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More Vintage Stuff

Recently I’ve been spending time thinking about what DevOps really means to my teams and to me. A lot of reading has been done and a lot of pondering of the navel.

Tne most important conclusion that I have come too is that the DevOps movement is nothing new; the second conclusion I have come to is that it can mean pretty much what you want it to and hence there is no right way to do it but there might well be horribly wrong ways to do it.

As a virtual greybeard; I started my IT career in the mainframe world as a PL/1 programmer but I also did some mainframe systems programming. As an application programmer, I was expected to do the deployment, support the deployment and be involved with application from cradle to undeath.

As a systems programmer, we scripted and automated in a variety of languages; we extended and expanded functionality of system programs; user exits were/are an incredibly powerful tool for the systems programmer. VSAM and VTAM – the software-defined storage and networking of their time.

We plagarised and shared scripts; mostly internally but also at times, scripts would make their way round the community via the contractor transmission method.

Many DevOps engineers would look at how we worked and find it instantly familiar…although the rigorous change control and formalised processes might freak them a bit.

So as per usual, the wheel has been re-invented and re-branded.

I’ve boiled down DevOps and the idea of the Site Reliability Engineering function down in my mind to the following –

Fix Bad Stuff
Stop Bad Stuff Happening
Do Good Stuff
Make Good Stuff easier to do
Keep Developing Skills

It turns out that my teams are already pretty working in this way; some folks spend more time dealing with the Bad Stuff and some spend more time dealing with the Good Stuff.

DevOps could be a great way to work; you might find that you already are on this journey and don’t believe anyone who tells you that it is new and revolutionary.

It’s not!

Pestilential but Persistent!

There is no doubt that the role of the Storage Admin has changed; technology has moved on and the business has changed but the role still exists in one form or another.

You just have to look at the number of vendors out there jockeying for position; the existing big boys, the new kids of the block, the objectionable ones and the ones you simply want to file. There’s more choice, more decisions and more chance to make mistakes than ever before.

The day-to-day role of the Storage Admin; zoning, allocating LUNs, swearing at arcane settings, updating Excel spreadsheets and convincing people that it is all ‘Dark Magic’; that’s still there but much of it has got easier. I expect any modern storage device to be easily manageable on a day-to-day basis; I expect the GUI to be intuitive; I expect the CLI or API to be logical and I hope the nomenclature used by most players to be common. 

The Storage Admin does more day-to-day and does it quicker; the estates are growing ever larger but the number of Storage Admins is not increasing in-line. But that part of the role still exists and could be done by an converged Infrastructure team and often is. 

So why do people keep insisting the role is dead? 

I think because they focus on the day-to-day LUN monkey stuff and that can be done by anyone. 

I’m looking at things differently; I want people who understand business requirements who then turn these into technical requirements who can then talk to vendors and sort the wheat from the chaff. People who can filter bullshit; the crap that flies from all sides; the unreal marketing and unreal demands of the Business.

People who look at complex systems and can break them down quickly; who understand different types application interactions, who understand the difference between IOPS, latency and throughput.  

People who are prepared to ask pertinent and sometimes awkward questions; who look to challenge and change the status-quo. 

In any large IT infrastructure organisation; there are two teams who can generally look at their systems and make significant inferences about the health, the effectiveness and a difference to the infrastructure. They are often the two teams who are the most lambasted; one is the network team and the other the storage team. They are the two teams who are changing the fastest whilst maintaining a legacy infrastructure and keeping the lights on. 

The Server Admin role has hardly really changed…even virtualisation has little impact on the role; the Storage and Network teams are changing rapidly, many are embracing Software-Defined whilst the Industry is trying to decide what Software-Defined is.

Many are already pretty DevOps in nature; they just don’t call it that but you try to manage the rapid expansion in scale without a DevOps type approach. 

I think many in the industry seem to want to kill off the Storage specialist role; it is more needed than ever and is becoming a lot more key…you probably just won’t call them LUN Monkeys any more..they’ve evolved!

But we persist…

Reality is persistent

I see quite a few posts about this storage or that storage..how it is going to change everything or has changed everything. And yet, I see little real evidence that storage usage is really changing for many.  So why is this? 

Let’s take on some of the received wisdom that seems to be percolating around. 

Object Storage can displace block and file?

It depends; replacing block with object is somewhat hard. You can’t really get the performance out of it; you will struggle with the APIs especially to drive performance for random operations and partial updates.

Replacing file with object is somewhat easier, most unstructured data could happily be stored as object and it is. It’s an object called a file. I wonder how many applications even using S3  APIs treat Object Storage anything other than a file-store, how many use some of the extended metadata capabilities? 

In many organisations; what we want is cheaper block and file. If we can fake this by putting a gateway device in front of Object Storage; that’s what we will do. The Object vendors have woken up to this and that is what they are doing. 

But if a vendor can do ‘native’ file with some of the availability advantages of a well-written erasure coding scheme at a compelling price point, we won’t care.

And when I can boot from Object Storage..call me.   

All new developers are Object Storage aficionados?

