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December, 2011:

Bod’s Stuff of the Year

Dec 21st, 2011
by Martin Glassborow.
1 comment

It’s bit late but if you still have some Christmas shopping to do, here’s a few ideas of things I’ve liked over the past twelve months.

Anyway, hopefully there are a few ideas for late Christmas presents or even some New Year’s retail therapy. Do your bit for the economy and spend, spend, spend!

Gadget of the Year

Don’t care which model you get but Amazon’s e-reader is probably the must have for any geek. It slips into a large coat pocket and you can have your favourite books with you where-ever you are. The only problem with it is that it is far too easy to buy books and you will find yourself spending more than you used to on books. But for me, it’s my favourite gadget.

Geek-out Extravaganza

It might be expensive and completely indulgent but if you are a Star Wars nut; then Star Wars: The Blueprints is a must have. The packaging is gorgeous and the content, especially from the filming of the original series, is sublime. Treat yourself, you’ll love it. Just hide the receipt!

Games(s) of the Year

I am already loosing sleep to Star Wars: The Old Republic (had a great gaming session with Storagezilla) but my Game of the Year is not really a game but a collection of games; can I recommend that you all support the Indie Games industry and especially Humble Bundle, some fun games at pocket money prices and you get to support independent games companies and charity at the same time.  There are other indie games bundles out there, it’s worth keeping an eye out for them.

Fiction Book of the Year

There’s been some great fiction this year, Neal Stephenson told a cracking tale in Reamde and really hit form again; William Gibson’s Zero History was full of ideas and great fun but for me, a new City Watch tale from Terry Pratchett was always going to be the highlight. Snuff takes Captain Vimes into the country and out of his beloved city, as he struggles with the duties of Lord of the Manor, he stumbles into a murder. The ensuing tale is Pratchett at his best.

Non-Fiction Book of the Year

The sad and expected demise of Steve Jobs lead to the early release of Steve Jobs: The Exclusive Biography. I think it is a credit to Steve and his family that this rounded picture of him was allowed. A deeply flawed genius; this book does not shy away from the flaws whilst painting the picture of the driven genius. If you love Apple or even if you hate Apple, it’s worth reading and perhaps reflecting on the bit of Steve which is in us all, certainly Biography of the Year. Pencil Me In: A Journey in the Fight for Graphite is a allegorical tale of technology introduction in education; I think many of my readers will both find relevant and fun [especially recommended to Chuck Hollis and Matthew Yeager].

But my non-fiction book of the year is The Party: The Secret World of China’s Communist Rulers: 1.3 Billion People, 1 Secret Regime; as power continues to move eastwards and China continues its rise to become the dominant economic super-power, this book details how China has pulled itself out of the doldrums and transform its economy. Anecdotes are well used to demonstrate ideas and why China will not transform into a Western-style democracy any time soon.

Album of the Year

I’ve enjoyed House Of Cards by Emily Baker, Suck It And See by Arctic Monkeys and especially enjoyed the collaboration between Lou Reed and Metallica in the form of Lulu. The return of Atari Teenage Riot’s aural assault was a welcome return by the Teutonic terrors, Is This Hyperreal?.

Still, I have to agree with the Mercury Music Prize panel and make PJ Harvey’s Let England Shake my stand-out album of the year. As English as it gets, PJ’s anger and passion for our homeland’s current place in the world is a powerful piece from an artist who never fails to push our buttons.

Computer Component of the Year

SSD, get one! It changes your desktop experience, I use the Crucial variations but do your research and transform your desktop computer.

Dear Santa – 2011

Dec 20th, 2011
by Martin Glassborow.
3 comments

Dear Santa,

it’s that time of year again when I write to you on behalf of the storage community and beyond. 2011 promised much but delivered less than hoped; the financial crisis throughout the world has put a damper on the party and there are some gloomy faces around. But as we know, the world will always need more storage, so what do we need to deliver in 2012.

Firstly, what we don’t need is Elementary Marketing Crud from the Effluent Management Cabal; perhaps this was a last grasp at a disappearing childhood as they realise that they need to be a grown-up company.

What I would like to see is some more serious discussion about what ‘Big Data’ is and what it means both from a Business point of view but also from a social responsibility point of view. I would like to see EMC and all get behind efforts to use data for good; for example, get behind the efforts to review all drug trial data ever produced to build a proper evidence based regime for the use and prescription of drugs, especially for children who often just get treated as small adults. This is just one example of how we can use data for good.

There are so many places where ‘Big Data’ can be used beyond the simple analysis of Business activities that it is something which really could change the world. Many areas of science from Climate Research to Particle Physics generate huge amounts of data that need analysing and archiving for future analysis that we can look at this being a gift to the world.

And Santa, it can also be used to optimise your route around the world, I’m sure it is getting more complicated and in these days of increasing costs, even you must be looking at ways of being more efficient.

