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July, 2012:

Edgey

Jul 17th, 2012
by Martin Glassborow.
3 comments

A week or so ago, I spent an hour talking to Avere about their NAS products; this was not really long enough to do any kind of deep dive but what I heard, I liked. It could just be marketing fluff but what they are trying to do is clever and potentially very useful for a variety of reasons.

People love their NetApp filer, they just don’t like their next dozen. Filer proliferation and if I am being fair, it’s not just NetApp but all traditional NAS devices, is a major problem. Data mobility and name-space consolidation; making use of capacity that you’ve bought; these are all problems.

Avere hope to allow you to use all that capacity you’ve got in your filers and to allow you to easily move data in your filers around between them, from EMC to NetApp to white-box NFS to a Blue-Arc and perhaps into a Cloud service.

Firstly, they accelerate by putting a ‘Edge-filer’ in front of your traditional NAS; this could be filled with SSD or spinning rust. This provides a cache-tier which allows hot data to be stored on more performant ‘disk’; for their benchmarking, they use whitebox servers full of disk and front them with their devices. This demonstrates that they can take commodity disk and accelerate it into something gives the big-boys something to think about. This allows you get over some of the problems that the large SATA drive are causing with the rapid decline in I/O per terabyte.

Secondly, almost a side-effect of their Edge-filer; you get a more consolidated name-space; I hesitate to say Global Name Space…your core filers export their file-systems to Avere’s edge-filers which then export the file-systems to the wider-server infrastructure.

This allows NAS sprawl to be hidden from the users but it does obviously come with some limitations caused by the core-filer limitations; for example, if your core-filer only supports a 16Tb file-system, your export is going to be limited to that and you will need to monitor this carefully.

But where I really see a use for the Avere technology is in front of Scale-Out NAS devices allowing the efficient use of cheaper SATA technologies to provide capacity whilst preserving performance. So it is no surprise to me to that Avere are making some real in-roads into the worlds of media and rendering.

Avere are an interesting proposition and what I find especially interesting is that in many ways they don’t compete with NetApp, EMC et al but provide a complementary product which allows end-users to make better use of their investment.

Still, I suspect that the big-boys might not like this; they don’t really want you to be too efficient…

Patience is a Virtue?

Jul 9th, 2012
by Martin Glassborow.
1 comment

Or is patience just an acceptance of latency and friction? A criticism oft made of today’s generation is that they expect everything now and this is a bad thing but is it really?

If a bottle of fine wine could mature in an instant and be good as a ’61; would this be a bad thing? If you could produce a Michelin quality meal in a microwave, would it be a bad thing?

Yes, today we do have to accept that such things take time but is it really a virtue? Is there anything wrong with aspiring to do things quicker whilst maintaining quality?

We should not just accept that latency and friction in process is inevitable; we should work to try to remove them from the way that we work.

For example, change management is considered to be a necessary ITIL process but does it have to be the lengthy bureaucratic process that it is? If your infrastructure is dynamic, surely your change process should be dynamic too? If you are installing a new server, should you have to raise a change

1) to rack and stack
2) to configure the network
3) to install the operating system
4) to present the storage
5) to add the new server to the monitoring solution etc, etc

Each of these being an individual change being raised by separate teams. Or should you be able to do this all programmatically? Now obviously in a traditional data-centre, some of these require physical work but once the server has been physically commissioned, there is nothing there which should not be able to be done programmatically and pretty much automatically.

And so it goes for many of the traditional IT processes; they simply introduce friction and latency to reduce the risk of the IT department smacking into a wall. This is often deeply resented by the Business who simply want to get their services up and running, it is also resented by the people who are following the processes and then it is thrown away in an emergency (which happens more often than you would possibly expect 😉 ).

This is not a rant against ITIL, it was tool for a more sedate time but in a time when Patience is no longer really a virtue..do we need a better way. Or perhaps something like an IT Infrastructure API?

Don’t throw away the rule-book but replace it with something better.

p.s Patience was actually my grand-mother; she had her vices but we loved her very much.

Not Special

Jul 7th, 2012
by Martin Glassborow.
No comments yet

As we grow up, there are a various times in our lives when we realise that we are not as special as we always believed that we are; or certainly that we are less important than we thought. This can be the arrival of a younger sibling or the birth of a child, these sort of events can effect us greatly and the feelings resulting from them can be quite painful but it is all a necessary part of growing, learning who we are and changing our perspective.

And as it is for people, so it is for Business and Business function; the moment you believe that you are special as a matter of right, something is going to come along and disrupt that centre.

Internal IT functions have for a long time believed that they are special, we all know that they are not. But so do many Businesses and other functions; I’ve lost track of the number times that someone has tried to convince me that they don’t have to follow a process because they are special. And yet we find ourselves kow-towing to that attitude all the time; internally and externally we find ourselves making exceptions to rules….whether it is to the Mega-Corporation who does not want to pay tax or the the Senior Manager who believes that they should not have to follow the internal IT policy.

However, I do believe that we should embrace difference; the department that wants to work differently because it supports their processes, they should be supported. You change the rules but don’t make exceptions; if the rules don’t work, don’t ignore the rules but change them. And at times, don’t be afraid to tear up the rule book and come up with a completely new set of rules; pick up that ball and run with it.

I look around at the moment and I see so many people and companies trying to put in exceptions and workarounds to fit their business models and activities; trying to foreclose on the potential disruption that is coming…believing that they are special; from banking to broadcast…when they might be better tearing up their play-book and starting again.

No-one believed that you could win a major Football tournament without strikers, Spain showed that you can…you just have to play differently.