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November, 2011:

The True Scourge

Nov 22nd, 2011
by Martin Glassborow.
5 comments

Many people believe that email is the scourge of our modern life and there is some truth to this but I do not believe that for many of us; especially of those in the middle management layers that this is the real scourge.

The real scourge is Online Diaries; generally Outlook but all are evil.

When I started my career all those years ago; I had part share in secretary who managed my diary, if you wanted to book a meeting with me, you would generally ask Audrey who would check that I was free and would apply common sense.

1) She would not accept a meeting booking when I was on leave.

2) She would not accept a meeting booking when I was already booked.

3) She would not accept a back-to-back meeting booking, especially in different buildings and would always make sure that I had time to get from one meeting to another.

4) She would generally ensure that I actually had time for a break and time to do some work during the day.

Unfortunately these days; even staff at my ‘exalted level’ do not warrant a secretary or PA and my diary is on line for all to see and so people feel happy to

1) Book meetings when I am on leave

2) Book meetings when I am already attending another meeting; I have an example this week when I am in six meetings simultaneously allegedly.

3)Book me solid for a whole day with no time eat, breath or think and seem to expect me to be able to teleport across campus.

4)Leave me no time to do any work

In fact meetings have proliferated to the extent that they are meaningless. Online diaries have made it easy to invite a cast of thousands; book even more meetings, book meetings at the last minute and generally destroy the working day of many.

Meetings are now badly run with no agenda, no minutes and often over-run causing even more running about the campus. There are now so many meetings, that most places have a shortage of meeting rooms and hence meetings are now run in rest areas, canteens and anywhere else that can be found.

So it is not email that is the scourges; it is the modern meeting which is the true time-soak and scourge of many.

Solutions and Specialists…

Nov 21st, 2011
by Martin Glassborow.
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Solutions are great, a vendor turns up and sells a turn-key solution, it’s a marvellous world and everything just works; it’s all certified and lovely. There is a single supplier to kick and trouble-shoot the problem. Or at least that’s the theory….

But what happens when the supplier can’t fix the problem? Who do you turn to then? Funnily enough, that’s the situation I’m in today. A turn-key media solution which we’ve been kept at arms length from for years has developed issues and now who do the customer turn to when not getting good answers from the solutions vendor? That’s right, our little team of specialists..

A couple of hours of investigation and a meeting with the vendor where we expose what we see as issues by treating the solution as just another piece of infrastructure has been enlightening to both our internal customer and the solutions vendor. There will be no arms-length going forward; solutions still need specialists.

You need specialists to ensure that the wool is not being pulled over your eyes; you need specialists to ask the right questions and know when the answers are not good enough. Too often you will find that the solutions vendor themselves have little clue about the underlying infrastructure; focusing on the application whilst using the hardware as a nice little revenue lift. This is fine until you hit problems.

If you are buying integrated solutions and stacks; make sure that they are integrated and that the solutions provider can actually support the stack. Don’t be afraid to dig into what is being provided as part of the stack/solution and keep some specialists around.

 

Singularly Selfish….

Nov 20th, 2011
by Martin Glassborow.
No comments yet

Despite the ever shifting sands which are most large IT departments/divisions/directorates; the underlying structure has not changed for many years. Indeed, most IT departments look very similar to the IT departments of the mainframe era and mostly are analogues of the past. And the longer something stays the same, the longer it stays the same; the resistance to change will cause most organisations to simply spring back to a previous form.

Yet we are talking about new paradigms and new delivery models but how do we stop this simply springing back into the previous form.

Transformational change is required but can most organisations actually achieve this? Only you can answer that question for your own organisation but I would suggest looking around you and think about the changes that you can make. It might be worth being a little bit selfish and ask yourself these questions?

How do I have more fun and go home happy pretty much every day? How do I make my job more satisfying?

I think until you can answer that question and decide on your destination; all the technological changes in the world are probably going to be little difference to the delivery of the IT Service. I think ultimately, a new service model will make your life a lot easier and a lot more fun…in fact, the positive impact on you may well be greater than that of it on the Business.

Yes, we spend a lot of time talking about technological and organisational change but take it back to you and work on being happier.

Simple Scalability

Nov 17th, 2011
by Martin Glassborow.
1 comment

As more and more organisations are moving into petascale environments; driven by big data, unstructured explosions, day-to-day growth and generally poor data management; the ability to manage at scale is becoming increasing important.

Now from a vendor point of view, there has been a focus on getting to scale but that is less than half the story; if it is hard to implement and manage that scale, hard-pressed data-management teams are going to start looking elsewhere.  Managing at scale needs to be as easy and seamless as managing a single array or filer.

Implementation and expansion needs to be quick and painless; the ability to expand without little effort is a major show-stopper for many scalable implementations. I need to be able to add capacity to my systems to support I/O or data-growth but it needs to be transparent and non-disruptive; it needs to be automatic in its optimisation; quite frankly no-one has the time to re-layout a multi-petabyte environment manually with the almost inevitable disruption that brings.

