Storagebod's Blog

42 is the answer

The trick to getting the right answer is to ask the right question; so often I talk to people who have come up with answers but have asked the wrong question. Indeed, they have often started with the answer and worked back to the question which gives that particular answer.

As vendors, you've probably seen this; you see an RFx and the way it has been phrased discloses a lot about the answer wanted; often, the questions are phrased in such a way that you can already see that a procurement decision is already more than 50% made. 

I'm not sure that this is a particularly solveable problem; we are all mostly human (there are exceptions) and we all carry the baggage of experience. Indeed, it is often that experience which allows us to leap to close approximations of what the right answer will be; perhaps those approximations are good enough but perhaps they will simply show that we don't understand the problem.

And of course as a vendor, if you only have one answer; you want to twist the question in such a way that your answer is right. When all you have is a hammer, every problem looks a nail but even if your hammer is the best hammer in all the world and sure you could bang in a screw, at the end of the day, there will be disatisfaction with results. But if you have hundreds of different hammers and you spend hours looking for just the right hammer when another hammer would have been equally good, your customer might just pick up a rock.

Sometimes customers don't just want answers, they want solutions. This a hard thing for a hammer seller to accept; yes, you make great hammers but I want the nails, the saws, the screws, the chisels, the wood, the craftsman, the sails, the paint, the glue etc. I'm building a boat, not banging in nails. Actually, I've changed my mind; I'd rather buy the vertically integrated solution and I'm going to seeing a boat-builder.

So life is never especially simple but I think that we all could do better when phrasing questions and giving context to our answers. 

And the question which gives the answer 42? 

How old is Storagebod tomorrow?....Happy Birthday to me! 

 

#awesomesauce

Like modern-day fairy dust, #awesomesauce can be liberally applied to everyday objects and make them appear special but like fairy dust, the illusion often fades. 

#awesomesauce has many uses in the world of IT

    It can bring the appearance of coherence 

    It can make accidental seem deliberate 

    It can make visions appear as solid objects

    It can make short-sightedness appear as focus

    It can make profligacy appear virtuous 

    It can turn OEM to OWN

    It can turn partnership into eternal bliss

After consuming #awesomesauce you may believe many things and you will be compelled to tell the world of the #awesomesauce you have just consumed!

But #awesomesauce needs to be consumed with care; for it can lead to a funny taste in the mouth and general feelings of nausea from both the diners but also everyone in contact with the diners.

There is much #awsomesauce around at the moment, so beware the #awesomesauce and the purveyors of #awesomesauce as unlike the tales of magic and fairy dust; there are no frog princes, Robespierre saw to that!  

Indulge Me....

If you came to this post expecting to read another rant about the state of the storage industry or an attack on this vendor or that vendor, I'm afraid that you are going to be disappointed. This is a purely indulgent post by Martin and not a 'Storagebod' post.

Like many people, I have many roles in this life and you have got to see a fair amount of them talked about here and on Twitter but probably one of the most important of them is 'Doting Daddy' to my little girl. Like most parents, I am very proud of my kid; she's funny, bright, caring, loving; to all intents and purposes, she's special! But she's even more special to us for a couple of reason; firstly she's a surviving twin, we lost her sister at 26 weeks but secondly she has a condition called arthrogryposis. 

Now I don't blame you if you've never heard of it; it's not the most common condition in the world and it's an umbrella term which covers a number of conditions which present in similar ways but are unrelated. But in simple terms, it is a condition which affects joints in various ways; it can affect a few joints or pretty much all of them. In Meggie's case it effects all her limbs. There is no cure or reversal and a combination of therapies and treatments are involved; physio therapy, occupational therapy and indeed orthopaedic surgery have all had their place and will continue to their place in our lives. Wheelchairs, splinting and calipers are all part of the paraphernalia of our lives.

But apart from the physical disabilities, she's just a normal little girl obsessed by reading, robots, aliens, computers, Star Wars, fast cars, guitar-based music and the colour pink! 

Still if I look back nearly nine years ago, when she was born early and in special care, with a pair of shell-shocked parents; grieving for both a lost twin but also for the surviving twin wondering what life was to bring, I am quite frankly amazed that we are where we are. One of the reasons that we are where we are is a pretty amazing bunch of people who founded a charity in UK called The Arthrogryposis Group, lovingly known by it's members as TAG!

