Storagebod's Blog

Gladiators - Are You Ready!

Last week at #storagebeers, myself and Chris Evans were chatting and I was saying that you couldn't run your business with HP but you could with IBM or Oracle; although that wasn't quite true as IBM and Oracle still needed a network division (but then IBM go and buy a network company). 

So HP announcing Leo Apotheker of SAP as their new CEO seems to indicate that HP realise this and are planning to start going after the application space. I guess this is all going to be about owning the whole stack! 

It's going to be an interesting ride folks. Snorage may be snoring but the stack-wars are going to get interesting. I hear IBM are going to bring back the old dress-code as we head back into this strange 60s timewarp! 

 

Random Ruminations on IT Form and Function

I continue to think about the role and structure of the IT function and how it needs to change as the landscape evolves around us and here are some of my more random thoughts. 

It is important to stop thinking about the scale; scale needs to become completely meaningless; if you think about it, you will terrify yourself and fall into the traps of applying old paradigms. Forget about scale but always account for how to scale. Whatever you do today, you will need to do more of tomorrow.

I think we need to review how operational support, implementation and architectural teams interact. I hesitate to suggest that these all need to become a single function due to the health impact on some of my regular readers. But I think the divorcing of these functions has caused many of the problems that we keep hitting and will continue to do so. In order for management of environments at scale, the feedback loop needs to be closed; this means platform teams who are able manage both the infrastructure from end-to-end but also the infrastructure life-cycle from cradle-to-grave. At the very least, there needs to be regular and open end-to-end reviews involving all the players.

Too often I have seen extremely complex designs created and implemented by people who are not going to run them on a day-to-day basis slowly decay into a morass because the architectural decisions have not taken into account operational procedures, business growth and all those things which the operational teams have to deal with. 

How quickly people forget the support issues and operational headaches caused when they become no longer their problem. How quickly people forget the broken nights caused by overly complex designs which are a nightmare to scale and manage. How quickly people forget cursing the implementation team who have not created basic automation for monitoring and restart scripts.

I can point to some extremely complex storage implementations and layouts which have caused no end of headaches because no account has been made as to how to add more space. 

However even as we consider IT as a service; we also need to review the vertical services that we provide and how best to service our businesses. My favourite example is email and all the related services around email. Email is now so ubiquitous that we know what is required from it but when was the last time anyone did a requirements review of email? I hear lots of talk about Exchange 2010 upgrade projects but little about what the business wants from the service, I suspect that we have stopped asking. 

As we separate services into verticals; this does bring us into conflict at times with horizontal services such as back-up and archiving. Do you use a single back-up and archiving tool or do you encapsulate the backup and archive function into the vertical. Does this breed a multitude of products and does it increase complexity? It could do but if you are charging the business for the provision of the service and they are willing to pay the cost, this may not be important. However as you enter a service-oriented world, you might be competing with external providers. Keeping things as simple as possible would probably make sense but at times a vertical stack might make more sense than a horizontal slice.

We need to consider how we measure our success as an IT service provider and provide business relevant metrics designed to demonstrate value and not to make the IT department look good. For example, I regularly see change metrics demonstrating the number of changes undertaken successfully but what does that mean to the business. Did all those changes actually need to happen? Why are there so many changes? How many of those changes actually needed to happen because of mistakes made in prior changes? What value did those changes generate as opposed to the risk that those changes introduced? 

As we define service metrics with the business; there needs to be a mature discussion about how things like growth are handled. As IT departments, we cannot expect blank cheques but we cannot continue to provide IT services as a pure all you can eat buffet; yes, there is an always open buffet but every visit may attract a cost. 

Every IT spend above a certain threshold needs to have a worked business case and every business case should be up for a spot audit to demonstrate that it actually delivered the business benefit stated; this should not be used to beat people up but should be used to build an understanding as to what actually works and getting better at delivering business benefits.  

Yours,

A Random Bod

It's all fine....

