Storagebod's Blog

Thoughts on Filestore

So Symantec have decided to enter the world of Cloud Storage; I'm not sure that simply packaging up a Linux Software appliance with some clustering actually counts but it was inevitable; if it was not packaged as Cloud, it would have been packaged as a basic NAS offering.

Realistically, Symantec needed to do something as NAS is a huge problem to them; if I go NAS, then I don't need VxFS and VVM. Even in their core Solaris market, ZFS will start to damage them. The volume manager as a standalone product is becoming an irrelevance. I've no idea what the penetration is in the Windows server markets but I doubt it is high.

Then there is Veritas Cluster Services; if I use virtualisation technologies such as VMware, then the clustering is part of the Hypervisor and I don't need VCS. Oracle RAC replaces the need at the high-end where VCS had a lot of it's core deployments protecting Oracle databases.

And I'm not sure what impact NetBackUp 6 has had on Symantec's share of the back-up market but it has been a poor release; both 6 and 6.5 have undergone patch after patch with problems always being fixed at the next patch level.

But Filestore is lauching into an increasingly crowded market-place and just comes across as a 'me too' product; I think Symantec are going to struggle with this one, it currently lacks features and it's price point is not as attractive it might be. I see some very tough times ahead for the Enterprise Software side of Symantec; the market's moved and I'm not sure that they can offer me enough.

#storagebeers

If you are attending IP Expo tomorrow and why wouldn't you be as the great blogger Chad Sakac is speaking amongst others; there will hopefully be a meet-up afterwards for beers at the The Atlas pub round the corner.

Please come along and join the discussion; the only rules are no vendor baiting and product pimping! It would be great to put some faces to names. And I really don't want to drink by myself! 

If you have any questions about the job I've posted about; it would be a great place to try and quiz me.

Work in the Sky, not Clouds

Okay, I very rarely blatantly refer to the company I work for; I don't hide it but I try not to talk too specifically about Sky. But I can't really avoid it this time as we've got a couple of storage analyst positions available. These are fairly unusual in that they are on the Broadcast side of the company and oh yes, there currently is not strictly a Broadcast Storage Support team; there's me doing it as an ad-hoc role.

So this is the chance to get in and actually try to do things right; it's a greenfield role and we get to work on defining our own processes and procedures. There's no legacy SAN, no legacy back-up and no legacy apps; in fact there's not a lot at present. There's a few packing cases and empty racks (and a building site).

You'll probably look at the list of skills and think WTF! But don't worry, there is probably about a dozen people in the country with the exact skills we are looking for in the UK, so we accept that we are going to have to train people. This is about attitude and wanting to get things done!

No you won't get virtualisation, you won't get deduplication and you won't get Cloud but all the skills you pick up will be relevant to all of these. You'll get the chance to build a system which will potentially redefine the core business workflow in Sky and you'll get to play with and see some cool stuff. Hell, we might even pay you to do it.

And you'll get to work with me...so it's not perfect!

Do you have an Umbrella?

Every now and then, we have 'interesting' conversations at work about morbid subjects; recently we had a discussion about another 9/11 and whether our systems could cope with it. Not the systems that you get to see but our internal systems and how we scale for peak load and what peak load actually means. Scaling web-servers is pretty easy but other systems don't necessarily scale so easily.

We had recently put a new system in and then Michael Jackson went and died; so that was a good test for the system, which coped pretty well. Tragic events are what generates traffic; that and England winning the World Cup but we have generally have to deal with tragedies not miracles.

But web-sites, phone-systems, networks can all fail when under extreme load; in fact, pretty much every form of utility is massively over-subscribed pretty much by design. If everyone got in their cars at the same time, the road network would melt-down. Flights are regularly over-sold, certainly by the budget providers. If everyone in the UK decides to make a cup of tea at the same time, the power-grid suffers.

This led me on to thinking about the Public Cloud; what level of over-subscription do the Public Cloud providers sustain in the forms of 'reserved instances' and how many instances can they actually support all coming up at one time. How much storage does Amazon actually have?

If you are going to bet your business on the Cloud, you probably ought to know and you probably ought to know what kind of events will cause you to burst and probably what will cause everyone else sharing the Cloud with you to burst. And what you are going to do if the Cloud does burst? Do you know where your umbrella is? Or at least the candles to dry you out.

What a Fraud!!

Sometimes when I'm writing this blog, I feel a complete fraud! Actually I suspect most of the time that I am posting complete nonsense. Many of the technologies that I post on, I will never use in my current role.

1) Virtualisation - neither storage or server virtualisation impinge on my world. And it's currently hard to see that they might. Digital media production doesn't lend itself to virtualisation at present even the flag-wavers admit that they are not ready for such environments.

2) Deduplication - Digital media, enough said. Although Ocarina might have a play, digital media is the one place that deduplication does not really play.

3) Cloud - if we are not ready for Virtualisation, then we are not ready for Cloud. Even Cloud Storage currently has a limited presence in the large, performance oriented media space.

But even so, much of what is talked about still has relevance to me in what I do. I don't need to virtualise to utilise many of the process and procedures which are talked about and being developed. At times we all get caught up in the technology and believe that it is the technology that is something special but really it is only half the story.