We were put in touch with them very early on and then just a few months after Meggie was born, we went to their annual get together; TAG conference. TAG conference changed our lives and outlook; kids screaming around in their wheel-chairs, causing mayhem and mirth, grown-ups who were just getting on with their lives, an Olympic Gold Medalist and people who we didn't have to explain anything to and just took us in.  

Meggie describes it as wheelchair world, it's the one time when she doesn't have to feel different to all her friends; she can just get on with being her, she doesn't have to explain what she can and can't do...they already know.

TAG doesn't just provide Conference, it also arranges an Adventure Camp for Teenagers; a week where everything is arranged around them and a week where they don't have to feel guilty that they are holding their friends back or that activities are having to be specially tailored around them. They are just like everyone else! 

Also TAG has been instrumental in getting multi-disciplinary clinics set-up throughout the UK so that this complex condition can be treated holistically and not just as a disparate set of symptoms; indeed, TAG was behind the first International Arthrogryposis Symposium where experts from throughout the world gathered to discuss the condition. 

And finally, TAG provides a place for people to contact each other and get support from each other. 

Obviously, all of this costs money and this week-end, TAG is fortunate to be the subject of the BBC Radio 4 appeal; please tune in if you can or listen on the BBC website. And if Storagebod has ever made you laugh, scream with anger or even taught you something; perhaps you could consider giving something to TAG...

Thanks for reading.....normal service will be resumed soon!

Martin

#storagebeers schedule

Quick note on some proposed #storagebeers

15th April 2010 - London

13th May 2010 - Global !EMCWorld #storagebeers - also known as DaaD beers i.e Drunk at a Distance!

18th May 2010 - After SNIA Academy event in London 

Venues TBA! 

Please come along! They are generally great networking opportunities.

My Turn!

My turn to rag on XIV; this time I'm not going to rag on the architectural issues related to availability, I want to pick up on something from their marketting blurb. And I quote

Scalable in All Key Aspects!

XIV technology scales in all key aspects, including capacity, cache size, switching and processing power.

Pardon me for taking exception to this. Capacity? In what world does XIV scale in capacity? It scales to 79Tb useable! Okay, you could take 2Tb drives and this would double etc but realistically how useful is this? Many enterprises are going to need 10s of XIV arrays to meet their requirements. 

Of course, XIV is really easy to manage. But it's going to need to be because your admins are going to be busy enough managing these many arrays. Still, I can think of some plus points; the array is so small that secure multi-tenancy doesn't become an issue; if you are a hosting provider, simply provision an array per user!

But array size is important; as companies deal with larger and larger data-sets, they need larger arrays. Limited capacity causes all kinds of problems and makes processes like upgrades, data-refreshes and migrations more complex.

Even migrating some of our 'smaller' arrays would require migrating to multiple XIVs. Even if thin provisioning was to gain us 40-50% improvements in capacity utilisation, we would be filling the XIV to the gills leaving no room for growth.

 IBM have so many issues with XIV at present; some might be perception as opposed to reality. I think it's time to for them to have a very good look at the architecture and the limitations that it has. IBM have said in the past that there is no reason why XIV cannot scale to larger but at the moment it seems that the strategy to scale is to stick bigger spindles in the array. 

So I have to ask; will XIV GEN3 and GEN4 scale the number of spindles and nodes? If not, why not? Is it

    1) Customer demands i.e no-one wants a bigger XIV

    2) Architectural issues i.e it can't scale any further

    

Storage Poverty

In the recent Infosmack that yours truly took part in, the issue of Storage Poverty was raised by Alex McDonald of NetApp. Although it was hard to get a hard and fast definition of what storage poverty is, what it really boiled down to was the paucity of true innovation within the storage arena and why we continue to do things in a particular way. 

This got me thinking about what some of the reasons are and why this storage thing is so hard; why is true innovation so hard? Why do we continue to do things the hard way? 

And I think it comes down to this, storage teams are the custodians of the life-blood of most businesses; the information which makes a business run. Customer records, billing records, everything you need to keep your business alive. You can probably cope with the a server bursting into flames and the odd application crashing but can you cope with your storage dying?

