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September, 2014:

A Ball of Destruction…

Sep 26th, 2014
by Martin Glassborow.
6 comments

I’m not sure that EMC haven’t started an unwelcome trend; I had a road-map discussion with a vendor this week where they started to talk about upcoming changes to their architecture..my questioning ‘but surely that’s not just a disruptive upgrade but destructive?’ was met with an affirmative. Of course like EMC; the upgrade would not be compulsory but probably advisable.

The interesting thing with this one is that it was not a storage hardware platform but a software defined storage product. And we tend to be a lot more tolerant of such disruptive and potentially destructive upgrades. Architecturally as we move to more storage as software as opposed to being software wrapped in hardware; this is going to be more common and we are going to have design infrastructure platforms and applications to cope with this.

This almost inevitably means that we will need to purchase more hardware than previously to allow us to build zones of availability to allow upgrades to core systems to be carried out out as non-disruptively as possible. And when we start to dig into the nitty-gritty; we may find that this starts to push costs and complexity up…whether these costs go up so much that the whole commodity storage argument starts to fall to pieces is still open to debate.

I think for some businesses it might well do; especially those who don’t really understand the cloud model and start to move traditional applications into the cloud without a great deal of thought and understanding.

Now this doesn’t let EMC off the hook at all but to be honest; EMC have a really ropey track-record on non-disruptive upgrades in the past…more so than most realise. Major Enginuity upgrades have always come with a certain amount of disruption and my experience has not always been good; the levels of planning and certification required has kept many storage contractors gainfully employed. Clariion upgrades have also been scary in the past and even today, Isilon upgrades are no-where as near as clean as they have you believe.

EMC could have of course got away with the recent debacle if they’d simply released a new hardware platform and everyone would have accepted that this was going to involve data-migration and move data around.

Still, the scariest upgrade I ever had was an upgrade of an IBM Shark which failed half-way and left us with one node at one level of software and one at a different level. And IBM scratching their heads. But recently, the smoothest upgrades have been V7000..so even elephants can learn to dance.

As storage vendors struggle with a number of issues; including the setting of the sun on traditional data protection schemes such as RAID; I would expect the number of destructive and disruptive upgrades to increase. And the marketing spin around them from everyone to reach dizzying heights. As vendors manipulate the data we are storing in more and more complex and clever ways; the potential for disruption and destructive upgrades is going increase.

Architectural mistakes are going to be made; wrong alleys will be followed…Great vendors will admit and support their customers through these changes. This will be easier for those who are shipping software products wrapped with hardware; this is going to be much harder for the software-only vendors. If a feature is so complex that it seems magic; you might not want to use it…I’m looking for simple to manage, operate and explain.

An argument for Public Cloud? Maybe, as this will take the onus away from you to arrange. Caveat Emptor though and this may just mean that disruption is imposed upon you and if you’ve not designed your applications to cope with this…Ho hum!

 

 

 

 

Heady Potential Eventually Means Catastrophe?

Sep 22nd, 2014
by Martin Glassborow.
No comments yet

Amongst the storage cognoscenti today on Twitter, there’s been quite a discussion about EMC and HP possibly merging. Most people seem to be either negative or at best disbelieving that something like this would bring value or even happen.

But from a technology point of view, the whole thing might make a lot of sense. The storage folks like to point at overlap in the portfolios but I am not convinced that this really matters and the overlap might not be as great as people think. Or at least, the overlap might well finally kill off the weaker products; I’ll let the reader decide those products that deserve to die.

EMC are on a massive push to commoditise and move their technology onto a standard platform; software variants of all their storage platforms exist and just need infrastructure to run on. I’ve mentioned before that HP’s SL4500 range is an ideal platform for many of EMC’s software defined products.

But storage aside; the EMC Federation has a lot of value for HP, it is early days for Pivotal but I suspect Meg can see a lot of potential in it. She’ll see a bit of the eBay in it; she’ll get the value of some of the stuff that they are trying to do. They are still very much a start-up, a well-funded start-up tho’.

VMware, I would expect to continue as it is; it might throw up some questions about EVO-RAIL and HP have pointedly not produced an EVO-RAIL certified stack; despite being invited to. But to fold VMware into the main HP would be rash and would upset too many other vendors. But hey, with IBM pulling out of x86 servers and honestly, who cares about Oracle’s x86 servers; HP might have a decent run at dominating the server marketplace before Lenovo takes a massive bite out of it.

And customers? I’m not sure that they’d be too uncomfortable with a HP/EMC merger; mergers are almost certainly on the agenda and there are less attractive ones on the table.

HP need software to help them build their software-defined data-centre; Openstack will only take them so far today. EMC need a commodity partner to help them build a hardware platform that would be trusted. An HP/EMC stack would be solid and traditional but with potential to grow into the 3rd platform supporting infrastructure as customers move that way.

And they both need a way of fending off Amazon and Google; this might be the way for them to do it.

I know I’ve been talking about this more like a HP take-over of EMC and it’d be closer to a true merger; this makes it harder…true mergers always are but culturally, the companies are less dissimilar than most realise. They both need more rapid cultural change…perhaps a merger might force that on them.

Will it happen, I don’t know…would it be a disaster if it did? I don’t think so. It’d also be good for the industry; lots of hacked-off smart people would leave the new behemoth and build new companies or join some of the pretenders.

