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August, 2012:

Amazon Goes Glacial

Aug 21st, 2012
by Martin Glassborow.
8 comments

Amazon have announced a pretty interesting low-cost archive solution called Amazon Glacier; certainly the pricing which works out at $120 per terabyte per annum with 11 9’s availability is competitive. For those of us working with large media archives could this be a competitor with tape and all the tape management headaches that tape brings. I look after a fairly large media archive and there are times when I would gladly see the back of tape for-ever.

So is the Amazon Glacier the solution we are looking for? Well for the type of media archives that I manage, unfortunately the answer is not yet or not for all use cases. The 3-4 hour latency introduced on a recall by the Glacier does not fit many media organisations, especially those who might have a news component. At times even the minutes that retrieving from tape take seems to be unacceptable, especially to news editors and the like. And even at $120 per terabyte; when you are growing at multiple petabytes a year, the costs fairly quickly add-up.

Yet, this is the first storage product which has made be sit up and think that we could replace tape. If the access times were reduced substantially and it looked more like a large tape library; this would be an extremely interesting service. I just need the Glacier to move a bit faster.

Summer Reading

Aug 17th, 2012
by Martin Glassborow.
2 comments

Every now and then I do a book review or two for the blog, people seem to like them and as it is the summer holildays, I’ve decided to give you an insight as to what I am reading or have read on holiday. It’s the normal mixed back of books; some old, some new, some best-sellers, some not. I only tend to write about books I like which is why my book reviews tend to be nearly entirely positive.

So here goes, some holiday reading for you all.

At school, I hated history and dropped it as a subject as soon as possible; it might have been the way it was taught or perhaps it was that the eras studied just were not those that I was interested in; these days though I read a lot of history books, it tends to be mostly early history but not entirely so. I’ve recently become more interested in European history and the creation of modern Europe; one of those figures which looms large is Lenin, a monster and tyrant in the West’s eyes and mythologised in the Soviet Russia. The collapse of the Soviet Union opened previously sealed records and has allowed Robert Service to re-appraise the life of Lenin and the influences which him; from his early upbringing and education to the execution of his elder brother Alexander, Lenin’s early life is brought to life and the monster is humanised. Yet as Vladimir Ilich Ulyanov becomes Lenin (Lenin was his revolutionary name), you see the man become the monster. If there is any criticism to be made of the book, it tends to ignore some of the major events such as the First World War and focuses on Lenin the man but as a biography it paints a picture of Lenin beyond the normal mythology, Robert Service’s Lenin: A Biography may not be the cheeriest summer read but I found it really interesting and learnt a lot.

The Black Jacobins by the great Trinidadian writer CLR James is the history of the Hatian Revolution of 1791-1804, especially considered against the background of the French Revolution (Haiti was ruled by the French), it mainly focuses on the black leader Toussaint L’Ouverture who rose from slavery to a hero of the Haitian revolution and a tragic one at that. A criticism oft laid at the book is that it is very partisan and idealistic but this does not prevent it from being an easy read and an important parallel to one of the key developments in European history.

The Library Book is a collection of pieces on the importance of libraries from short stories to personal testimony by such luminaries as Stephen Fry, Alan Bennet, Seth Godin and many more. At a time when many feel that libraries are now not necessary with everything online, this collection gives many reasons why we still need libraries. A library is more than just a collection of books, just as a book is more than just a collection of words; if you love books and libraries, this book is great fun.

It’s odd that I have read many of George R.R Martin’s books; I was a great fan of the Wild-Cards series which was editted by him, I also loved Windhaven and have read many of his short stories but I had never read any of A Song of Ice and Fire (The Game of Thrones) books, they had just passed me by and I had probably discounted them as more Tolkien fantasy wannabe. Well, more fool me, I’ve been racing through them this summer and have found them compelling, complex, exciting, violent and witty. Late to the party I know but I very pleased I picked them up. Full of strong characters, both male and female; flawed but heroic and certainly not Tolkien like at all. Although I have linked the boxed set, I’d buy them on Kindle if I were you; they’re very long so much easier to carry around on the Kindle. Saves you carrying around two heavy books if you are getting close to the end of one.

REST APIs and interacting with services via them are becoming an increasingly important part of the tech landscape; even humble infrastructure bods like myself can’t avoid them any more. The REST API Design Handbook by George Reese is great short introduction on how you go about designing a REST API and I wish that many of my developer friends would read it; it would make my life and theirs a lot simpler. I continue to see horrible things done with SOAP which would work so much better with a RESTful implementation that I feel that this should be compulsory reading before you decide to do anything with SOAP. And at only 90 pages or so, there’s no excuse for not reading it.

Fifty Shades of Grey is not a book I have read this summer and really have no intention in reading, although I gather it makes for great amusement when read aloud but if you want something similar but better written (although I can’t really say that not having read 50SoG), try The Sleeping Beauty Trilogy by Anne Rice writing as A.N. Roquelaure. Of course it is adult, so if you are neither adult or a possessor of an open mind, give it a miss.

Friday Quick Thought

Aug 17th, 2012
by Martin Glassborow.
2 comments

Flash=Compute Storage, stuff you are processing

Disk=Data Storage, stuff you have processed or might want to process soon

Tape=Data Hoard, stuff you can’t bare to get rid because you might need it but realistically, you only need <10% but you don't know which 10%.