Is it really any surprise that we are so conservative? What we do has to work....So storage guys want real proof before they are willing to change tried and proven processes. And even if the process is broken, we know how it's broken.

Innovation always comes with risk as well as potential reward....are the rewards worth the risk? I'm not saying that they are not but it's a fairly easy argument to be placed in the way of any change.

BFI

BFI is an acronym which gets thrown around a bit and could stand for many things

Brute Force and Ignorance is one...but I've come up with a hopefully a new one which goes along with it, Big F**king Infrastructure. And this is my problem with Cloud at present; there seems to be a trend around at the moment that the point of Cloud is to build Big F**king Infrastructure. 

Now as an infrastructure bod, I can appreciate this and indeed, the part of me which likes looking at big tanks, fighter jets, aircraft carriers etc; finds BFI cool! Who wouldn't want to build the biggest, baddest data centre in the world? 

But is it really the point of Cloud? And this is what concerns me! Cloud should not just be about building infrastructures, it certainly should not be about turning data centres into Building Blocks. Cloud needs to be more than that.

It needs to be about something more; it needs to be about changing development methodologies and tools. If we just use it to simply replicate at scale what we do today, I think that we have failed. It certainly needs to be more than packaging and provisioning. It needs to be about elegance and innovation. 

I really don't want Cloud to turn into something like Java; what do I mean? Don't get me wrong, Java is great (and the JVM is greater) but how much Java written is simply C written in Java? Lots, believe me! I don't believe that Java has changed development paradigms nearly as much as some people like to believe. A large amount of C++ code is also simply C written using some of the features of C++ but not the fundamental structural changes brought by C++. And so it goes on.

Cloud brings elasticity to infrastructure, applications need to be designed with this elasticity in mind. A database needs to be able to scale up on demand and then gracefully shrink back down again; perhaps it needs to be able to start additional instances of itself on different machines to meet a peak and then when the load falls away, it should remove those instances whilst maintaining transactional consistency and integrity. 

Developers need to be able to design applications which wax and wane with demand. Yes we can fix a lot of these sort of issues at an infrastructure level but is that actually the right place to do it? We can fix a huge amount of problems with BFI but are we bringing sledgehammers to bear? 

So Cloud needs to be more than BFI! And that is why I was glad to see this story here about VMware and Redis; like Zilla writes, I also know >.< NoSQL apart from a couple of presentations at Cloud Camp and what I've read on the Net. After sitting in presentations by VMWare employees where they seemed to be equating Virtualisation with Cloud; it is great to see that they are looking beyond that. Let's hope it continues.

Kansas....

The thing with the Internet, Social Media and all these wonderful technologies is that the world no longer stops at Kansas or where-ever else you happen to call home. The world is The World and it maybe time to start getting used to that. 

So if you work in PR, Marketing, Social Media and anything else which involves getting your message across to a global market, can I suggest that this list or something like it might be very useful. It stops you organising important webinars and events on major holidays. And yes, somewhere in the world is always on holiday but try to be aware of it. 

And then use it; for example, an invite to an event saying, we know it's a public holiday where you are but we've got this event which you might be interested in; however we understand if you can't make it and here is the link to where a recording of the event is being stored. 

Also if you've got storage announcements to make; here's a list of dates to avoid

    March 31st - my birthday!

    May 26th - little Bod's birthday!

    May 30th - my Wedding anniversary!

    July 21st - Mrs Bod's birthday!

I shall ignore the subject of EMC-World and the fact that it appears that the whole of EMC would turn into a giant pumpkin if it left North America.

Seller of Dreams

I like Chuck's blog, I suspect I'd like Chuck in the flesh as well; I like the seller of dreams. And that is what he does but I'm going to call EMC and him on the latest dream being sold. Not because it's not a good dream; it has potential to be a very good dream, if EMC can actually get a grasp of it.

About this time last year, EMC announced a product with a big fan-fare; you may remember it, it was called V-MAX and it was announced with a load of exciting features. Most importantly was FAST and it was to come in two tranches:-

FAST v1, which pretty much everyone not drinking the EMC kool-aid decided was not very exciting. In fact many people struggled to see what the difference between FAST V1 was and the existing SymOptimizer product...apart from the fact, that you could actually buy the SymOptimizer product!

