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Storagebod’s Fashion Tips for Storage Engineers

Oct 17th, 2011
by Martin Glassborow.
1 comment

Greg recently wrote his Fashion Tips for Network Engineering Men and in doing so, I think he has highlighted some of the differences between Network Engineers and Storage Engineers. So I thought I would take the challenge of giving the sartorially challenged Storage Engineer some help.

Fortunately, I have some fashion pedigree being related to both the Duchess of Cambridge and the Head Buyer for Harvey Nichols; in fact of the three of us, I suspect I am the true fashion leader in the family.

Ties

Every Storage Engineer needs a good collection of ties; these should rarely be worn in the conventional manner but at times, they come in handy for keeping sweat out of your eyes whilst trying to explain why Fibre Channel is a far superior protocol to anything that a Network Engineer might use. Indeed, a number of them can be deployed to prevent said Engineer escaping.

The exception to this is the Black Tie; you should have at least one which can be worn to the many storage award ceremonies which you might get invited to. These are deeply meaningful events where awards are given on a strictly meritorious basis. And they are not an excuse to simply drink large quantities of cheap champagne and wine.

Shirts

Vendor polo shirts should be worn whenever possible; these allow you to demonstrate what high esteem your vendor holds you in. However never let said vendor feel too comfortable, always wear a different vendor polo shirt to the one you are having a meeting with.

For days when you want to dress to impress, nothing says engineer like a dress shirt with the sleeves completely removed.

And for those dress down days, can I suggest a t-shirt with the sleeves removed? Never a vest, that simply looks tacky!

Hats

Face it, no-one looks good in a hat; if you need to keep the sun off your head (and that is unlikely, you are shut away from the sun most of the time), a knotted hankie should suffice.

Portable Computing

Portable computing is not for the Storage Engineer! If you can carry it, it’s non-enterprise kit and we don’t do non-enterprise. Wireless? Pah, if it’s not a fibre cable; it’s not connectivity!

Belt

Belts should be elasticated and not leather. They should be capable of being used as a catapult or if there are a number of you; a ballista.

For the particular daring of you; they can be used for bungee jumping after an awards ceremony.

A diving belt can be used as an albeit for carrying a diving knife but a diving knife is normally overkill for most occasions.

Suits

A dinner suit is the only suit you will likely require, to be worn to important awards ceremonies.

The old favourite boiler suit needs to be worn with care unless you end up making a political statement that you do not wish.

If you end up in court after an awards ceremony, may I suggest your birthday suit; it always impresses the court that you really have nothing to hide.

Shoes

A real engineer would never wear shoes; boots are the preferred wear. Site boots are especially effective wear when bringing complex vendor negotiations to a close.

Converse can be worn but never with a suit; you’ll just end up looking like to you want to be David Tennant in Doctor Who!

Socks

Preferably clean or at least the ones from the bottom of the laundry basket. It is one the place that I really agree with Greg though; simply buy a dozen or so pairs of black socks. That’s unless you are ignoring my footwear advice and are wearing shoes, then white socks are preferred. So much more stylish!

Trousers

Yes! In general trousers are a good idea! Although, a kilt can be an acceptable alternative.

Shorts, especially lycra cycling shorts just make you look like a cycle courier and you are better than that.

Be Amazing

If you take my advice, everyone will know you are a Storage Engineer and you will get the respect due!

500 Not Out! How Did This Happen?

Oct 13th, 2011
by Martin Glassborow.
2 comments

Another milestone for the Storagebod blog; this is my five hundredth post!  I should write something really meaningful but I’m not sure I can think of anything, so I thought I’d just put down a number of short ideas which might get developed more into full blogs.

Enterprise IT – Enterprise IT is a meaningless term; it is insulting and disparaging of anyone else who is not an Enterprise. If you run a business and your IT infrastructure is core to the continuation of your business; you need IT which is reliable, scalable and all those other good things. You can of course leave off paying the premium for what people call ‘Enterprise’!

RFPs – Request For Pain. RFPs generally exist for one reason in IT; that is to give a bunch of vendors a kicking. In the storage world, you probably have little reason to change vendor but you might as well kick the crap out of your incumbent for laughs. The result of nearly all RFPs is driven by politics and not technical reasons; it is probably better for your sanity if you acknowledge that up front. If a customer really wants to change, they will.

It’s a PC Plus World; the reality is that if you’ve got a desktop, you will probably keep a desktop. Don’t expect this to change any time soon. Yes, you will probably be able to get access to some services via an alternative device but I suspect that most desktop users will stay just that.  You will see more mobile devices about but we all know that it’s a pose and it gives us something to do in tedious meetings.

Big Data; use Big Data to make better decisions, don’t use it as an excuse to dive into analysis paralysis. If it has all the characteristics of a duck, it probably is a duck…you don’t need to decode it’s genome before you serve it with Orange sauce.