Last week, I sat in a vendor update session with a vendor who wants to sell more into our company; we've a couple of deployments of their stuff and it's fine but there's no real appetite for putting any more footprint on the floor. So we get to the end of the update and the vendor looks up with enthusiasm and pride in their hearts and ask me what I think.

'It looks fine; it ticks all the boxes but I really can't see why I'd buy your product over anyone else's!'

But the roadmap, they say, the roadmap looks good doesn't it?

'It looks fine; certainly doing the right things but it's no different to anyone else's really!'

So what would make you interested? 

'Four to five year costs breakdown? TCO model? ROI model?'

We've got industry leading TCO and ROI figures; we've got customers who save millions using our kit!

'Care to share those figures, what base-line are they starting from? For all I know they might have been the worst managed storage division in history? What industry? I mean if you look at some my proposed metrics for our environment, a large number of storage managers and administrators could be looking to have me shot but my use-case is very different.'

And then the conversation peters out because they can't give me the figures I need. It's going to get harder to sell storage on features, you've all got them or at least they are road-mapped. 

I'm not going to tell you which vendor it was but it could have been pretty much any one of them. Perhaps one of the upcoming announcements will regain my enthusiasm for storage technology but until then, 'It's all fine....'

And another year passes...

I'm not sure how this happened but I appear to have missed my 2nd anniversary of being a storage-blogger; I guess I'm certainly no longer the new boy and I'm not the only end-user storage-blogger these days, although we could do with more. 

I started blogging really as a reaction to all of the vendor blogs which were often full of FUD and marketing BS; I also felt it was about time that some-one started putting the user's case across; those poor misbegotten fools who have to get the latest product from HopkinVale to work. Personally, I think that the vendor blogs have got better but that might be because some of the vitriol has made it's way onto Twitter where it can be dispensed in near real-time. 

So what have I learnt over the past couple of years, pretty much all of it in one of deepest and longest lasting recessions that we have experienced?

If we take away certain technological differences; most storage vendors are pretty much in the same chapter, if not on the same page. There is a herd mentality which is pushing the whole IT infrastructure industry to trying to build stacks. These stacks may be as the result of partnerships but there are also companies who intend to build the whole stack themselves. Independent storage vendors may well struggle in such a tightly integrated market place; 3Par are no longer independent, who could fall next? Compellent? Isilon? NetApp or even the mighty EMC themselves? 

All we can say for sure is that with the crazy price that HP paid for 3Par is that no storage acquisition is going to be cheap now. 

Certainly it seems that most vendors want to do a good job for the customers even if they are completely clueless as to what the customer wants. But that's generally okay as often the customer really has no idea what they want. Strategic thinking currently in many places is still taking the form of 'how do I make it most awkward for my employer to make me redundant'. 

I've found myself hooked into the back-channel between vendors and become more aware of some of the friendships and quiet private respect that some of the vendors have for each other's employees. The public face often is not the private reality but I am also aware of some of the viscerality which transcends logic and is really quite silly. 

I find myself thinking more deeply about the industry and where it is going; it may lead me to changing things in my own career as I look to align with some of the more interesting trends. I find myself even more determined though to tread the sometimes hard path of the honest man and continue to question what I know is wrong or at least appears to me to be wrong. My integrity appears to have become even more important to me now that I appear to have an audience, fools that you are!

But most of all, I've found that I really enjoy this writing stuff! And I especially enjoy throwing the odd English phrase and word in just to educate our colonial brethren!

Thanks for reading.....

 

Read Only

My name is Martin Glassborow and I am a gadget addict! 

My name is Martin Glassborow and I am a book addict!

So, my name is Martin Glassborow and I have a new Kindle!

I wasn't going to buy a new Kindle, I have a perfectly good iPad which makes a pretty good eReader and I also have an iRiver Story, which is an eReader. So why did I go and buy a new Kindle, I really don't need one!? I blame Ian Foster and the like! But now I've got one, I'm pretty happy I did!

