Storagebod's Blog

Date Night...

Warning, this post may contain distasteful and disturbing imagery!!

Like any relationship, the relationship between storage customer and storage vendor can go a bit stale, sometimes a bit awry. Often it's the same old thing; you bore me, you've got nothing to offer which I haven't seen before, you don't satisfy me any more, I've changed, you've not changed and the result is often, I want to see other people.

I hear this on a fairly regular basis from my colleagues in the storage world but often the root cause is simply not communicating properly and clearly. Often I'll hear a colleague moaning that their current array can't do the latest whizz-bang thing but often this simply isn't true. What they have actually is heard from the new exciting partner that their old partner can't do this and they believe them. However, if they bothered to talk to their old partner, they would find that either the feature is available now or firmly on the road-map.

Now I'm not saying that people should not change vendors but don't do it based on lack of information.

And vendors, don't take your customers for granted; spend time listening to them and finding out what other products they are interested in. Don't rubbish those products, don't rubbish the competitor; your customer is looking elsewhere because they have a genuine need that they feel you can't meet.

Treat every customer meeting like your first meeting and make sure that the customer feels valued. Too often I've seen account managers mess up because they took the customer for granted or because a customer has stopped buying, they take their eye off the ball. And the next thing they know, they are history.

So even if you've a long established relationship, try and arrange a date night once in whilst!  Keep those lines of communication open..

Waves of Cool

You see a fair bit of discussion around Google Wave, some people thinking it'll be Google's first big failure and others very postive about it. Now I think it could be Google's first really big high profile failure for the simple reason although it has lots of potential, it has no real obvious killer application at present. And it's hard to see the value of it immediately.

Actually looking at Google Wave, this is one of the first times that Google have actually tried to invent something and get a new concept across; well, certainly one which is new to a lot of people (I worked on similar products for a small start-up many moons ago). Google are very good at taking existing ideas and making them better, these ideas though are nearly always pretty much fully accepted already tho'. Google do not invent, they improve.

There were search engines before Google; Google just did it better.

There was online advertising before Google, Google just does it better and knows how to monetise it better.

There was webmail before Gmail, Google just does it very well.

There's nothing wrong with this approach, arguably some countries have pretty much made this their whole industry. But to truly innovate, now that's hard and all the PhD's in the world are not necessarily going to generate the creative spark needed. 

This is equally true across the whole of the technical landscape and it might not matter whether you invented a concept, you just have to do it better. So whether EMC is more innovative than NetApp or whether IBM have more patents than HDS; it does not really matter from a customer's point of view. I just want products which do want I want them to do at a price which I want to pay. 

I see lots of cool products from lots of cool companies but cool is not a feature that I am willing to pay for in professional life (personally, I'll buy cool stuff all the time but I'm not going to bet my career on cool).

p.s Happy Turkey Day to my colonial readers! Remember to buy lots of cool stuff on Black Friday!

p.p.s I do have some spare invites for Google Wave if you want to give it a go.

Grumpy Storage-Bod

I find some trends in the storage industry at present more than a little irritating; I seem to be going through a bit of an angry stage and for that I apologise. I'm sure my normal cheerful self will re-appear at some point and I can leave the grumpy bit to the inimitable Ian at GrumpyStorage.

Now, a lot of my focus at present is on some particular niche areas of storage but that doesn't stop me looking at the wider picture and it certainly doesn't stop me talking to various vendors about what they are up to. A phrase that comes up more and more is 'our storage is optimised for VMWare and virtualisation'; you see to me that is just a little bit nonsensical. If you take the more and more commonly held belief that there is no workload that cannot be virtualised; what you are saying is that your storage is optimised for every workload out there.

VMWare is a platform, not a workload in itself; for example, we could use VMWare in our corporate billing environment as the underlying platform but you can bet your bottom dollar that most storage which is claimed to be VMWare optimised will just melt! Now this is a real edge case application but I think it's important that vendors realise that edge cases are out there and when you talk about VMWare optimised storage, you really have to qualify what you mean. I would like vendors to start giving more example workloads and also being up front what will and won't work; it'll stop us wasting time on trying things which really won't work.

Let's all stop talking about VMWare (and virtualisation) as a workload in itself and lets start thinking about what the real applications are. Yes, this means you need to understand a bit more and it might involve more than sticking some brochureware on the screen but in the long term, it might be worth it.

And I might stop being so grumpy with some of you guys!!

'Supported?'

Val and 'Zilla were having one of their famous love-ins on Twitter with regards to support of EMC arrays behind the v-Series. It's a topic which has a habit of raising it's ugly head with fairly monotonous regularity.

The NetApp vSeries does not appear on the EMC Support Matrix (one of the few things which doesn't; last time I checked the Goblin Teasmaid was listed on page 976) and hence, it is true to say that it is not fully supported by EMC. And this is where at times it gets contentious and it all comes down to the definition of support.

If you ask EMC whether a DMX will work behind a vSeries, you will get the answer 'It's not supported' but that's not the question you asked. Even if you ask the question is there any reason why a DMX (or CX or VMAX) won't work behind a vSeries, you will get the same answer! If you keep pushing, often you will get dark mutterings that it should work in most cases but there may be border-cases where it won't work and EMC won't support you!