FAST v2, which pretty much everyone who wasn't drinking somebody else's kool-aid decided was pretty damn exciting. Okay, Compellent had got there first but this was large Enterprise scale stuff. 

And here we are, pretty much a year on; FAST v1 struggled out of the door before the end of 2009 but we are now in 2010...another big EMC announcement, this time even more spectacular than the VMAX announcement. Spectacular in two ways

    1) The vision is huge; this is EMC's moonshot! 

    2) There is no product at present (but we are promised big things at EMC World)

Actually, comparing it to the moonshot may end up to be a very good comparison because when Kennedy announced the race to the Moon; the US were massively behind the Soviets. Arguably, EMC are massively behind companies like IBM who have a very good product in Sysplex but that's a mainframe product. 

But before getting to the moon; can you finish what you've started elsewhere? So you before you start on the grandiose plans, deliver what you explicitly promised last year; that is block-level FAST working with virtually-provisioned volumes. Because at the moment, it looks like 3PAR have beaten you to the punch!

And howabout delivering what you have been promising in private for some time; a light-weight, performant and reliable SRM tool? 

So EMC get:-

A* for Ambition

C- for Delivery

p.s Chuck, if you manage to get the moon, work out what you are going to do there! It'd be unfortunate to get there and for everyone to applaud the effort and then simply get on doing what they were doing before. Make sure that people actually want this, not a few sad geeky dreamers.

p.p.s Still I note from the Now web-site, despite Alex's assurances that OnTap 8 was going to be GA next week and this was some weeks ago; OnTap 8 is still sitting at RC3. 

Not Accepted Everywhere

There are problems with any kind of automated storage tiering but does that mean it's not worth doing? 

I think it is worth looking at the kinds of problems that storage tiering is intended to fix and especially storage tiering of the automated kind. I guess at the simplest level, it is about getting your data onto the right type of storage and ensuring that you get the best use of the various resources that you have. However defining what is the right type of storage is not easy and it also may change over the lifetime of the data.

Automated storage tiering can address a number of objectives and we might have to also be pragmatic about how it will be misused as a substitute to what we may feel is best practise. 

Automated storage tiering may allow us to make much more efficient use of an expensive resource or at least what is perceived to be an expensive resource. 

SSDs are currently expensive if you look at them purely as places to store data at rest or data that has less than demanding access requirements but if we consider them as the place where our most I/O intensive workloads live; they become more economic. 

SATA disks are cheap if you look at them as purely places to store data pretty much at rest but it we consider them as places for our most I/O intensive workloads to live; they become less economic, especially if you take into account environmental considerations. 

FC disks are at the mid-point and cannot yet be discounted from the equation as much as people might like to. This is going to change and it is this mid-tier which will eventually disappear. 

So automated storage tiering should allow you to use disk more efficiently. And it might bring some unexpected benefits; for example, how many people have legacy applications which have databases which simply grow forever?

Be honest, lots of us have; much as I would like to pretend differently, it is a fact of life for many people that one of the first non-functional requirements which get sacrificed in any development is the ability to get data out into an archive. 

And many of us have legacy applications which are never going to be fixed and will simply grow forever; at present, they sit on FC disk which more or less does the job but it is not especially economical on a pure IOPs measure or a pure capacity measure and it gets less so. But to take advantage of a SSD/SATA mixed environment would require a massive amount of rework and continuing maintenance. Automation is the key to this, especially automation which allows us to optimise at the sub-file and sub-LUN basis. 

The right thing to do would be insist that archiving gets integrated to the applications but the pragmatic thing may be to utilise storage tiering to do this. 

We all agree that archiving is a good thing but so is exercise.....and if they invented a pill to stop people getting fat even fewer of us would exercise despite the additional benefits that exercise brings. But just curbing obesity would be considered a major advance; we need to at least consider automated storage tiering in the same light...

And for all you BURA specialists out there; I feel your pain but pragmatic short-term fixes win very often in this space.

p.s brownie points for anyone who gets the reference in the title....