at the moment as they are too busy trying to improve and iterate their products.

So what we end up with is a pretty meaningless list.

Is it useful to know when your array’s performance falls of a cliff? Yes, it probably is but you might be better trying to get your vendor to sign-up to some performance guarantees as opposed to relying on a benchmark that currently appears to have little value.

I wish we could move away from benchmarketing, magic quadrants and the ‘woo’ that surrounds the storage market. I suspect we won’t anytime soon.

Dead Flesh…

Feb 18th, 2015
by Martin Glassborow.
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If in doubt rebrand…have IBM completely run out of ideas with their storage offerings? The Spectrum rebrand of their storage offerings feels like the last throw of the dice. And it demonstrates the problems that they currently have.

In fact, it is not all of their storage offerings but appears to be the software offerings? DS8K for example is missing from the line-up but perhaps Spectrum Zombie – the Storage Array that Will Not Die was a step too far. We do however have Spectrum Virtualise; this is a hardware offering offering in the form of SVC currently but is this going to morph into a software offering? There is little reason why it shouldn’t.

But there are also products such as the hardware XIV, the Vxxxx series and also the ESS GPFS appliance that are missing from the Spectrum family? Are we going to see IBM exit these products over time; it feels like the clock is ticking on them?

The DS8K is probably a safe product because of the mainframe support but users of the rest of them are going to be nervous.

Why have IBM managed to completely mess up their storage portfolio? There are still massive gaps in it after all this time; Object Storage, Scalable NAS and indeed an ordinary workaday NAS of their own.

The products they have are generally good; I’ve been a fan of SVC for a long time, a GPFS advocate and a TSM bigot. Products that really work!

I feel sorry for the folks who develop them; they have been let down again and again by their product marketing; the problem isn’t the products!

Brownie points for anyone who gets the reference in the title..

 

A fool and his money….

Feb 9th, 2015
by Martin Glassborow.
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And the madness continues…

DON’T BUY THIS CRAP! Give your money to charity or burn it as a piece of performance art! But don’t buy this crap!

This makes me so annoyed! Do something useful with your money….please!

http://www.geek.com/chips/this-ethernet-cable-costs-10000-1615326/

Happy New Year

Jan 6th, 2015
by Martin Glassborow.
1 comment

Or is it April already, I really cannot tell from this post…

So I am going to kickstart a new product; AudioNAS – sounds expensive because it is!

There are very many complaints and issues that I have dealt with when dealing with the creative types that are my user-base but never have they complained that one storage system sounds better than the other storage system. They have never asked for better quality HDMI cables, better quality USB or even better quality Ethernet cables because their current ones just don’t render their work sufficiently well.

But perhaps there is a need for AudioNAS that allows you to get more from your files…improving the bits so that they sound better. Look, believe what you want to believe but if the storage system impacts on the sound of the files being stored there, there are horrible implications…because it means it is changing the data and that would be bad.

‘Sorry, Mr Audiophile….the storage improved your medical files and has smoothed out the fact that you are allergic to penicillin’

We call such improvements data corruption…this is bad!

But I’ll take your money for my new AudioNAS…

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