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June, 2014:

Not So Cold Fusion?

Jun 17th, 2014
by Martin Glassborow.
1 comment

Can SanDisk make a go of moving into the Enterprise especially with the purchase of Fusion-IO?

It is a very different market to the consumer space and although the margins are considerably higher; it brings with it many challenges. I think it’ll depend on the go-to market strategy that SanDisk take and I fully expect them to carry on the current partnership strategy that appears to work well for them at present.

I don’t see SanDisk moving into the enterprise space as a sales-organisation just yet and I suspect that the ION Accelerator line may well be dropped.

And I expect to see some very close ties being built between SanDisk and HP; HP already resell the ioDrive cards and the new 3Par 7450 array utilises SanDisk  Enterprise drives; it has been heavily pushed as a partnership between them.

Funny really that some people are touting SanDisk as the next EMC; EMC’s first really big partner and arguably the partnership that enabled EMC to grow into the behemoth that it is…was HP. Well until they fell out quite so badly.

What does this mean for the other flash-upstarts? Nothing yet, most of them are in a very different space to Fusion but there’s a whole raft of them who are currently parading themselves in none too subtle ways.

They need to get bought…they can’t all survive. And the list of suitors is rather short at the moment.  But with non-traditional vendors moving such as SanDisk acquiring; I think they’ll be feeling a little more positive.

YMMV

Jun 10th, 2014
by Martin Glassborow.
No comments yet

Storage Marketing is one of maddest and craziest parts of the technology industry; so many claims that don’t necessarily stand-up to scrutiny and pretty much all of them need to be caveated with the words

‘It Depends….’

And actually it is very important to understand that it really does depend; for example, when your flash vendor claims that they can supply flash at the price of spinning rust; they may well be making assumptions about deduplication or compression and your data.

If you are in a highly virtualised environment, you might well get a huge amount of deduplication from the operating systems..actually, even if you are not and you utilise SAN-boot, it’ll dedupe nicely. But what if you store your operating system on local disk?

What if you are already utilising compression in your database? What if your data is encrypted or pre-compressed media?

Of course this is obvious but I still find myself explaining this at times to irate sales who seem to assume that their marketing is always true…and not ‘It Depends’.

Understand your data…understand your access patterns…decide what you are trying to achieve…understand true costs…

The problem is that many of us don’t have time to carry out proper engineering tests; so I find it best to be as pessimistic as possible…I’d rather be pleasantly surprised than have an horrible shock. This means at times I am quite horrible to vendors but it saves me being really nasty later.

 

 

 

Hype Converges?

Jun 5th, 2014
by Martin Glassborow.
1 comment

In a software-defined data-centre; why are some of the hottest properties, hardware platforms? Nutanix and Simplivity are two such examples that lead to mind; highly converged, sometimes described as hyper-converged servers.

I think that it demonstrates what a mess our data-centres have got into that products such as these have any kind of attraction. Is it the case that we have built in processes that are so slow and inflexible; that a hardware platform that resembles nothing more than a games-console for virtualisation has an attraction.

Surely the value has to be in the software; so have we got so bad at building out data-centres that it makes sense to pay a premium for a hardware platform and there is certainly a large premium for some of them.

Now I don’t doubt that deployment times are quicker but my real concern is why have we got to this situation. It seems that the whole infrastructure deployment model has collapsed under it’s own weight. But is the answer expensive converged hardware platforms?

Perhaps it is time to fix the deployment model and deploy differently because I have a nasty feeling that many of those people who are struggling to deploy their current infrastructure will also struggle to deploy these new hyper-converged servers in a timely manner.

It really doesn’t matter how quickly you can rack, stack and deploy your hypervisor if it takes you weeks to cable it to to talk the outside world or give it an IP address or even a name!

And then the questions will be asked….you couldn’t deploy the old infrastructure in a timely manner; you can’t deploy the new infrastructure in a timely manner even if we pay a premium for it….so perhaps we will give public cloud a go.

Most of problems at present in the data-centre are not technology; they are people and mostly process. And I don’t see any hardware platform fixing these quickly….