Flying through clouds on Christmas Night, please remember us down below who are still trying to work out what Cloud is and what it means; there are those who feel that this is not important but there are others who worry about there being no solid definition. There are also plenty of C-level IT execs who are currently loosing sleep as to what Cloud in any form means to them and their teams.

So perhaps what is needed is less spin, more clarity and leadership. More honesty from vendors and users, stop calling products and projects, Cloud; focus on delivery and benefits. A focus on deliverables would remove much of the fear around the area.

Like your warehouses at this time of year, our storage systems are full and there is an ever increasing demand for space. It does not slow down and unlike you, our storage systems never really empty.  New tools for data and storage management allowing quick and easy classification of data are a real requirement along with standards based application integration for Object storage; de-facto standards are okay and perhaps you could get some of the vendors to stop being precious about ‘Not Invented Here’.

I would like to see the price of 10GbE come down substantially but also I would like to see the rapid introduction of even faster networks; I am throwing around huge amounts of data and the faster I can do it, the better. A few years ago, I was very positive about FCoE; now I am less so, certainly within a 10 GbE network it offers very little but faster networks might make me more positive about it again.

SSDs have changed my desktop experience but I want that level of performance from all of my storage; I’ve got impatient and I want my data *NOW*. Can you ask the vendors to improve their implementation of SSDs in Enterprise Arrays and obviously drive down the cost as well? I want my data as fast as the network can supply it and even faster if possible; local caching and other techniques might help.

But most of all Santa, I would like a quiet Christmas where nothing breaks and my teams get to catch up on some rest and spend time with their families. The next two years’ roadmap for delivery is relentless and time to catch our breath may be in short supply.

Merry Christmas,

Storagebod

 

#storagebeers – London 2012

Dec 19th, 2011
by Martin Glassborow.
4 comments

Dell are holding a ‘Dell Storage Forum’ event in early January 2012; I shan’t comment on the wisdom of running an event partially targeted at end-users in the week when many end-users will be coming out of Christmas change-freezes.

Anyway, I have been asked to ‘organise’ a #storagebeers; organising is really just a way of asking me to name a pub and a time. So without further ado, the first #storagebeers of the year will be on Tuesday January 10th meeting in ‘Ye Olde Chesire Cheese’ on Fleet Street from about 8 pm.

All are welcome, whether attending Dell Storage Forum or not…whether you work for Dell or not. Please come along and enjoy a pub where Dickens, Dr Johnson and Voltaire all drank.

 

2011 – A Vendor Retrospective….

Dec 12th, 2011
by Martin Glassborow.
2 comments

So, we’re winding down to Christmas and looking forward to spending time with our families, so I guess it’s time for me to do a couple of Christmas blog entries. It’s been a funny year really, a lot has happened in the world of technology but nothing really has changed in my opinion; there’s certainly some interesting tremors and fore-shadowing though.

HP started the year in a mess and finish the year in a mess; they got themselves into a bigger mess in the middle of the year but appear to have pulled themselves from the brink of the abyss. I can still hear the pebbles bouncing of the walls of the abyss as HP scramble but I think they’ll be okay. 3Par is going to turn into a huge win for them.

EMC started the year with a Big Bang of nothing announcements and some fairly childish marketing but their ‘Big Data’ meme appears to be building up a head of steam. Isilon appears to be doing great for them and although EMC still don’t appear to understand some of the verticals that they play in now, they seem to understand that they don’t and are generally letting the Isilon guys get on with it. Yes, they’ve lost a few people but that’s always the case. Their JV with Cisco; I hear mixed reviews, I think that they are doing well in the Service Provider space but less well in the other verticals; still, they are certainly marketing well to partner organisations.

HDS still struggle around message but they seem to be getting a better selling stuff and are going aggressively after business. Much of this seems to be by ‘ripping the arse’ out of prices but a newly hungry and aggressive HDS is not such a bad thing. I still think that they are not quite sure how to sell outside of their comfort zone but some of the arrogance has gone.

IBM; Incoherent Basic Marketing. There’s a huge opportunity for IBM and yet they seem to be confused. They do have a vision and they do have technology but they do seem to struggle with the bit in the middle.  And they never seem to finish a product; so much feels half-done.

NetApp bought Engenio; a great buy but have they confused themselves? Revenues appear to be plateauing and from my anecdotal evidence, adoption of OnTap 8 is slow. I think in hindsight that some within NetApp may agree that OnTap 8 shipped too early and it was a ‘release anything’ type move; OnTap 8.1 is really OnTap 8.

Oracle ‘bought’ Pillar and still have no storage story. Larry should bite the bullet and buy NetApp; much as that might upset some of  my friends at NetApp.

I started the year with great hopes for Dell and I finish the year with some great hopes for Dell but they need to move fast with a sober HP on the horizon. HP could shut them out.

