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More Vintage Stuff

May 27th, 2016
by Martin Glassborow.
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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!

Time to Build?

May 13th, 2016
by Martin Glassborow.
3 comments

Any half-way competent storage administrator or systems administrator should be able to build a storage array themselves these days. It’s never really been easier and building yourself a dual-head filer that does block and network attached should be a doddle for anyone with a bit of knowledge, a bit of time and some reasonable google-fu skills. I built a block-storage array using an old PC, a couple of HBAs and linux about five years ago; it was an interesting little project, it could present LUNs via FC/iSCSI and file-share via SMB and NFS. It couldn’t do Object but if I was doing it again today, it would.

And it was a single-head device but it was good enough to use as a target device to play about with FC and generally support my home devices. I only recently switched it off because I’m not running FC at home any more.

But if I could build a storage array five years ago; you can do so today. I am not that good a storage/server guy; I’m a tinkerer and dilettante. You are probably much more competent than me.

Another factor that makes it easier is that FC is slowly going away; it’s slow progress but iSCSI making headway for those who really need block, 10 GbE is coming down in price. I’m also interested to see whether some the proposed intermediate speeds of Ethernet have an impact in this space; many data-centres are not yet 10 GbE and there is still quite a cost differential but 1 GbE is not really good enough for a data-centre storage network but 5 GbE and maybe even 2.5GbE might good enough in some cases. And as FC goes away; building your own storage endpoints becomes a lot simpler.

Throw in commodity flash with one of ‘new’ file-systems and you have a pretty decent storage array at a cost per terabyte that is very attractive. Your cost of acquistion is pretty low, you’ll learn a whole lot and be positioned nicely for Infrastructure as Code tsunami.

If you do a great job, you might even be able to spin yourself out as a new flash-startup. Your technology will very similar to a number of start-ups out there.

So why are you sitting here, why are you still raising POs against the three or four letter name vendors?

Imagine never having to speak to them again, what a perfect world.

Tooling Up?

May 2nd, 2016
by Martin Glassborow.
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As the role of the storage admin changes; the toolset will change and we will need new tools that assist us. Modelling tools that enable us to work with our workloads are generally very expensive and often have rather dubious ROI models that allow us to justify them to our management. 

And you rarely need them but it you are heading into a refresh cycle for example and you don’t necessarily always trust the vendors to mark their own homework..a tool is useful, especially one that you can model your own workload on.

So this tool from the newly merged Load Dynamix and Virtual Instruments looks interesting; I’ve not had a play yet and am not sure of the limitations but free is hard to beat..

Workload Central 

Hopefully more vendors and the community will get involved and add more potential data sources..

Pestilential but Persistent!

Apr 19th, 2016
by Martin Glassborow.
8 comments

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…

Technology Live and a Little More…

Mar 17th, 2016
by Martin Glassborow.
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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

Mar 11th, 2016
by Martin Glassborow.
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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…

Dec 23rd, 2015
by Martin Glassborow.
No comments yet

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!!

Waffle to burn?

Dec 21st, 2015
by Martin Glassborow.
1 comment

NetApp have finally bitten the bullet and bought an AFA vendor; plumping for the technology driven Solidfire as opposed to some of the marketing driven competitors in the space.

At less than a billion dollars; it appears to be a very good deal for NetApp and perhaps with an ever decreasing number of suitors, it is a good deal for Solidfire and avoids the long march to IPO.

Obviously the whole deal will be painted as complementary to NetApp’s current product set but many will hope that Solidfire will long-term supplant the long-in-the-tooth OnTap. NetApp need to swallow their pride and need to move on from the past.

It can’t do this immediately; it needs work and it is not yet a solution for unstructured data. But putting data-services on top of it should not be a massive task as long as that is what NetApp decide to do and they don’t decide to try to integrate it with OnTap. NetApp can’t afford another decade of engineering faff! Funnily enough though , FC is seen as a relatively weak-point for Solidfire; where have we heard the before?

This could be as big a deal for them as EMC’s acquisition of Data General in 1999; the Clariion business brought some great engineers and a business that turned into a cash-cow for them. It allowed them to move into a different space and gave them options; it probably saved the company whilst they were messing up the Symmetrix line.

And whilst EMC/Dell are integrating themselves; NetApp have a decent opportunity to steal a march on their arch-rivals; especially if they take a light touch and continue to allow Solidfire to act like an engineering-led start-up.

I still have my doubts whether a storage-focused behemoth can actually survive long-term as data-centres change and buying behaviours change. But for the time being, NetApp have an interesting product again.

Interesting times for friends at both companies…

p.s anyone want to buy a pair of Solidfire socks?

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.

Scale-Out of Two?

Mar 17th, 2015
by Martin Glassborow.
4 comments

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’!!

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