But NetApp can point to a number of customers where it does work and a number of customers where EMC might even do more than take the stance 'It's not supported, if it goes wrong, it's your problem!' I might even have a vague idea where some of these customers are (not us BTW).

The simple truth of the matter is that EMC will support their array and if no fault is found with the array; then that's where in general (unless you are a super special customer), their support will stop. NetApp will support their head and will do their damndest to make it work with EMC arrays. EMC, as far as I know are not doing an Apple and detecting that a NetApp head is talking to their array and then sulk a la Apple, Palm and iTunes!

And I suppose it comes down to access to engineering teams; EMC can work with the other operating system vendors quite happily and get access to the appropriate bits of source and vice-versa but I suspect the same isn't true when dealing with NetApp. Perhaps it could be made true, not sure? But as a customer, it's damned annoying! A v-Series in front of CX for example is potentially an excellent combination. EMC don't actually know whether their arrays will work behind a NetApp head because they will claim that they can't know.

BTW, I believe that the same is true for EMC arrays with SVC and USP-V. EMC will not officially support anyone else's storage device in front of their arrays (I am prepared to be corrected on this mind you!).

I guess the solution is for NetApp to buy EMC? Or the other way round? Or perhaps Cisco could buy them both and bang their heads together.

p.s FWIW, evidence suggests that EMC arrays work quite will behind NetApp heads! And, oh yes; the Celerra VM works pretty well with NetApp storage behind it.

Terms of Service

One of the things you get used to as a consumer of services is that at times changes to the terms and conditions of that service irritate you and you consider moving your custom. Most of the time you don't and eventually you learn to live with the changes. Actually, most of the times, the changes don't make a jot of difference and you are just irritated for the sake of being irritated.

As consumers of 'cloud applications'; this happens to us a lot; Twitter changes something, we all howl, it generally stays changed and we learn to live with it. User-interfaces change underneath us all the time, we have no choice and we learn the new interface. We cannot opt-out.

Now, look around your data centre; how many applications have you got running on legacy hardware/operating systems which are long out of support and in some case, the company which built them no longer exists? As you own the infrastructure, you can simply take the decision to opt-out and continue to run the application. A Business Unit might have very good reasons for continuing to run the application but it could simply be the case of 'It Aint Broke, So Don't Fix It'.

If Cloud Infrastructures become the norm, this no longer becomes quite so tenable. If your Cloud Provider upgrades it's underlying infrastructure and you find your instance no longer works; your only opt-out might well to be find a way of moving that instance into a infrastructure which will support it. However, if the application is core and lots of applications partner with it; this might not be easy.

For support teams, this might finally give them the stick they need to encourage maintenance of applications enabling them to upgrade but if you are running a private cloud infrastructure, you could find yourself in the position where you have legacy clouds...and that will just make things worse.

Not a Cloud Storage Problem

Before we all get carried away and pick on Cloud Storage as a specific target; perhaps we should sit back and think. It is not Cloud Storage; it is the Public Cloud which is the problem; the most visible failures have been storage related, but let's be honest; without storage, you don't have a Cloud Environment.

Cloud providers of Storage, Compute etc need to be held up to the highest standards of availability. You would not outsource your computing environment to Accenture, Cap Gemini, IBM etc without doing your due diligence, or perhaps you would?

Actually, I can think of many cases where people have outsourced various key parts of their business without due diligence; web-hosting for example, lots of SMBs have hosted their websites on random web-hosting companies with very little in the way of investigation. We have simply got into the habit of trusting people and we have accepted the enthusiastic amateur who starts a business. 

But this business has got too big and important; but it aint a Cloud Storage problem! Stop throwing bricks at Cloud Storage; start holding the whole hosted computing business to account. Demand SLAs, verify SLAs, check insurances, ask for references, ask for evidence of best practise operating procedures. Be an informed consumer!

However, also accept that if you pay peanuts; you'll get monkeys. So don't just look at the cost, consider the value!

100% Virtualised? Let's try for 99%

A lot of posts and talks from people involved in VMware and especially when we start talking about the Private Cloud talk about 100% virtualised data centres. And there's always the nay-sayers like me who point out that there are niche applications which currently can't be virtualised. These include applications which run specialist hardware and applications which have real-time requirements; in my world of Broadcast Media, these are often one and the same.

But there a whole bunch of other applications; often niche and often from small vendors which can't be virtualised for no other reason than the fact that the vendor says they can't. And the reason? It's not been tested, often the applications have very restrictive hardware requirements which are basically dictated by the vendor's ability to test against multiple hardware variants and VMware (and other virtualisation technologies) is really just another hardware variant. I have a whole bunch of these where people swear blind that they can't be virtualised, I don't believe them.

So I'm going to have a go; fortunately, as well starting to build a new storage team, I have another job which involves running a test and integration department. Hence I have all the test cases etc for alot of these apps already built, so it should be just a case of opportunistically running these tests against a non-virtualised and a virtualised enviroment and seeing the differences. It's going to be a case of fitting it in when we can but we've managed to scrounge some fairly meaty hardware to build our new virtual environment on.

