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Waffle to burn?

NetApp have finally bitten the bullet and bought an AFA vendor; plumping for the technology driven Solidfire as opposed to some of the marketing driven competitors in the space.

At less than a billion dollars; it appears to be a very good deal for NetApp and perhaps with an ever decreasing number of suitors, it is a good deal for Solidfire and avoids the long march to IPO.

Obviously the whole deal will be painted as complementary to NetApp’s current product set but many will hope that Solidfire will long-term supplant the long-in-the-tooth OnTap. NetApp need to swallow their pride and need to move on from the past.

It can’t do this immediately; it needs work and it is not yet a solution for unstructured data. But putting data-services on top of it should not be a massive task as long as that is what NetApp decide to do and they don’t decide to try to integrate it with OnTap. NetApp can’t afford another decade of engineering faff! Funnily enough though , FC is seen as a relatively weak-point for Solidfire; where have we heard the before?

This could be as big a deal for them as EMC’s acquisition of Data General in 1999; the Clariion business brought some great engineers and a business that turned into a cash-cow for them. It allowed them to move into a different space and gave them options; it probably saved the company whilst they were messing up the Symmetrix line.

And whilst EMC/Dell are integrating themselves; NetApp have a decent opportunity to steal a march on their arch-rivals; especially if they take a light touch and continue to allow Solidfire to act like an engineering-led start-up.

I still have my doubts whether a storage-focused behemoth can actually survive long-term as data-centres change and buying behaviours change. But for the time being, NetApp have an interesting product again.

Interesting times for friends at both companies…

p.s anyone want to buy a pair of Solidfire socks?

Object Lessons?

I was hoping that one of the things that I might be able to write about after HPE Discover was that HPE finally had a great solution for Scale-Out storage; either NAS or Object.

There had been hints that something was coming; yes, HPe had done work with Cleversafe and Scality for Object Storage but the hints were that they were doing something of their own. And with IBM having taken Cleversafe into their loving bosom, HPE are the only big player without their own object platform.

Turns out however that HPE’s big announcement was their ongoing partnership with Scality; now Scality is a good object platform but there are bits that need work as is the case with Cleversafe and the others.

I don’t think that I am the only one is left disappointed by the announcement and the not the only person who was thinking…why didn’t they just buy Scality?

Are HPE still thinking of doing their own thing? Well, it’s gone very quiet and there’s some sheepish looking people about and some annoyed HPErs wondering when they will get their story straight.

Like HPE’s Cloud strategy; confusion seems to reign.

If there is any take-away from the first HPE Discover….it seems that HPE are discovering slowly and the map that is being revealed has more in common with the Mappa Mundi than an Ordinance Survey map…vaguely right, bits missing and centralised on the wrong thing.

What Next For HPE Storage?

So I’m sitting here in my hotel room before day 2 of HPE Discover* thinking about some of the discussions that have happened on the previous days/evenings. It seems that even vendors are now coming round to the idea that Enterprise Storage is pretty much dead or at least in it’s current form.

What do we mean by dead?

Well, we don’t mean that it is going away anytime soon; like the mainframe, it’ll continue to haunt the data-centres of the future. But unlike the coming zombie apocalypse; this zombie will not take over the world.

However, there is little to no growth opportunity for the traditional Enterprise Storage Array; year on year, we probably won’t see a decline in the amount of storage shipped in this form but it’s proportion of the total shipped storage will decline massively.

In fact, the vendors themselves have only to blame themselves; modern Enterprise arrays are that much more efficient; thin provisioning, compression and data reduction technologies such as deduplication are having the impact that to maintain revenues, the vendors are having to ship twice as much storage.

It’s a great time to be a customer of Enterprise Storage; the price will continue to fall and it’s becoming so simple that swapping one vendor for another is no longer a massive deal. Our continued push for simplified interfaces and click-driven provisioning is beginning to drive procurement behaviours that mean that it is no longer a massive RFx process to change vendors; pence per gigabyte or IOP is the only measure of importance.

And it’s a scary time for many vendors who don’t have a story to tell about what comes next and how they mitigate for this change in market. Enterprise Storage has been a cash-cow; massive margins and annual increases in revenues are pretty much in decline.

So HPE; what comes next in your world because wandering round Discover; I can see an awful lot of servers filled with disks but I don’t see the next storage solution from you guys. Maybe I’ll see it today? 

(disclosure: HP have paid for my accommodation and entrance to the event but I’m under no obligation to write anything)

Dude – You’re Getting An EMC

Just a few thoughts on the Dell/EMC takeover/merger or whatever you want to call it. 