Elsewhere in the industry, pure-play SSD start-ups seem to be hot and there’s a lot of new players in that space. There’s going to be more in that space as people start to treat SSDs as a new class of storage as opposed to simply faster spinning rust. I do worry at the focus on VMware by some of these start-ups and their exposure to VMware doing something which impacts the start-up’s model and technology. Design with virtualisation in mind but ensure that you are agile enough to dodge the slings and arrows of misfortune.

One thing which has saddened me over the past eighteen months is the fall off in blog entries by some of the more notable bloggers. I know you are busy guys but is an entry every other week or so too much to ask? I miss reading some of you!! Hey, I even miss some of the heated spats in the comments.

 

Clue is in the Name

Dec 11th, 2011
by Martin Glassborow.
No comments yet

Information Technology; that’s what we do and of those two words surely the most important is Information.

I like Gregory Bateson‘s definition of Information as ‘Difference which makes a difference’.

As we start to move into the realms of ‘Big Data’; we should remember what we are really trying to do, we are not analysing ‘Big Data’ to boast about the size of our data-sets, how much data we are analysing; we are looking for information, the ‘differences which make a difference’ to our companies, our lives and the general world.

We should also be concentrating on trying to do this as efficiently as possible; what technology is enabling us to do is to analyse ever bigger samples in ever shortening time-scales but it does not always correlate that the bigger samples will enable us to spot ‘Differences which make a difference’ any better.

Make sure the driver for better technology is Better Information and not simply better technology. The siren song of bigger is some which could smash us onto the rocks; if someone can make the same decisions with less and do it even quicker, the competitive advantage can be lost.

I personally would have been much happier if the ‘Big Data’ meme was actually ‘Better Information through Technology’, not as catchy maybe but more relevant and real in my opinion.

But don’t get caught up in the Cult of Big! Remember it’s not all about the Data, it’s about the Information.

Forecast is Cloudy

Dec 5th, 2011
by Martin Glassborow.
No comments yet

So, you’ve built your Cloud or perhaps at least built the case for the use of Cloud; private, public, and hybrid; so what do you next? What are those next steps?

Perhaps you’ve even got some ‘Lighthouse Deployments’; some early projects running in the Cloud? How do take your Cloud mainstream? Or do you just sit round and self-congratulate yourselves for the next six months?

Actually, what have you implemented? Have you perhaps built a vBlock infrastructure? A Flexpod? So what applications are you running in this Cloud? The low-hanging fruit such as email is popular but really have you actually done Cloud at this point? All you have done is moved an application into a virtualised infrastructure.

Now there are some significant benefits in taking existing workloads and virtualising them but is that enough?

It seems that a great deal of focus on the journey to Cloud is still on the underlying infrastructure and a very low-level of infrastructure at that. Putting Big Data to one side, where are the applications and workloads which can be genuinely said to be Cloud?

If we continue to simply take existing workloads and just shift them into a more dynamic infrastructure; we risk missing the transformative possibilities of Cloud. We miss the possibility of using a new generation of applications to redefine process and business.

The beauty of the PC was not that it just brought computing power to the desktop but it brought new applications with it; from the Office applications that we all love to hate to the browser which we all love to hate; it has transformed the way we do business and our lives.

The infrastructure to support Cloud is mostly there or within reach but the applications which define Cloud and change business and lives; these are mostly missing, certainly if you move outside of the social applications and Big Data.

And even migrating existing workloads to the Cloud is often a simple lift and shift with little redevelopment of the workload to take advantage of the possibilities or even the realities of Cloud. Workloads are not designed and architected to take advantage of elastic resource which might vanish at any moment.

The plumbing is done; now it’s time to heat the house.

Stacks…

Dec 1st, 2011
by Martin Glassborow.
1 comment

Over the past eighteen months or so, I have pretty much managed to avoid the vendor roadmap discussion despite many attempts by vendors to draw me in but I have found that it really does not hamper my decision making. Knowing short-term futures and what is about to be announced in the next six months is often useful but the longer term less so.

Roadmaps change so much and often features that are promised are not there, so it is not worth designing systems and infrastructures around them; game-changing features turn out rarely to be so and game-changers can often be completely unexpected.

I am going to say something rather surprising here and those who know me will probably be calling the men in white coats; vBlock is game-changing and will continue to change the game. But it is not for what it is but it is what for it makes people do. It actually encourages people to start thinking about the whole stack and how it does integrate; VCE (amongst others) will of course suggest that once you do this that the best thing to do is to then buy that whole stack from a single person. It might be…it might not, your mileage will vary.

But what it should do is drive the idea of standardisation and governance and it actually allows you ask some other interesting questions which almost go against the very idea of an integrated stack.

If a vendor turns up and says ‘My software is marvellous but you must run it on *my stack*; if you have your own stack, you are in a better position to ask why is this so? Why must I run it on your expensive and overpriced stack, I have built my stack and it runs just fine? Is the value of your integration and certification really worth that much?’

Your stack might be VCE, it might be something completely different and something that you have defined but you really do need one now. vBlock is game-changing because of the thought process it should drive…