Petascale computing almost always comes with a 24x7x365 availability requirement; Big Data analysis often involves long-running jobs.

But these huge environments bring other challenges as well; you will have large files, small files, tiny files, spread throughout your systems; access characteristics are different, some will be random, some will be sequential and in some cases, you might find both. Some files will have a single user and some will have hundreds of users. However, the data-management team will want to manage these all in a consistent and seamless manner; yet again, they will want to do this with a minimum amount of intervention.

Let’s think about the impact of a self-service environment where teams can throw up new environments; the data-management team will have little control of the files and type of files that these applications create. The provisioning tool may ask questions, will you produce large files or small files but in an agile environment, the answer given yesterday may not reflect the reality of the code written today.

This all leads us to a key requirement and feature for anyone who wants to sell Petascale data-management and storage tools; ‘Simple Scalability’. Yes, it is important that it is fast but it is equally important that it is simple to support and manage throughout its life-cycle.

Lets not kid ourselves; as we move to petascale and beyond; these environments are going to life-spans which far outstretch those of our current SAN environments because the practical realities of migrating petabytes of data stored in single system being accessed by many services is going drive this.

So the next time you are benchmarketing a system; ask yourself, is really practical or is it just a ‘My Dad is bigger than your Dad’ playground argument?

 

More Books

Nov 15th, 2011
by Martin Glassborow.
No comments yet

Every now and then I like to post some short reviews of books I’ve enjoyed; there’s no particular theme, I generally just love books and read just about everything. So here are a handful of books that I’ve enjoyed recently.

Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?; Jeanette Winterson’s first novel, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit was an award winning first novel when it was published 1985, pretty much everyone knows that it was semi-autobiographical but now Jeanette Wintersone has gone back and written the real story. And what everyone assumed was exaggerated for effect actually turn out to be true or actually they put a more cheery gloss than what was the lonely reality.

Stories of  a mother who refused to enter Marks and Spencer announcing that ‘The Jews Killed Christ’ manage to evoke laughter,disbelief and sadness all at the same time. Never self-pitying but often painfully honest, the book still manages to be amazingly easy to read. I suspect it would make a great Boxing Day tonic to the sometimes cloying sentimentality of Christmas TV.

And now for something completely different

The Queen’s Agent: Francis Walsingham at the Court of Elizabeth I; Francis Walsingham is often credited with creating the English secret service and the first great English spymaster.  To be honest, there are few good books about him and I don’t think there is one which places him so well in the period.

Elizabethan England was a fragile place; full tumult and change, the divide between Protestant and Catholic, the tensions between a fierce loyalty to both crown and faith are brought to life without ever coming down in favour of either side.

For a scholarly book, it is fascinating and entertaining;  reminding me of John Julius Norwich’s Byzantium histories in style; both learned and witty…certainly worth a read.

Peter Hamilton is famous for writing tomes; books that you could build a house with but he is also an accomplished writer of short stories; Manhattan in Reverse is his second collection of short stories covering a variety of settings from an alternate  19th century Oxford to the more familiar setting of his Commonwealth novels.

It includes a new Paula Myo story which gives the book its title which is why many people will pick it up but bizarrely it omits his  award-winning short story ‘The Suspect Genome’ which features Greg Mandel from his early trilogy. Still, it’s a nice collection of his short stories and proves that he doesn’t actually need 1000+ pages to tell a good story and that he can demonstrate some kind of restraint!

So there you go; three very different books for you to try!

A Star Configuring…..

Nov 14th, 2011
by Martin Glassborow.
3 comments

So in the latest little wing-ding between EMC and NetApp and who can do the fastest lap; I do wonder if they miss the point some-what. Benchmarks unfortunately generally focus on one thing, who can do ‘x’ faster than the competition; this is especially true of storage benchmarks which seem to throw up all kind of marketing monstrosities.

The problem with this is that life is not often that simple and performance is just one factor when purchasing storage.

I do wonder if the benchmarking industry could do with taking something out of Top Gear’s book and have ‘A Star Configuring An Extortionately Priced Array’; we could get a random star who has a book/film/album to promote and get them to configure an array to carry out a specific task.

The measure would then not only how well the array runs but also how long it takes them to get it to first I/O.

And I can see a whole series; ‘A Star Configuring An Extortionately Priced Private Cloud’ or perhaps ‘A Star Configuring An Reasonably Priced Public Cloud (just make sure that they’ve read the small print)’.

 

Always Questions

Nov 8th, 2011
by Martin Glassborow.
1 comment

Matt Davis touches on a number of my favourite storage subjects in his post here, so I thought I’d take it and run with it a little bit with some statements and some questions.