  1. In a world where IT companies have been busy splitting themselves up; think HP, Symantec, IBM divesting from server business…it seems a brave move to build a new IT behemoth. 
  2. However; some of the restructuring already announced hints at a potential split in how Dell do business. Dell Enterprise to be run out of Hopkinton and using EMC’s Enterprise smarts in this space.
  3. Dell have struggled to build a genuine storage brand since going their different ways; arguably their acquisitions have under-performed.
  4. VMware is already under attack from various technologies – VMware under control of hardware server vendor would have been a problem a decade ago but might be less so as people have more choices for both virtualising Heritage applications and Cloud-Scale. VMware absolutely now have to get their container strategy right.
  5. EMC can really get to grips with how to build their hyper-converged appliances and get access to Dell’s supply chain. 
  6. That EMC have been picked up by a hardware vendor just shows how hard it is to transition from a hardware company to a software company. 
  7. A spell in purdah seems necessary for any IT company trying to transition their business model. Meeting the demands of the market seems to really hamper innovation and change. EMC were so driven by a reporting cycle, it drove very poor behaviours.
  8. All those EMC guys who transitioned away from using Dell laptops to various MacBooks…oh dear!
  9. I doubt this is yet a done deal and expect more twists and turns! But good luck to all my friends working at both companies! May it be better!

 

Overcoming Objections

My friend Enrico is a massive fan of Object Storage whereas for a long time, I’ve had the reputation of being somewhat sceptical; feeling the whole thing has been somewhat overhyped. The hype started with EMC’s Atmos launch and continued from there. 

The problem with Object Storage has been the lack of support from application vendors especially in the space that I work in. And development teams, especially those working in organisations with large numbers of heritage applications have been very slow to embrace it.  Most just want to work with standard filesystems.

And so we saw the birth of the cloud-gateway; devices that sat in front of the object-stores and presented the object-stores in a more familiar manner. Yet often the way that these were licensed simply added cost and negated the low cost of object store; they also added complexity into an environment.

The Object Storage vendors were slower to acknowledge the issue and really wanted you to use the API to access the storage; some of the larger vendors really didn’t want their Object Storage to cannibalise their NAS revenues and were even slower to acknowledge the issue.

So it seemed that Object Storage was really going to be confined to the world of cloud-scale and cloud-native applications. 

But this now seems to be rapidly changing; robust NFS implementations from the Object Storage vendors are becoming significantly more common; SMB implementations still seem to be rather patchy but once they become more robust, I see Object Storage becoming the standard for file-serving applications. 

Will we see API-driven ‘file access’ become the universal method for interacting with file storage? Not for some time but having the choice and realising that it is a not and all or nothing scenario will begin to ease friction in this space.  

 

A Slight Return

I intend to start updating here again occasionally as the itches begin to build up again and I feel the need to scratch. There’s a lot going in the industry and there’s a massive amount of confusion about where it’s going at the moment.

I’m having interesting conversations with industry figures, many of them are as confused privately as they are sure publicly. Few seem to know exactly how this all plays out and not just storage guys.

I had a conversation a couple of days ago that put the electricity supply model for compute back on the radar; the technology enablers are beginning to line up to make this much more feasible but is the will/desire there? This debate will carry on until we wake up and realise that it’s all changed again.

Flash and trash is still fascinating; vendors still playing games with pricing and comparisons that make little sense. Valuations out of control (maybe) and yet quite possibly we can see the time when flash does become the standard as the prices continue to fall and storage requirements continue to soar.

And a lastly, a big thanks to all those have offered support, prayers, kind thoughts to me over the past few months. It does help..watching people you love go through chemo isn’t fun but it does help reset your priorities a bit.

Service Temporarily Suspended…

Apologies for very infrequent updates!

Unfortunately life has somewhat got in the way and I really don’t have the energy to blog at present! So I’m taking a little bit of a break…certainly over the summer, should we have one!

Hopefully normal service will be renewed at some point towards the end of the year!

So vendors….make hay whilst the sun shines!

Punish the Pundits!!

A day rarely goes by without someone declaring one technology or another is dead…and rarely a year goes by without someone declaring this is the year of whatever product they happen to be pimping or in favour of.

And yet, you can oft find dead technologies in rude health and rarely does it actually turn out to be the year of the product it is supposed to be the year of.

It turns out that pundits (including me) really have little idea what technology is going to die or fly. And that is what makes the industry fun and interesting.

The storage industry is especially good for this; SAN is dead, DAS lives, NAS is obsolete, Object is the future, iSCSI will never work, Scale Up, Scale Out…

We know nothing…

The only thing we do know is that data volumes will keep getting bigger and we need somewhere to put it.