I still don't think you can virtualise everything; especially in an environment which has specialist requirements; in the same way it would be very hard for some environments to get rid of their mainframes, it will be hard for some environments to get rid of all the non-virtualised stuff and replacing all your non-x86 with x86 hardware. But with some work, we might be able to get rid of more than we can today.

An Exercise in Utility

EMC and VMWare's coming together with Cisco is an exercise in Utility. If we take Nick Carr's analogy of comparing utility computing with the power-generation industry, what the VCE alliance could be said to be is an attempt to define a de-facto standard for the 'compute unit'. An attempt even to define what voltage the Cloud should run at.

This is not necessarily a bad thing and there will come a time when we do need a standard for the 'compute unit'; even a de-facto unit isn't necessarily a bad thing. De-facto standards happen all the time; the processor has almost become a de-facto standard in that of the Intel chip, the desk-top operating system standard is pretty much Windows (and this from a Linux/MacOS fan).

Around these 'standards'; an industry has been built and thrives. And where there are standards in computing, there are dissenting voices and where there are dissenting voices, little industries spring and thrive in their niche.

But considering where we are in the development of cloud computing and especially, the infrastructure as a service play; arguably this is a bold and a very risky play. Much of what is being offered is at least behind the scenes, the proverbial swan; 'graceful and elegant on the top, with little legs paddling like mad'. Perhaps this is why that this coming together is in the form of a services company? It's just too hard for a currently over-worked IT department to make the technology play nice together?

Thoughts on the Acadian Dream

So EMC, Cisco and VMware finally confirm their partnership and the formation of Acadia (that really ought to have an R in it!!); much rumoured and trailled by many over the past few months. Actually anything to do with Cisco seems to really struggle at keeping secret; more leaky than Cardiff on St David's Day.

So what does this mean to me as a customer and where's the value? Already a customer of EMC, Cisco and VMware; does this have value to me? Well, not at the moment as my infrastructure has a server component which is not Cisco. In fact, I wonder if the VMware value proposition might be damaged long-term if this is not played very carefully.

When EMC bought VMware; a lot of people were concerned whether EMC would turn out to be a good custodian but they did a much better job than I or anyone really thought they would. They just left VMware alone and let them carry on building partnerships with who-ever they wanted and allowed VMware to grow and develop.

In fact, of the possible suitors for VMware, EMC turned out to be ideal as they didn't have a server platform to push and there no real reason to make VMware work better on one company's server as opposed to some-one elses. Good job EMC!

But now this partnership could throw all this good work and custodianship up in the air. Ever since VMware became an independant company again and since the departure of Diane Greene; EMC's influence has been noticably growing or at least, as a customer, I feel that EMC and VMware work a lot closer than they have in the past. Actually conversations I have had suggest that this closeness is only the start and now we have this JV with Cisco.

So there is now potential for VMware to be tuned to work better on one server platform as opposed to another and this is worrying. Yes I get the 'one throat to choke' argument and I remember EMC railling against this argument when IBM used it!

This 'Bod is going to be watching developments very carefully; it's worrying when Microsoft could hold up their hypervisor as an example of infrastructure neutrality and whisper ever so quietly but insistently, 'How neutral is VMware, think of the risk of being locked into their hardware and software...they are no more open than us!'

If VMware take the compelling route of adding value to the partnership by tuning their software to run better on EMC/Cisco kit; their value to me, even as an existing EMC/Cisco customer is a lot less. I look to the hypervisor to give me infrastructure neutrality and common capability; I hope VMware maintain this ethos.

I'd be very sad to see this change; I've been a customer of VMware and I mean *me* personally since VMware Workstation version 1 when they made the sensible decision to release a hobbyist/student license at a decent price.

World of Storcraft

Many of my storage buddies are World of Warcraft addicts or recovering addicts at least; I've recently fallen back off the wagon after seeing the videos for the next expansion and was inspired to start playing again.

Actually levelling a character in Warcraft has many similarities with the world of storage management and administration; it is mostly a matter of repetitive grind, repeating processes over and over again. Yet for some reason, us addicts seem to enjoy it. When I consider many of buddies who play, most of them are fairly senior and have moved away from the daily grind of storage allocations and obviously have had to replace it with another regular grind.

Pretty much the whole of the Player versus Environment (player versus machine) content is actually a simple decision tree;  if this event, trigger this action etc and at one point, there was functionality built into the Warcraft scripting engine to allow whole encounters to be automated but when Blizzard released the first expansion, they removed much of the functionality which allowed play to be automated and the decisions now pretty much always have to be driven by a human.

Why? Because using an automated engine allowed an unfair advantage to be developed and could have led to an escalating war of Bots as opposed to human beings; machines are much better at reacting and responding to simple decision tree based events than humans but where was the fun in that?

But this is precisely what we want to get to in Storage Management; we want fully automated storage management, tools like FAST etc are key and we certainly want decent scripting interfaces to allow us to build our own automation! Actually perhaps Blizzard should get involved because once all the Lun monkeys are freed from the repetitve grind of storage allocations, they'd be freed up to play Warcraft and further fill their coffers!