Super Glue Required

Aug 17th, 2012
by Martin Glassborow.
1 comment

IBM’s purchase of TMS was not the biggest surprise, especially for anyone who has been involved with IBM’s HPC team. It’s a good move for both companies and gives IBM a good solid flash-based storage team. It does add yet another storage array product to IBM’s ever growing portfolio and positioning outside of the HPC world is going to be fun; IBM have multiple competing arrays but arguably the TMS range does not overlap with any.

And so the move to flash continues or more likely a move to a 2-tier storage future; with active data sitting in a flash-tier and resting data sitting on a SATA/SAS bulk storage tier. But with all these competing products and different vendors, the storage management and implementation head-aches could be massive.

Now, we could move to hybrid arrays where both flash and traditional rotational storage live in the same array. The array itself can auto-tune what sits where, moving data according to temperature; we’ve seen this in the various auto-tiering technologies from EMC, IBM and HDS for example.

We could move to a world where the flash in an array simply works as an extended cache tier, augmenting the DRAM cache; speeding up reads, think NetApp’s approach.

Both of these implementations allow existing storage architectures to be enhanced with flash and hence both are pretty popular with the existing vendors and customers. Nothing much changes and things feel very much Business As Usual but faster.

Then there are the new players on the block with their flash-only arrays; architected to make the most out of flash. These tend to have really screaming performance but can you afford to replace all of your storage with flash technology? If you can’t, you need to think a lot harder about how best to utilise these; for example if the data you are storing has any form of longevity and needs to be kept, you will need to come up ways of moving this data between tiers of storage which almost certainly come from different vendors. Experience suggests that this sort of tiering is very hard to-do and applications need to be designed with this in mind.

And then there vendors who believe that you should implement flash as close to the server as possible. This is the approach of Fusion-IO and the like; in many ways this could be very attractive, certainly if you can use it as a cache-tier but if you have very large server farms, this could be expensive and yet again, you could run into design headaches where positioning workloads starts to get much harder. There are also potential issues with clustering, failure modes and the like. But it could allow you to leverage your existing storage estate and sweat the asset.

This introduction of a new tier of storage has re-opened the ILM/HSM box; the glue which moves data between different tiers of storage is going to be incredibly important and this more than the actual hardware could well define the future of flash in the Enterprise and beyond.

We are seeing a rapidly evolving hardware market but the technologies could manifestly increase the complexity of the storage environment. This might be good news for the storage administrators who look at the increasingly simplified administration tools that all of these arrays ship with but to enable the dynamic environments that Business requires, the integration layer is going to have to start appearing.

And as IBM’s acquisition of TMS shows, acquiring hardware platforms and expertise seems to be the current focus…even if every array you purchased was IBM branded, data movement between the arrays would be hard; start adding other vendors into the mix and your problems are going to be interesting.

Enterprise and Cloud

Aug 2nd, 2012
by Martin Glassborow.
4 comments

Anybody working in storage cannot fail to come across the term ‘Enterprise Storage’; a term which is often used to justify the cost of what it is commodity item that is stuck together with some clever software; ask a sales-man from a vendor as to what makes their storage ‘Enterprise’ and you will get a huge amount of fluff but with little substance. ‘Enterprise Storage’ is a marketing term.

And now we are seeing the word ‘Enterprise’ being used by some Cloud Service Providers and Cloud Vendors to try to distinguish their Cloud server from their competitors, especially when trying to differentiate themselves from Amazon. Yet, is this just a marketing term again? I don’t think it is but not for entirely positive reasons.

If your application has been properly architected and designed to run in a Cloud based infrastructure; you almost certainly don’t need to be running in an ‘Enterprise Cloud’ and the extra expense that brings; if you have tried to shoe-horn an existing application into the Cloud, you might well need to consider an Enterprise Cloud. Because many Enterprise Clouds are simply hosted environments re-branded as Cloud, often utilising virtualisation sitting on top of highly resilient hardware; they remove many of the transition costs to the Cloud by not actually transitioning to a Cloud Model.

A properly designed Cloud application will meet all the availability and performance requirements of the most demanding Enterprise and users whether it runs in an commodity cloud or an Enterprise Cloud. Redeveloping your existing application portfolio may well feel prohibitively expensive and hence many will avoid doing this. Ultimately though, many of these existing applications which live in the Enterprise Cloud will transition to a SAAS environment; CRM, ERP and other common enterprise applications are the obvious candidates. This will leave the those applications which make your Business special and from which you derive some kind of competitive advantage; these are the applications and architectures that you should be thinking about re-architecting and re-developing, not just dumping them into an ‘Enterprise Cloud’.

Try not to buy into the whole ‘Enterprise Cloud’ thing apart from as a transitionary step; think about what you need to do to run your business on any ‘Commodity Cloud’; how you design applications which are scalable and resilient at the application layer as opposed to infrastructure, think about how you make those applications environmentally agnostic with the ability to take advantage of spot pricing and brokerage. Or if you really don’t believe in the Cloud, stop pretending to and stop using Enterprise as camouflage.