I’m afraid from my limited sample size; I find this is rarely the case. Most seem to want to interact with file-systems or databases for their persistence layer. Now the nature of the databases that they want interact with is changing with more becoming comfortable with NoSQL databases.

Most applications just don’t produce enough data to warrant any kind of persistence layer that requires Object or even any kind of persistence layer at all.  

Developers rarely care about what their storage is; they just want it to be there and work according to their needs. 

Technology X will replace Technology Y

Only if Technology Y does not continue to develop and only if Technology X has a really good economic advantage. I do see a time when NAND could replace rotational rust for all primary storage but for secondary and tertiary storage; we might still be a way off. 

It also turns out that many people have a really over-inflated idea about how many IOPs their application need; there appears to be a real machismo about claiming that you need 1000s of IOPS…when our monitoring shows that someone could write with a quill pen and still fulfil the requirement. Latency does turn out to be important; when you do your 10 IOPS, you want it to be quick. 

Storage is either free or really cheap?

An individual gigabyte is basically free; a thousand of these is pretty cheap but a billion gigabytes is starting to get a little pricey.

A Terabyte is not a lot of storage? 

In my real life, I get to see a lot of people who request a terabyte of storage for a server because hell, even their laptop has this amount of storage. But for many servers, a terabyte is a huge amount of storage..many applications just don’t have this level of requirement for persistent data. A terabyte is still a really large database for many applications; unless the application developers haven’t bother to write a clean-up process.

Software-Defined is Cheaper? 

Buy a calculator and factor in your true costs. Work out what compromises you might have to make and then work out what that is worth to you. 

Google/Amazon do it, so we can too?

You could but is it really your core business? Don’t try to compete with the web-scale companies unless you are one..focus on providing your business with the service it requires. 

Storage Administration is dead?

It changed, you should change too but there is still a role for people who want to manage the persistent data-layer in all it’s forms. It’s no longer storage…it’s persistence.

Mine is the only reality?

I really hope not…

 

 

 

 

Technology Live and a Little More…

Last week, I was at A3 Communications’ Technology Live event;  it’s a smaller event where a group of journalists, bloggers and analysts are briefed by three or four companies. Good fun, a chance for awkward questions to be asked and generally good-humoured banter. 

It is a chance for some of the smaller and lesser known companies; some just pretty much unveiling from stealth to get their message across without some of the hype and hyperbole of the larger events you sometimes associate with the business. 

Companies like Scale Computing and their converged platform probably deserve to be much better known; targeted at the SMB and smaller user whose IT department is one person who actually has another proper job, quietly get on with things without press releases about yet further funding rounds and a gazillion dollar valuations. It is one of the few times when I’ve had a converged platform demonstrated where I’ve thought ‘well that makes sense for their target market’ as opposed to ‘shiny lights…but where’s the substance’. 

DDN are much larger and better known that Scale Computing but probably not as well-known as they should be; their HPC roots are allowing them to play in the scale-out and big data space. They’ve taken massive strides in hiding some of the complexity of their products; what was really a bit of an engineer’s product, now has some polish that really lends itself to the Enterprise.  If you are looking at tiering from primary storage to a secondary storage object tier; I think that you must have a look. 

Tarmin have been around for ages with their Gridbank Data-Defined Storage; it’s a really interesting concept but it’s one that I still struggle to find the use-case that will really drive it forward. A Swiss-Army knife of a product that might be lacking that one blade that would make it compelling; I feel that it’ll just need too much work to integrate into most application environments and I also have concerns about how easy it is to get out of if you decided that it was no longer the platform for you.

We also had OpenIO who are another Object Storage vendor in what is an increasingly crowded space; new to the game and building on-top of an open-source product. You pay for the support and not the product; obviously, it’s model that has worked well for some in the past but I feel that you really need some critical mass before it becomes viable. And there’s many alternatives out there now but it did look nice; hexagons instead of circles. It is also really easy to get up and running quickly; install vagrant if you haven’t already and then a couple of commands, you can quickly have an object store up and running. With Swift and S3 compatibility; it could be a nice entry point for developers to play with.

Earlier in the month, I was at BVE for my day job. I chatted to a few vendors but I really want to call out what I think is a perfect example of a company who are successfully building a business out of doing something extremely well in a well-defined niche. Object Matrix who are based in Wales do Object-Storage for media applications; they have spent a lot of time integrating with products like Avid and GrassValley, really understanding the business that they are in and building a successful company without mega-investments. And they are really nice people….who unfortunately support one of the weaker sides in the Six Nations ;-). 

There are many companies like some of the aforementioned who are doing great jobs for their customers who aren’t getting the recognition because they don’t play in the ‘glamour’ end of the market but I suspect some of them will still be around years after the Unicorns have turned out to be pit-ponies…

Perhaps you work for one; if so…get in touch, I’d love to hear from you. 

 

Skating with Cerberus

I imagine there was a sharp intake of breathe as Microsoft announced SQL Server for Linux and then a checking of dates. And yet it makes perfect sense, a very sensible strategic move for Microsoft.

My question and I know I’m not the only person asking this is; what is the future of Windows in the data-centre? If SQL Server runs well on Linux; there are a vanishing small number of workloads that I would want to run on Windows Server in a data-centre. Yes there are alot of third party applicatons that run on Windows and this is going to continue for many years but I do really wonder if Microsoft’s heart is really in the Windows Server business.

