Storagebod Rotating Header Image

February, 2014:

IT’s choking the life out of me.

Feb 28th, 2014
by Martin Glassborow.
2 comments

I’ve been fairly used to the idea that my PC at home is substantially better than my work one; this has certainly been the case for me for more than a decade. I’m a geek and I spend more than most on my personal technology environment.

However, it is no longer just my home PC; I’ve got better software tools and back-end systems; my home workflow is so much better than my work workflow; it’s not even close. And the integration with my mobile devices, it’s a completely different league altogether. I can edit documents on my iPad, my MBA, my desktop, even my phone and they’ll all sync up and be in the same place for me. My email is a common experience across all devices. My media; it’s just there.

With the only real exception of games; it doesn’t matter which device I’m using to do stuff.

And what is more; it’s not just me; my daughter has the same for her stuff as does my wife. We’ve not had to do anything clever, there’s no clever scripting involved, we just use consumer-level stuff.

Yet our working experience is so much poorer; if my wife wants to work on her stuff for her job, she’s either got to email it to herself or use ‘GoToMyPC’ provided by her employer.

Let’s be honest, for most of us now…our work environment is quite frankly rubbish. It has fallen so far behind consumer IT, it’s sad.

It’s no longer the technology enthusiast who generally has a better environment…it’s almost everyone who has access to IT. And not only that, we pay a lot less for it than the average business.

Our suppliers hide behind a cloak of complexity; I’m beginning to wonder if IT as it is traditionally understood by business is no longer an enabler, it’s just a choke-point.

And yes there are many excuses as to why this is the case; go ahead…make them! I’ve made them myself but I don’t really believe them any more…do you?

Drowning in Roadmaps…

Feb 14th, 2014
by Martin Glassborow.
No comments yet

Roadmap after roadmap at the moment; bring out your roadmaps. Of course, this causes me a problem as I’ve now seen roadmaps going way off into the future and it is a pain because as soon as I start speculating about the future of storage; people seem to get very worried about breach of NDAs.

But some general themes are beginning to appear

1) Traditional RAID5 and RAID6 data protection schemas are still in general the go to for most of the major vendors…but all are acknowledging there are problems and are roadmapping different ways of protecting against data loss in the event of drive failures. XIV were right in that you need as many drives as possible taking part in the rebuild; they may have been wrong with specifics.

2)Every vendor is struggling with the appliance versus software model. It is almost painful to watch the thought-processes and the conflict. Few are willing to take the leap into a pure software model and yet they all want to talk about Software Defined Storage. There are some practical considerations but it is mostly dogma and politics.

3)Still the discussions about running workloads on storage arrays directly seem to rage and with little real clue as to what, how and why you would do so. There are some workloads that you might but the use-cases are not as compelling as you might think.

4)Automated Storage Tiering, it appears to be getting better but it still seems that people do not yet trust it fully and are wasting a huge amount of cycles second guessing the automation. Most vendors are struggling with where to go next.

5)Vendors still seem to be overly focussed on building features into general purpose arrays to meet the corner-cases. VDI and Big Data related features pepper roadmaps but with little comprehension of the real demand and requirement.

6)Intel have won the storage market or at least x86 has. And it is making it increasingly hard for vendors to distinguish between generations of their storage…the current generations of x86 could well power storage arrays way into the future.

7)FCoE still seems to be more discussed than implemented; a tick-box feature that currently outside some markets has no demand. 16 Gig Fibre-channel is certainly beginning to appear on the concrete side of the roadmaps; I’ve seen 40GbE on a couple now.

8)Flexibility of packaging and physical deployment options is actually a feature; vendors are more willing to allow you to re-rack their kit to fit your environment and data-centre.

9)The new boys on the block feel a lot like the old boys on the block…mostly because they are.

10)Block and File storage are still very resilient against the putative assaults of Object Storage.

11)The most compelling feature for many of us at the high-end is the procurement model that moves us to linear pricing. There are still struggles how to make this happen.

And yet expect big announcements with marketing splashes in May…Expect more marketing than ever!!!

Disrupt?

Feb 13th, 2014
by Martin Glassborow.
11 comments

So you’ve founded a new storage business; you’ve got a great idea and you want to disrupt the market? Good for you…but you want to maintain the same-old margins as the old crew?

So you build it around commodity hardware; you use the same commodity hardware as I can buy off the shelf; basically the same disks that I can buy off the shelf from PC World or order from my preferred Enterprise tin-shifter.

You tell me that you are lean and mean? You don’t have huge sales overheads, no huge marketing budget and no legacy code to maintain?

You tell me that it’s all about the software but you still want to clothe it in hardware.

And then you tell me it’s cheaper than the stuff that I buy from my current vendor? How much cheaper? 20%, 30%, 40%, 50%??

Then I do the calculations; your cost base and your BoM is much lower and you are actually making more money per terabyte than the big old company that you used to work for?

But hey, I’m still saving money, so that’s okay….

Of course, then I dig a bit more…I want support? Your support organisation is tiny; I do my due diligence,  can you really hit your response times?

But you’ve got a really great feature? How great? I’ve not seen a single vendor come up with a feature that is so awesome and so unique that no-one manages to copy it…few which aren’t in a lab somewhere.

In a race to the bottom; you are still too greedy. You still believe that customers are stupid and will accept being ripped off.

If you were truly disruptive….you’d work out a way of articulating the value of your software without clothing it in hardware. You’d work with me on getting it onto commodity hardware and no I’m not talking about some no-name white-box; you’d work with me on getting it onto my preferred vendor’s kit; be it HP, Dell, Lenovo, Oracle or whoever else…

For hardware issues; I could utilise the economies of scale and the leverage I have with my tin-shifter; you wouldn’t have to set-up a maintenance function or sub-contract it to some third party who will inevitably let us both down.

And for software support; well you could concentrate on those…

You’d help me be truly disruptive…and ultimately we’d both be successful…

Gherkins

Feb 4th, 2014
by Martin Glassborow.
3 comments

I can only write from my experience and your mileage will vary somewhat but 2014 is already beginning to get interesting from a storage point of view. And it appears to have little to do with technology or perhaps too little technology.

Perhaps the innovation has stopped? Or perhaps we’re finally beginning to see the impact of Google/Amazon and Azure on the Enterprise market. Pricing models seem to be being thrown out of the window as the big vendors try to work out how to defend themselves against the big Cloud players.

Historically high margins are being sacrificed in order to maintain footprint; vendors are competing against themselves internally. Commodity plays are competing with existing product sets; white-box implementations, once something that they all liked to avoid and FUD, are seriously on the agenda.

It won’t be completely free-for-all but expect to start seeing server-platforms certified as target-platforms for all but the highest-value storage. Engineering objections are being worked around as hardware teams transition to software development teams; those who won’t or can’t will become marginalised.

Last year I saw lip-service being paid to this trend; now I’m beginning to see this happening. A change in focus…long overdue.

If you work in the large Enterprise, it seems that you can have it your way….

And yet, I still see a place for the hardware vendor. I see a place for the vendor that has market leading support and the engineering smarts that means that support does not cost a fortune to provide or procure.

Reducing call volumes and onsite visits but still ensuring that the call is handled and dealt with by smart people. This is becoming more and more of a differentiator for me; I don’t want okay support, I want great support.

The move to commoditisation is finally beginning….but I wonder if we are going to need new support models to at least maintain and hopefully improve the support we get today.