Firstly, the storage array is becoming software layered on top of a commodity platform.

Secondly and related, hardware is becoming less of differentiator between the array types from all vendors.

Thirdly, if the only differentiator is software; why really do EMC have VNX and VMAX? Because they do I suspect is the real answer and glomming those two lines together is the job of the next guy.

Fourthly, why do I really pay so much extra for VMAX? What are the relative sizes of the two development teams and is VMAX software so much better? Or is it that to make it really Enterprise, you have to charge more?

Fifthly, could EMC build a multi-head VNX to support block? Could they build a multi-head VNX to support file?

Sixthly, would not the ideal EMC platform be VMAX and Isilon running on the same hardware to provide scale-out block and file? If you feel brave, perhaps run Atmos to support Object as well?

Seventhly, do EMC *really* need Cisco to produce the next generations of vBlock?

A few statements and more questions. I find EMC a fascinating company; there is the appearance of clarity of vision but at times, you have to wonder if there is true clarity of purpose.

Thanks Matt for the inspiration..

Features /= Product

Nov 6th, 2011
by Martin Glassborow.
No comments yet

Hey I’ve got a great idea for a new storage product often equates to ‘I’ve got a great idea for a new feature’; companies large and small are equally guilty of this but a product is more than just a feature. Wandering round SNW and IP-Expo, this really struck me; lots of people are basing their whole product around a single feature.

Unless you have managed to invent a completely new product category; for example NetApp with their NAS appliance was really a new category (ignoring Auspex), you need more than a great feature and you need to do a whole lot more. 3Par for example may have been known as the thin-provisioning company but their product was more than just thin-provisioning; they lead the way on ease of use, wide-striping (okay, the enabling technology for thin-provisioning), micro-RAID and customer engagement.

If you just have a feature and it is something which could be easily be integrated into an existing competing product, you are going to have to make the most of your first mover advantage and then possibly get out. This may seem obvious but I am seeing a number of companies at the moment who are doing a feature and do not currently seem to be progressing whilst there are oncoming juggernauts who could possibly crush them like a bug.

And there are very few new ideas out there which are not being worked on by at least three different companies.

Mad Science Experiments

Nov 4th, 2011
by Martin Glassborow.
5 comments

Whilst NetApp and EMC scrap over meaningless willy waving; the rest of the world try to get on with real work and real world problems. Yet again, sat in a meeting where the requirement is for a grow-forever and delete nothing archive but with the requirement for ‘instant retrieval’ and with a really simple user interface so that a non-technical user can cope. In fact they would really like the archive just to appear as a drive letter on their desktop and be able to just drag files back.

There is part of me who fancies doing a mad science experience using a bizarre mix of an Avere NAS accelerator and NFS-exporting an entire tape library using LTFS. I do wonder if it’d work…build a tape-based Dropbox like solution. Perhaps Avere fancy building a proof of concept system and taking that to NAB or something, I think it might get some attention.

Of course we’ll probably do something sensible and more conventional but a tape-cloud…that’d be kind of fun!!

 

SNW Europe – Some Thoughts

Nov 4th, 2011
by Martin Glassborow.
5 comments

I had an interesting chat with Bob Plumridge of SNIA whilst at SNW-Europe where we discussed the differences between the European organisation and the US organisation; possible directions for the Academy events and SNW-Europe and what we want to see from the industry organisation.

There are significant differences between the US and the European SNIA organisations; SNIA in the US is a fairly inward looking organisation, focusing very much on the development of standards and discussion between vendors, whereas the European organisation is generally more outward looking and focused on the education aspects. Educating end-users about technology concepts and trends but in a way which does not focus on one vendor or another.

I’ve only ever attended SNW Europe and not its sister conference in the US but the comments I have heard from people are that the European event gets a lot more end-users and is less of a industry networking event. This should mean that it has more value and attendance is certainly up.

But it may be time for it to change again or at least evolve so that it maintains value. Here are some of my thoughts which I shared.

1) Education sessions seem to be aimed at a relatively low-level of assumed knowledge. There might be scope for a more advanced track.

2) Perhaps cover areas which although not traditionally storage but do have applicability to us; for example the legal obligations with regards to data security and especially with regards to locality of data when storing in a cloud infrastructure.

3) Birds of the Feather sessions; where like minded storage folks can talk about the things which are impacting them and their businesses.

4) Ensuring that we have good attendance from some of the more interesting start-ups.

The vendor neutral presentations are good but they only go so far; I do wonder if it might be allowable to let the vendor who has just struggled through a presentation to either take questions and not having to be completely neutral in their answers or allowing them a five minute lightning pitch at the end of a presentation.

Or perhaps have a session which is just lightning pitches? Or a vendor balloon-debate?

I think as an event, it’s good but at times it takes itself too seriously. It could perhaps do with a fun side as well…what would you like to see?

 

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