In the past three months; I’ve seen technologies in what everyone will have you believe are innovation-free zones that have made me stop and think ‘But I thought that was going to die….’

Yes we have far too many start-ups in some parts of the industry; far too many people have arrived at where they thought the puck was going to be.

A few people seem to be skating round where the puck was.

And there’s a few people who have picked the puck, stuck in their pocket and hidden it.

So my prediction for the next eighteen months…

‘Bumpy….with the chance of sinkholes!’

My advice…

‘Don’t listen to the pundits, we know nothing….we just love the shinies!!’

Scale-Out of Two?

One of the things I have been lamenting about for some time with many vendors is that there has been a lack of a truly credible alternative to EMC’s Isilon product in the Scale-Out NAS space. There are some technologies out there that could compete but they just seem to fall/fail at the last hurdle; there are also technologies that are packaged to look like Scale-Out but are cludges and general hotch-potches.

So EMC have pretty much have had it their own way in this space and they know it!

But yesterday, finally a company came out of Stealth to announce a product that might finally be the alternative to Isilon that I and others have been looking for.

That company is Qumulo; they claim to have developed the first Data-Aware Scale-Out NAS; to be honest that first bit, ‘Data-Aware’ sounds a bit like marketing fluff but Scale-Out NAS…that hits the spot. Why would Qumulo be any more interesting than the other attempts in the space? Well, they are based out of Seattle founded by a bunch of ex-Isilon folks; so they have credibility. I think they understand that the core of any scale-out product is scale-out; it has to be designed that way from the start.

I also think that they understand that any scale-out system needs to be easy to manage; the command and control options need to be robust and simple. Many storage administrators love the Isilon because it is simple to manage but there are still things that it doesn’t do so well; ACL management is a particular bugbear of many, especially those of us who have to work in mixed NFS/SMB environments (OSX/Windows/Linux).

If we go to the marketing tag-line, ‘Data Aware’; this seems to be somewhat equivalent to the Insight-IQ offering from Isilon but baked into the core product set. I have mentioned here and also to the Isilon guys that I believe that Insight-IQ should be free and a standard offering; generally, by the time that a customer needs access to Insight-IQ, it’s because there’s a problem open with support.

But if I start to think about my environment; when we are dealing with complex workflows for a particular asset, it would be useful to follow that asset; see what systems touch it, where the bottle-necks are and perhaps the storage where the asset lives are might well be the best place. It might not be that the storage is the problem but it is the one common environment for an asset. So I am prepared to be convinced that ‘Data Aware’ is more than marketing; it needs be properly useful and simple for me to produce meaningful reports however.

Qumulo have made the sensible decision that at day one, a customer has the option of deploying on their own commodity hardware or purchase an appliance from Qumulo. I’ll have to see the costs and build our own TCO model, let’s hope that for once it will actually be more cost effective to use my own commodity hardware and not have to pay some opt-out tax that makes it more expensive.

It makes a change to see a product that meets a need today…I know plenty of people who will be genuinely interested in seeing a true competitor to EMC Isilon. I think even the guys still at Isilon are interested; it pushes them on as well.

I look forward to talking to Qumulo in the future.

Stupid name tho’!!

Flash in a pan?

The Tech Report have been running an ‘SSD Endurance Experiment’ utilising consumer SSDs to see how long they last and what their ‘real world’ endurance is really.  It seem that pretty much all of the drive are very good and last longer than their manufacturers state; a fairly unusual state of affairs that!! Something in IT that does better than it states on the can.

The winner is Samsung 840 Pro that manages more than 2.4 Pb of data before it dies!

This is great news for consumers but there are some gotchas; it seems that most drives when they finally fail, they fail hard and leave your data inaccessible; some of the drives’ software happily states they are healthy right up until the day they fail.

A lot of people assume that when SSDs fail and reach their end of life for writes; the data on them will still be readable; it seems that this might not be the case with the majority of drives. You are going to need decent backups.

What does this mean for the flash array market? Well, in general it appears to be pretty good news and that those vendors who are using consumer-grade SSD are pretty much vindicated. But…it does show that managing and monitoring the SSDs in those arrays is going to be key. Software as per usual is going to be king!

A much larger scale test needs to be done before we can be 100% certain and it’d be good if some of the array vendors were to release their experiences around the life of consumer drives that they are using in their arrays.

Still if I was running a large server estate and was looking at putting SSDs in them; I probably would now think twice before forking out a huge amount of cash on eMLC and would be looking at the higher-end consumer drives.