A shake up is needed…this might do it. Will the market like it? I’m not especially bothered…I don’t hold shares in either company. I just think it might make more sense than people realise. 

 

Singing the lowest note…

Sep 17th, 2014
by Martin Glassborow.
1 comment

The problem with many discussions in IT, is that they rapidly descend into one that looks and feels like a religious debate; whereas reality is much more complex and the good IT specialist will develop their own syncretic religion and pinch bits that work from everywhere.

One of the things that many of us working in Enterprise IT is that our houses have many rooms and must house many differing belief systems; the one true way is not a reality. And any organisation more than fifteen years old has probably built up a fair amount of incompatible dogmas.

For all the pronouncements of the clouderatti; we are simply not in the position to move whole-scale to the Cloud in any of its many forms. We have applications that are simply not designed for scale-out; they are certainly not infrastructure aware and none of them are built for failure. But we also have a developer community who might be wanting to push ahead; use the language du jour and want to utilise cloud-like infrastructure, dev-ops and software defined everything.

So what do we in the infrastructure teams do? Well, we are going to have to implement multiple infrastructure patterns to cater for the demands of all our communities. But we really don’t want to bespoke everything and we certainly don’t want to lock ourselves into anything.

Many of the hyper-converged plays lock us into one technology or another; hence we are starting to look at building our own rack-converged blocks to give us lowest common denominator infrastructure that can be managed with standard tools.

Vendors with unique features are sent packing; we want to know why you are better at the 90%. Features will not sell; if I can’t source a feature/function from more than one vendor, I probably will not do it. Vendors who not play nice with other vendors; vendors who insist on doing it all and make this their lock-in are not where it’s at.

On top of this infrastructure; we will start to layer on the environment to support the applications. For some applications; this will be cloudy and fluffy. We will allow a lot more developer interaction with the infrastructure; it will feel a lot closer to dev-ops.

For others where it looks like a more traditional approach is required; think those environments that need a robustly designed SAN, traditional fail-over clustering; we’ll be a lot more proscriptive about what can be done.

But all of these will sit on a common, reusable infrastructure that will allow us to meet the demands of the business.  This infrastructure will be able to be quickly deployed but also quickly removed and moved away from; it will not require us to train our infrastructure teams in depth to take advantage of some unique feature.

Remember to partner well with us but also with your competitors; yes, it sometimes makes for an amusing conversation about how rubbish the other guy is but we’ll also have exactly that same conversation about you.

Don’t just play lip-service to openness, be prepared to show us evidence.

ESXi Musings…

Sep 3rd, 2014
by Martin Glassborow.
1 comment

VMware need to open-source ESXi and move on; by open-sourcing ESXi, they could start to concentrate on becoming the dominant player in the future delivery of the 3rd platform.

If they continue with the current development model with ESXi; their interactions with the OpenStack community and others will always be treated with slight suspicion. And their defensive moves with regards to VIO to try to keep the faithful happy will not stop larger players abandoning them to more open technologies.

A full open-sourcing of ESXi could bring a new burst of innovation to the product; it would allow the integration of new storage modules for example. Some will suggest that they just need to provide a pluggable architecture but that will inevitably will also leave people with the feeling that they allow preferential access to core partners such as EMC.

The reality is that we are beginning to see more and more companies running multiple virtualisation technologies. If we throw in containerisation into the mix, within the next five years, we will see large companies running three or four virtualisation technologies to support a mix of use-cases and the real headache on how we manage these will begin.

I know it is slightly insane to be even talking about us having more virtualisation platforms than operating systems but most large companies are running at least two virtualisation platforms and probably many are already at three (they just don’t realise it). This ignores those with running local desktop virtualisation by the way.

The battle for dominance is shifting up the stack as the lower layers become ‘good enough’..vendors will need to find new differentiators…

 

Death of the Salesman

Sep 1st, 2014
by Martin Glassborow.
No comments yet

Reflecting recently on the changes that I have seen in the Enterprise IT market, more specifically the Enterprise storage market; I have come to the conclusion that over the past five years or so, the changes have not been so much technological but everything  around the technology and it’s packaging.

There appears to be significantly less selling going on and a lot more marketing. This is not necessarily a good thing; there is more reliance than ever on PowerPoint and fancy marketing routines. More gimmick than ever, more focus on the big launch and less on understanding what the customer needs.

More webinars and broadcasting of information and a lot less listening than ever from the vendors.

Yet this is hardly surprising; as the margins on Enterprise hardware slowly erode away and the commoditisation continues; it is a lot harder to justify the existence of the shiny suit.

And many sales teams are struggling with this shift; the sales managers setting targets have not yet adjusted to the new rhythms  and how quickly the market can shift.

But there is a requirement for sales who understand their customers and understand the market. Sales who understand that no one solution fits all; that there is a difference between the traditional IT and the new web-scale stuff.

However, if the large vendors continue to be very target focussed; panicking over the next quarter’s figures and setting them and their staff some unrealistic targets; not realising that the customer now has a lot of choice on how they buy technology and from whom, then they are going fail.

Customers themselves are struggling with some the new paradigms and the demands that their businesses are making of them. The answers are not to be found in another webinar; another meag-launch but perhaps in the conversation.

We used to say that ears and mouth need to be used in proportion; this is never more true but has never been more ignored.