Cloud; it’s a way of delivering service but it’s not the only way of delivering service. If you find yourself getting religious about how you deliver a service as opposed to delivering the service…take a holiday and get some perspective.

Internal Service Providers; you only have one customer to focus on. This is your biggest strength and weakness.

IT Management; take the chance if possible to manage a team outside of your technical experience. You learn to manage, delegate and trust your team; you focus on managing and not trying to do two jobs. You can always go back to managing in your technical discipline but you will bring new insight and ideas.

Work/Life Balance; you will die, this is inevitable. Make sure that the people you love remember you for the right reasons and not for times you weren’t there.

So that’s post 500 done…here’s to the next 500!!

 

Trading Commodities

Oct 12th, 2011
by Martin Glassborow.
3 comments

‘Would you trust your business on a storage array built from commodity hardware?’ to paraphrase a remark which came up in a meeting today? This comment took me aback as we were discussing another array which is also built from commodity hardware, although the questioner seemed blissfully unaware of that. I left meeting feeling a little perturbed and put out with something nagging going round my head.

The comment is not an uncommon one to be honest but does it really mean anything at all? And then it hit me,

‘We risk all of our business on commodity hardware all the time; what the hell do you think those servers are?’

Most of the time, they will be clustered to fail over in a very similar manner to a commodity dual-head storage device. And as we put virtualise more and more services; the impact of a failed server or server-chassis is possibly very similar to the impact of a the failure of a head in a dual-head storage array.

So would I trust my business to commodity hardware? Well, I don’t think we’ve got that much choice these days, do you? Be it storage or servers; its getting to be pretty much the same thing!

The DAS Alternative?

Oct 6th, 2011
by Martin Glassborow.
1 comment

There’s a lot of discussion about the resurgence of DAS and alternatives to SAN and NAS; whether these be virtual appliances, clustering storage, object or just plan old direct-attached-disk; all of these are seen as ways to replace the expensive network storage be it SAN or NAS attached.

But is this actually important or even especially new? It is certainly the case that the software vendors such as Microsoft and Oracle would like a piece of the action but we also have new players coming in via the virtualisation space.

Personally I see it just as another evolution in the realm of Networked Shared Storage; SAN, NAS and Clustered-Storage. The clustered storage will generally be built around commodity disk but it will not be exclusively so; it may be accessed in a variety of ways, clustered file-systems such as StorNext, GPFS and Gluster will all provide a block-level access but you can also throw in object technologies such as Caringo and you may still decide to access via the traditional NAS protocols.

There are certainly some interesting possibilities where block and file access could be provided to the same data; build yourself a storage-cluster and add in client nodes which see the storage as ‘local filesystems’ but also have remote access via NAS/CIFS or even object.

But is this really a resurgence of DAS? Not really, it’s still networked storage but just different. Existing SAN infrastructures can be leveraged to provide access to the physical bits (the rise of SSDs means no more storage is rust!). We simply have a new (actually old) tool in the box.

And it just reflects what we already know; Storage is Software…

Tiers are back

Oct 4th, 2011
by Martin Glassborow.
No comments yet

No sooner than we start get to technology which allows us to practically get rid of tiers or at least the management of tiers by the introduction of automation to move data around arrays with minimal admin intervention; we start to bring a whole new bunch of storage silos.

There seems to be discussion about tiers again and how we categorise data; so we have SSD only arrays which are our performance tiers, we have SATA/NL-SAS which are capacity tiers and then we have tape/MAID etc which are our archive tiers. So here we go again, fragmentation of data across multiple tiers could well be with us again with-in the next half-dozen or so years.

And there will be hand-wringing again; ILM and HSM is too hard say the vendors, the returns are minimal. Once we see the mass introduction of SSD-only arrays or perhaps that should be an if; I think as storage consumers that we need to be putting pressure on the vendors to provide seamless ways to move data around between the arrays.

I wonder if almost inevitably, the standard operating model will be external virtualisation in front of silos? Or is it application level intelligence which does the movement? Or the file-system?

I am not against the introduction of SSD only arrays; actually I think starting from a different point as opposed to just putting SSDs into an existing array is not such a bad idea. Designing from the metal up may mean we see less compromises and more effective use of SSDs, yet it does bring challenges into the data centre.

At times, this all feels very circular.

Developers have all the fun?

Sep 26th, 2011
by Martin Glassborow.
No comments yet

When I started work many years ago, I started as a mainframe programmer and not especially good one really. The life of the programmer was really rather boring, we took designs and specifications from analysts and wrote code to do what was in the specification. I really was not cut out for it and gravitated to systems where it was a lot more immediate and a lot more varied on a day-to-day basis.

Now we talk about developers more often than programmers; it is an interesting change in terminology and focus. Developers appear to have a lot more freedom, certainly the Agile methodologies seem to have an immediacy that allows the developer to get feedback  and a result a lot quicker than we used to. It seems a more interesting and varied proposition than it was back when I was cutting my teeth. I might not have made the change to Infrastructure (although anyone who had to maintain my code might disagree) if things had been different way back then.