I got the new Kindle v3 with WiFi+3G and it's a little slab of reading happiness! The E-ink screen is fantastic; much better than on my iRiver and the refreshes are quick enough that after a while you no longer notice the screen flash. Actually the size of the screen and the way text is formatted on it seems to suit the way my eyes scan and I read even quicker than normal, this may or may not be a good thing; I'm not sure! 

But it's not perfect and rather than focus on the great things, I'm going to list what enhancements and improvements I would like to see.

Library management sucks! Yes, there are categories but adding books to categories on the Kindle itself is painful and slow; the keyboard is absolutely horrible. The ability to manage your books and put them into categories needs to be driven from the 'Manage Your Kindle' page!! Once you've got more than 30 or 40 books in your library; you really want to be able to manage and categorise them on the website.

The keyboard is horrid! I cannot imagine doing very much annotation using it and hence I think this limits the use of Kindle by students. Personally I think some kind of touch-screen would be better but obviously this needs to be done without compromising the quality of the E-ink screen. 

It's great that you can have a number of Kindles attached to an account but this needs to be enhanced, certainly for families. My credit card is associated with my account and I really don't have a problem with my beloved wife buying books on my card; what's mine is hers and what's hers is her own and all that. However, do I really want to let my daughter lose with my card? I am not convinced but I would love her to have a Kindle and actually, it would be kind of nice for all the books to go into one big family library.

However, I would like to be able to restrict what she reads to a certain extent; I feel slightly uncomfortable with this idea as I had an adult library card at a very early age but even so, I would like to think that the librarian would have stopped me taking out books that were completely age inappropriate. At the very least, I would like to see what books she was checking out of our Kindle library.

I would like searches to have the ability to search not just the books currently on the Kindle but to search all books in my Kindle library. This I can see being extremely useful in the future. 
I want my Kindle to be waterproof, so that I can read it in the bath without fear! 

I would like to be able to choose the voice when I get the Kindle to read books to me; it would be nice if it could read fiction in my Grand-mother's voice sometimes or perhaps Shakespeare could be read in John Gielgud's voice or perhaps dear Larry's voice etc, etc...you get the picture.

And finally, a general industry observation....why are e-books so expensive? Surely the cost of publication is massively reduced and surely this should be reflected in the price? I can see no real reason for pretty much parity pricing with dead-tree volumes! 

#storagebeers schedule - Autumn 2010

Although due to work commitments, I am not attending 360IT; I am intending to journey up to Earls Court after work to hopefully meet up with the inestimable Chris Evans and the indomitable Alex MacDonald tomorrow (Wednesday 22nd September 2010). If you are attending the show or are about generally, you are welcome to join us.

At present there is no agreed venue, so keep an eye on Twitter for venue.

As for more #storagebeers.

I am attending SNW Europe, so I very much suspect that there will be a meet-up there.

I will also be at IP Expo, so expect an announcement of #storagebeers there.

There are a couple of other events/announcements which hopefully I'll be attending, so watch Twitter for announcements!!

Special?

One of the 'innovations' which EMC are to be congratulated on is not a product and no, it's not their Social Media policy; it's the concept of the vSpecialist or as I prefer to think of them, 'vGeneralists'. I think as a model for end-user departments, it is a concept that has merit and one which more companies should explore. But in many ways, it's not a new idea; there are many aging mainframe bods who in many ways fit the mould as well; many mainframe system-programmers could turn their hand easily to most of the disciplines within the infrastructure.

 
We did have our own specialisms; I certainly never worked in a mainframe storage team or network team but I am certainly of no doubt that when I was working in the world of mainframe, I probably could have done the day-to-day job of any of those. And even in my brief spell as an mainframe application programmer, I was certainly expected to write my own JCL*, plan job schedules, allocate the right sort of disk and create many of my tools. So arguably, in the era when mainframe was dominant, we had both 'vSpecialists' and 'DevOps'; so it is great to see it coming back round again.