Even if you don't see yourselves using the technology, you might find many of the processes and concepts relevant to you; for example, I may not use the general purpose Cloud Storage being provided by many people but I am still interested in how to build meta-data and what meta-data should be.

Arguably, a big chunk of what I am working on at the moment is building a specialised media-cloud which will serve content to a huge variety of applications. If all these applications could talk to the media cloud in a standard way; life would be alot easier (they don't), so I'm interested in the standards which are being discussed.

Virtualisation, actually in the media cloud, we will have very few servers but there may be times when we have to scale very quickly. So I can learn alot from the virtualisation guys on rapid provisioning.

So I'll keep posting on things that I know nothing about and hope that you guys don't catch on!

Important Announcement

This is a very important announcement; there will be #Storagebeers on Wednesday 7th October following the first day of the IP Expo. IP Expo is being held 7th-8th October at Earls Court, London. It has a rather good list of keynote speakers and should be one of the better events in the UK this year.

Venue for drinks has yet to be finalised and any suggestions would be welcomed. Vendor sponsorship is always appreciated at such events but it will be a vendor neutral engagement i.e no fighting!!

And beer should never be virtualised or thin-provisioned!

I'll certainly tweet the venue once it has been agreed!! I look forward to seeing as many of you as possible!

Economic Truth

Steve Duplessie posts on Cloud Economics and especially the economics of Cloud Storage, 20 TBs of storage from Amazon's S3 cloud will cost you $36,000 a year and that doesn't necessarily compare especially well with purchasing your own array. So do the economics of the Cloud storage scale, especially when we start talking about the 100s of terabytes of storage which many enterprises consume?

The problem is we don't really know how much it costs us per terabyte in total! There are no good published TCO models for storage; this is why the initiative started by Nick Pearce and Ian are so important. Go and read their blogs here and here on building a TCO model for storage; let's get this thing crowd-sourced and perhaps we can make the TCO costs of storage a little less cloudy.

And then we can start on the model for Cloud TCO...public vs private etc!!

Many Solutions, Many Problems...

Instead of focusing on product, more and more of us are concentrating on solutions; products don't solve business problems, solutions do; I like this entry on Eigenmagic which looks at the differences between products and solutions.

But concentrating on solutions can be dangerous because next thing you know you have a data centre full of point solutions and a support nightmare. Many vendors like to try and package their solutions as black-box type solutions which require their own OS builds, own hardware, do not support virtualisation, do not co-exist well with others. 

Software appliances which run on industry-standard hardware may well be the answer but even these often have stringent requirements. I have come across software appliances which specify that they only support certain types of server underneath; we need to move away from this and to very high-level requirements i.e how much memory, how much CPU and how I/O is required to support the application; not it requires a specific HP server. 

Solutions are great as long as they are not used as a way to sell me expensive OEMed hardware which I can buy off the shelf from half the cost. And you may claim that the TCO will be lower; let me tell you, often the TCO goes up because I still have to manage the security patching, multiple support contracts, non-standard form-factors etc, etc.

You Gotta Love Larry

You really have to love Larry Ellison of Oracle; if there is one thing that you cannot acuse him of and that is being a shy retiring violet. But his latest pronouncements on becoming the new IBM; not the IBM we have today but the monopolistic (although very successful) monster of Thomas Watson Jr's day.

The IBM which manipulated the market, the big arrogant beast? Do we really want this to happen? Does anyone really want the IBM of the past back? I don't, do you? Perhaps he thinks that today's crop of ITers don't remember that IBM gouged the market with their prices for years. Is this the message that he is really sending out!

However to be honest, I don't think he stands a hope in hell of becoming the behemoth; there is too much competition out there and that in my mind is good.

Happy Blog Day

This blog is now a year old; who'd have thought it!!

It seems to have become part of the fabric of the many storage bloggers and it's certainly become part of the fabric of my life. I started the blog as a counter to many of the vendor blogs I see out there; trashing each other products but often not in a useful way.

I wanted to represent the customer's view; especially the larger customers, those with multiple arrays and multiple petabytes of data; those who have to struggle with management tools which didn't (and still don't) scale; those who have to deal with application architects who have no idea about what their applications do; those who don't have time to tune each individual LUN etc. 

I hope I have done so; I certainly feel that I've had some success and I know that some vendors are taking notice. I wish I was a 'Force for Change' but I think I probably more a 'Little Nudge for Change' but that is all good!

I like to thank my many readers and commentors; I like to thank all those who have linked to my blog either in posts or part of your blog-rolls. It's really quite odd when people in the industry who I have admired and read for years start linking and quoting me but hey, it's very cool.

I'd also like to thank Stephen Foskett for asking me to be part of the Gestalt IT team; that was a great honour and I look forward to collaborating on more posts with you guys!

Obviously I intend to carry on with the blog; calling FUD when I see it, hopefully talking about some of the cool stuff I'm currently involved in and generally supporting the customer point of view. And I keep meaning to do some more personal stuff; perhaps some book reviews and more about my home data centre.

And if you are ever in London; give us a shout, I'm always happy to have a beer...