It does make me wonder how we attract people into the Infrastructure side; DevOps not withstanding, there is still a role for the Infrastructure Specialist. The guys who really know how to put together a data-centre environment.  It does appear to be getting incredibly hard to get entry-level interest, perhaps programming is just too much fun these days?

 

Three is the Magic Number?

Sep 19th, 2011
by Martin Glassborow.
2 comments

I never thought that I’d keep this going so long but it is now three years that I’ve been writing this blog. It’s still fun to do and keeps the mind going; sometimes I think it’s getting easier and then at times, I just sit here writing and re-writing the same sentence again and again!

It amazes me that people come and keep coming back to read more. It also amazes me when people actually write nice things about the blog even when I’ve been very critical of their company; the vendors have been incredibly supportive (no, no money has changed hands) as have my fellow bloggers.

I look back at some posts and wonder ‘what the hell was I thinking?’ and then there are others which I can read with pleasure. There are the posts which I know have changed things; encouraging and badgering  EMC to include VP as part of the standard stack with Symmetrix is something I am quietly proud to have influenced.

Its been interesting to watch the take-over shenanigans as the tier 2 companies have been gobbled up; leaving only NetApp really retaining its independence.

And now we have new wave of storage start-ups; many virtualisation focused and many trying to figure out the best way to deploy SSDs. How many of these will grow into take-over targets and can any of them become the next NetApp?

Then there is the growth of Cloud and what that means; does Cloud mean anything? It certainly still seems to mean many things to many people. From the consumer cloud to the private cloud; Cloudwashing is the order of the day!

So dear reader, thank-you for reading, thank-you for commenting and thank-you for the generally nice things you say about the blog.

Here’s to the next year and beyond.

Virtual Angst

Sep 12th, 2011
by Martin Glassborow.
2 comments

There appears to be a lot of angst and general uncertainty about VAAI; who is in and who is out of the Storage Cartel. Will the future developments of VAAI and VMware storage directions in general cut out some of the start-ups who have built their business models around VMware storage and is this an attempt to curtail or will it even accidentally curtail innovation in storage.

Personally, I think it will only curtail innovation if you buy into the premise that the storage market is reliant on VMware and its machinations. Now VMware and the mothership EMC want you to believe that this is the case; they want you to play on their pitch under their rules but you do not have to.

And if you only focus on VMware; you could well find that killer feature moves up the stack into the hypervisor and you are suddenly in a very cold place.

No, if you are driven by innovation; you need to ensure that VMware is part of your strategy and not your whole strategy. There are plenty of customers and users who are buying storage to do  more than just VMware; don’t make yourself irrelevant to them.

We are a long way away from the majority of datacentres being VMware monocultures; don’t fall into the trap…and that goes for the big boys as well.

Something Blue?

Sep 7th, 2011
by Martin Glassborow.
No comments yet

After for going steady for a number of years, it seems that HDS and BlueArc have finally made their relationship permanent. HDS have finally acquired BlueArc.

As the Big Data meme grows and spreads it was inevitable that this was going to happen this as HDS really needed a file-based storage story of their own. Partnership only gets you so far and at some point if you want to get real hold of the roadmap and direction; you need to own it. And with so many of the big players coming into the space, BlueArc really needed a safe-harbour to develop their products.

In some shape or form, all of the players have a Big Data product now and now it’s going to come down to execution and message. Dare I say it, it’s the message (a.k.a marketing) which is as usual going to be the important thing and HDS are not really great at messages.

If they make the mistake of pitching BlueArc as something special because of their hardware implementations i.e. their traditional technical-based sale; it is going to be hard for them as the people who are buying into the Big Data story are not really that interested in technology. They are interested in what the technology can do for them and how they can do it without worrying about the technology.

How do I put this….ahhhh, got it; ‘they want Information without Technology’. We know that they can’t have the former without the latter but don’t sell the latter, sell the benefits of the former.

Anyway, just my thoughts.

So who is on the auction block next?

Glistening Gluster

Sep 2nd, 2011
by Martin Glassborow.
1 comment

There seems to be be more and more stuff appearing about Gluster; there’s a really nice article about Rolling Your Own Fail-Over SAN Cluster with Thin Provisioning, Deduplication and Compression using Ubuntu which just goes how far you can go with the DIY approach to building your own storage devices.

Please note that this article utilises iSCSI for it’s SAN connectivity but there’s no reason why you shouldn’t do a little more work and support FC as well and I daresay, that putting together FCoE is not beyond the realms of possibility.

I’d also suggest that people have a look at the 3.3beta stuff for reveal about what is coming down the line.

And I am certainly not suggesting that you should run your mission critical business applications on it but it really goes to show how far we’ve moved; premium features are beginning to turn-up in open-source systems.

A threat to the existing Storage Cabal? Not yet but for the more adventurous of you, there is a huge amount of potential.

 

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