I long for the day when we don't have Storage Managers, Network Managers, Server Managers and all the layers beneath them; I'm not sure what we should call this new breed; perhaps we'll end up with System Programmers, Systems Managers and the likes again working providing platforms and not infrastructure siloes. I long for the day when the silos which were never there in the past can be removed.  

But I bet those bloody DBAs stay a breed apart!!!

p.s Yeah, I never wrote my own JCL, I only edited someone else's...but hell, we all know that there has only been one original piece of JCL written ever!!

 

 

The Joy of Cloud

Although I have may suggested that 'Cloud is the new ITIL' in my previous blog; there is an alternative view, 'Cloud is the new sex'!

People talk a lot about Cloud, but few people are doing it!

There are many Cloud Experts, most of them have never done it!

You probably wouldn't want to sleep with most Cloud Experts! 

The best people at Cloud are too busy doing it to talk about it!

There are mixed opinions as to whether Cloud is better in private or public!

Some people would simply prefer a nice cup of tea!

Many people worry if they are doing Cloud the right way!

Choose your partner carefully before doing Cloud!

Cloud can be expensive if done with the wrong people!

Cloud can be career-limiting if done with the wrong people!

There are many types of Cloud, some are just wrong and some are just personal preference!

Your attitude to Cloud may be influenced by your early experience of IT!

Older people may be better at Cloud than you expect!

Cloud was invented in the sixties! You only think you're the first person to do it!

Your first experience of Cloud may be underwhelming!

Cloud can be messy!

How you do Cloud is probably more important than the tools!

Take your time when doing Cloud! 

Cloud can be complicated but it doesn't have to be!

Cloud with multiple partners can take careful scheduling and planning!

Only exhibitionists do Cloud in front of Windows! This does not make it wrong but it might amuse some observers.

Without protection, Cloud can lead to unintended consequences and virii.

I'm sure you can think of your own....

Cloudy With A Chance of Miracles...

Cloud will fail for the reasons just about every other IT initiative does and that is almost complete intractability of every Corporate IT department in the world and their ability to resist change. 

There will always be some reason why it can't work here. 

Of course there is lots of enthusiasm at the moment and lots of CIOs telling vendors and their peers that they are going great guns with Cloud; of course, they are surrounded by people telling them what they want to hear. I am sure that a lot of money is being spent on Cloud-enabled technology; the branding of VMware as some kind of magic cloud bean enables IT departments to say 'Yes, we're doing Cloud; look we've got lots of VMware deployed!'

These are the very same IT departments who five years ago who would have told you that they had embraced ITIL (and we can argue whether ITIL is a good or bad thing) but there sure were a lot of people claiming that they were implementing ITIL. Of course when you started to ask questions, they had implemented their own tweaked version of ITIL because ITIL wasn't really appropriate to their organisation. And then if you dug a bit more, what you actually found is that nothing had really changed and still the IT department merrily carried on in its own sweet way. 

And so I feel that most Cloud initiatives will be the same. Too many people with vested interests who are unwilling to expose their organisations to the level of change and scrutiny that is going to be needed to implement Cloud. 

I'm sure Chuck and other vendor 'leaders' talk to some very enthusiastic CIOs who are all about embracing the Cloud but in five years time will we be scratching our heads and asking what's changed? 

Cloud will be the new ITIL; just wait for Cloud v2 and Cloud v3.

But it really doesn't have to be this way however it needs some significant changes which are hard for many people to digest and get their head around. It's not all about IT people changing either.

Firstly, people need to understand the value of IT and not just the cost of IT. Let's take email for example; when email goes down, many companies seem to come to a grinding halt; so the email service has a value. The question needs to be asked what that value is, what can my company do now which it could not do without email. Perhaps it enables the company to communicate with its customers in a more timely manner and that has value. Do we actually know what that value is? Businesses need to ascribe value to the services that the IT department provide and perhaps they might come to the conclusion that they don't value some services.