Microsoft appear to have decided that their future is in Cloud; not the Enterprise DC. I mean it’s always been questionable whether anyone sane would run Exchange and now you don’t have to; Office 365 takes care of that for you.

A lot of people like Azure and sure Microsoft would prefer you to run your cloud apps in Azure but if you want to run them elsewhere; they would like to still make money out of you. SQL Server on Linux will remove some of the friction for deployment in the Cloud.

SQL Server running on Linux also allows them to compete with Oracle in those data-centres that Windows is simply a grudging presence; there are certainly those who will have you believe that SQL Server is not Enterprise but many of those comments have been driven by the stigma of Windows. I work with DBAs who do both; for most workloads, SQL Server and Oracle are equally good.

So what’s left for Microsoft to do?

Well, if Microsoft announce AD Services running on Linux; you’ll really know that their heart is no longer in the Windows Data-centre.

2016 and Beyond…

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?

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.

Dude – You’re Getting An EMC

Just a few thoughts on the Dell/EMC takeover/merger or whatever you want to call it. 

  1. In a world where IT companies have been busy splitting themselves up; think HP, Symantec, IBM divesting from server business…it seems a brave move to build a new IT behemoth. 
  2. However; some of the restructuring already announced hints at a potential split in how Dell do business. Dell Enterprise to be run out of Hopkinton and using EMC’s Enterprise smarts in this space.
  3. Dell have struggled to build a genuine storage brand since going their different ways; arguably their acquisitions have under-performed.
  4. VMware is already under attack from various technologies – VMware under control of hardware server vendor would have been a problem a decade ago but might be less so as people have more choices for both virtualising Heritage applications and Cloud-Scale. VMware absolutely now have to get their container strategy right.
  5. EMC can really get to grips with how to build their hyper-converged appliances and get access to Dell’s supply chain. 
  6. That EMC have been picked up by a hardware vendor just shows how hard it is to transition from a hardware company to a software company. 
  7. A spell in purdah seems necessary for any IT company trying to transition their business model. Meeting the demands of the market seems to really hamper innovation and change. EMC were so driven by a reporting cycle, it drove very poor behaviours.
  8. All those EMC guys who transitioned away from using Dell laptops to various MacBooks…oh dear!
  9. I doubt this is yet a done deal and expect more twists and turns! But good luck to all my friends working at both companies! May it be better!

 

Scale-Out of Two?

One of the things I have been lamenting about for some time with many vendors is that there has been a lack of a truly credible alternative to EMC’s Isilon product in the Scale-Out NAS space. There are some technologies out there that could compete but they just seem to fall/fail at the last hurdle; there are also technologies that are packaged to look like Scale-Out but are cludges and general hotch-potches.

So EMC have pretty much have had it their own way in this space and they know it!

But yesterday, finally a company came out of Stealth to announce a product that might finally be the alternative to Isilon that I and others have been looking for.

That company is Qumulo; they claim to have developed the first Data-Aware Scale-Out NAS; to be honest that first bit, ‘Data-Aware’ sounds a bit like marketing fluff but Scale-Out NAS…that hits the spot. Why would Qumulo be any more interesting than the other attempts in the space? Well, they are based out of Seattle founded by a bunch of ex-Isilon folks; so they have credibility. I think they understand that the core of any scale-out product is scale-out; it has to be designed that way from the start.

I also think that they understand that any scale-out system needs to be easy to manage; the command and control options need to be robust and simple. Many storage administrators love the Isilon because it is simple to manage but there are still things that it doesn’t do so well; ACL management is a particular bugbear of many, especially those of us who have to work in mixed NFS/SMB environments (OSX/Windows/Linux).

If we go to the marketing tag-line, ‘Data Aware’; this seems to be somewhat equivalent to the Insight-IQ offering from Isilon but baked into the core product set. I have mentioned here and also to the Isilon guys that I believe that Insight-IQ should be free and a standard offering; generally, by the time that a customer needs access to Insight-IQ, it’s because there’s a problem open with support.

But if I start to think about my environment; when we are dealing with complex workflows for a particular asset, it would be useful to follow that asset; see what systems touch it, where the bottle-necks are and perhaps the storage where the asset lives are might well be the best place. It might not be that the storage is the problem but it is the one common environment for an asset. So I am prepared to be convinced that ‘Data Aware’ is more than marketing; it needs be properly useful and simple for me to produce meaningful reports however.

Qumulo have made the sensible decision that at day one, a customer has the option of deploying on their own commodity hardware or purchase an appliance from Qumulo. I’ll have to see the costs and build our own TCO model, let’s hope that for once it will actually be more cost effective to use my own commodity hardware and not have to pay some opt-out tax that makes it more expensive.

It makes a change to see a product that meets a need today…I know plenty of people who will be genuinely interested in seeing a true competitor to EMC Isilon. I think even the guys still at Isilon are interested; it pushes them on as well.

I look forward to talking to Qumulo in the future.

Stupid name tho’!!

A Continuum of Theft…

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.