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November, 2011:

Fabric Causes Over Excitement.

Nov 2nd, 2011
by Martin Glassborow.
1 comment

There is currently a fair bit of noise about FCoE, whether it is ready for the prime time, whether it’ll ever be ready and does it matter anyway. I thought I’d add my tuppence worth of thought.

When FCoE was first announced and it looked like that we might get some fabric convergence, I was pretty positive about it all. I really thought that this was a good thing, convergence is good. Now there have been various ways of getting storage traffic to flow over traditional IP networks but storage guys don’t trust them and quite frankly most network guys don’t trust the storage guys not to destroy their networks anyway.

FCoE and the accompanying standards seem to be a real chance to do something about and as we continue down the path of 10GbE in the data-centre; we could work together to bring a new world and operating model. (exaggeration for effect BTW)

However, we are a long way away from this at present and 10 GbE networks are going without consideration of FCoE and traditional SAN environments keep growing. The vendors cannot agree on how to ensure interoperability and standardisation. So FCoE is turning into the complete ‘head-f**k’ that FC is. You will not be able to easily build a heterogenous FCoE fabric, mixing and matching switches from different vendors; you will have a ‘vendor x’  fabric, you will still be in the world of complex compatibility matrices, you will have political trouble as you try to get teams to co-operate and work together, you probably will not see any real performance gains at present from going down the FCoE route and change/problem/incident will be a complete mess.

So why bother with FCoE at all? You could just run iSCSI/NAS over 10GbE or just stick with FC as you know and love it today. The roadmap for FC is still healthy and there is deployed product. You probably have enough going on in your data centre already and if IT is going through a transformational change…you really do have enough on your plate.

Now, the future is not completely bleak for FCoE but the adoption of FCoE is going to take longer and more painful than I thought. But the vendors do need to get together on work out how best to adhere and stick to the standards and not just simply ‘Embrace and Extend’ causing a reply of FC!

Fear of Failure

Nov 1st, 2011
by Martin Glassborow.
3 comments

I’ve just finished Steve Jobs: The Exclusive Biography; which may not be a complete warts and all biography and I suspect there are more tales to tell but it does give you an insight into the man and his drives. Well worth reading and it does have some relevance to what is going on in the world of Enterprise IT.

Firstly, Steve’s insistence of controlling the stack both hardware and software has a lot of resonance with VCE’s vBlock, Oracle’s Exadata and many of the other stack plays in play at the moment. The control of the complete user experience has worked wonders for many and people have certainly been willing to pay a premium in the home. If you are not an inveterate tinkerer like me, it certainly makes sense. I find it interesting that amongst most of the inveterate tinkerers; the laptop of choice is a MacBook of some sort; if it’s closed already, you might as well get the best engineered laptop you can.

But does this have resonance for the corporate IT department; actually, I think where vBlock et al make the most sense at the moment is for the small-medium Enterprise who don’t have the economy of scale at the moment with server specialists, network specialists, storage specialist but a small team of generalists focused on providing IT in general. And if you don’t have a huge investment in legacy, it makes sense…actually it makes sense at that point to simply deploy into the public Cloud in my opinion. You have less cultural change and resistance to deal with in a smaller company.

I think the second take-away from the book is the almost breath-taking arrogance of the man; a man who believed that he knew better than his customers or at least never asked them what they really wanted.

But it’s not just vision, it’s also hard graft mixed with agility; Apple are known to prototype, refine, prototype, throw it away and then prototype again until they get something which really works. Too often, we don’t do this; we prototype, it kind of works, we put it into production, blame the users, refine it a little bit, blame the users a bit more and forget about the fact that prototyping really means that we should have been prepared to fail at this stage.

We are simply too scared to fail and so we fail a lot in and in public (and inflict our failures on the public).

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