Secondly, IT people need to stop operating under an atmosphere of fear; if the services provided are ascribed business value, some of the fear should be removed. Once value is understood, enhancing value is actually possible and perhaps at that point, implementing change to enhance value becomes an imperative not something to be resisted. IT people need to be proud of the service that they provide and not slightly ashamed; this is not about geek pride but a case of being able to say that we do a great job.

Thirdly, IT leaders need to stand up and say 'We believe what we do has value and we are not just a cost but we are looking for ways to improve the value of our service!' Too many IT leaders are falling into the trap of believing that their services are too expensive and hence find themselves in a constant spiral of negative evaluation. Actually most of them have little real idea as to what the value of the services that they provide actually is. 

Perhaps when you find such an organisation, let me know....I might want to work there!

Bod Block

Firstly thanks for all of you who have quietly tweeted me just to make sure that I'm alive, I can verify that I'm very much alive; just suffering a bit from blogger's block and a complete lack of blog inspiration. 

I've been building a new storage block for the Bod Block. It's kind of crazy what we can now run at home and the quality of the home NAS products available, I'm a big fan of the Synology NAS boxes and the fact that they just work.

But this time, I've decided to build my own again. I came across someone selling a 1U Mini-ITX case on Ebay at a reasonably cheap price and it spiraled from there.

Add a Gigabyte GA-D510UD Motherboard; an Atom based dual core box with 4 on-board SATA ports and a Gigabit Ethernet. 

2 x cheapo 2Gb DDR2 sticks

2 x Intel E1000 Gigabit Ethernet cards which I had lying around.

4 x Samsung 2 Tb Spinpoint F3 EcoGreen Hard Drives

and a 4 Gb Flash Disk for a boot drive.

Put it all together, turn it on and swear! Ye gods the power-supply is noisy. Find a supplier for silent 1U power-supply; fortunately with an Atom-based motherboard, the draw is so low, that I can get away with a fairly low-wattage power-supply and there are fan-less 1U power-supplies around.

New power-supply arrives and what do you know? It is indeed silent but its ATX connector is too short, order an extension cable and some shorter SATA cables whilst I'm at it for cabling tidiness. 

Put it all together again and find that the CPU fan is noisey as well and it vibrates the case. Order some quiet fans.

Fans arrive, put it all together again and yet more noise but it's quieter. 

Go to my craft box and find a small sachet of Sugru; make some anti-vibration grommets and life is much better. So it's not silent but it's pretty close, I think it's quieter than my Synology DS409 and it's certainly cheaper even after all the extra bits I was not expecting to buy.

I've decided to give NexentaStor a whirl as my storage operating system and from a raw performance point of view, it's doing pretty well. I can get 60-70Mbytes out of it via NFS, CIFS and iSCSI; wierdly, it seems to perform better at write operations. I've not set-up the additional Gigabit interfaces yet, next on my to-do list.  

I've found a few niggles and it took a couple of attempts to get it installed to a USB stick and I am really not sure what I did to get it installed. The GUI looks nice but it is strangely counter-intuitive and some things just do not work properly. Group editting for example needs to be done from the CLI to get it to stick.

Is it better than OpenFiler or FreeNAS? 

Well I seem to get similar performance from all of them, so I suspect that's a hardware bottle-neck. As a pure storage device, Nexenta is probably better featured; for all round capability tho' including wierd and wonderful protocols such as AFP and also additional media-serving capabilities, you'd have to go a long way to beat FreeNAS. Openfiler is probably easier to get up and running if you are looking for a pure storage system but if you want dedupe, compression, replication, automated tiering; NexentaStor is the one for you. 

Just be aware that at times, you are probably going to end up scratching your head and end up at the CLI to get it do what you want. That said, I managed to provision 30 iSCSI LUNs extremely quickly from the CLI and it is probably easier and more logical than the NetApp CLI amongst others.

Of course, you could just be sensible and buy an appliance off the shelf but where would the fun be in that.