Storagebod's Blog

Work for Bod??

Despite what we like to say in IT; it is rare for what we do to have a transformational impact on the day-to-day working of a business, fortunately I am currently in the position of knowing what I do completely changes how the company I work for creates it's product. And even better, I am in the position of being able to recruit someone else to come and join our little band of storage specialists, it's not an army, more a crack(ed) squad.

Over the next twelve months, we will be ramping up the delivery of a file-based workflow for content production for broadcast and at the core of this, is the storage; it is probably no exageration to say that all the company's eggs are being placed in our basket. We will be migrating into our new Broadcast Centre which amongst many other new features will be completely free of video-tapes; when I point out that we currently have over a million video tapes, this should give you some idea of the magnitude of our task. 

And whilst we are delivering this; we will be delivering 3D edit capability, render-farms, core back-up solutions for the Broadcast systems and anything else the business cares to throw at us. The skills that I am looking for are listed in the job advert but core skills are:

• Tivoli Storage Manager - Especially from an archive point of view
• IBM's GPFS - Clustered file-systems are becoming the foundation of the storage we deliver to the business
• NAS - NFS especially but also you need to be CIFS aware and an interest in pNFS would be helpful.
• General Storage - realistically, I don't really care what arrays you've worked on as long as you are ready to take on new challenges and also willing to let go of anything you have done in the past. We are not here to debate EMC vs HDS vs IBM vs NetApp etc; we are here to deliver a function not navel gaze!

Although it is not obvious at first, pretty much everything we do can be applied to the Cloud; no we don't do VMware (yet) but what we do do is build out massively scalable storage solutions based around pretty much commodity hardware. 

We're a small team at present; there's only three of us at the moment and I've no intention of growing it massively. The plan is to keep it small and focussed on doing the right things from day one. You will get the chance to work closely with both the other infrastructure teams but also the business teams. 

If you are interested, please go here and search for position number 02979 or just searching for storage should it.

If you have any questions; you should be able to find how to contact me and I'll be at #storagebeers on Thursday 2nd December. 

 

Briefing Bloggers - Some Thoughts!

Talking to some of the PR bods at SNW Europe was enlightening and especially the fact their customers find it incredibly hard to know how to deal with the independent bloggers. In fact, some of them actually seem to be scared of us and would probably rather that we went away. So as one of these scary, random and opinionated independent bloggers; I thought I’d reflect on how I think you should interact with us or at least with me.

Now, I have no pretensions to being a journalist, a hack or any other kind of professional writer; I do this for pure fun and my own interest, a gentleman amateur may be? So for example, take SNW this week; although SNW picked up the bill for the hotel, flights and much of my sustenance; I was not paid and indeed I took leave from my day job to attend. Chris Evans who was also attending with me is self-employed and the days he spent at SNW were days when he wasn’t earning fees. 

So first thing; you are interacting with ‘Martin Glassborow, blogger’ not with ‘Martin Glassborow, an employee of a large media company’; this is not your chance to try and sell to me in this role. Now obviously my day job does give you some context as to what I do and what my experience is but if you want to try to sell to me as a corporate employee, you would be better trying to book a meeting with me when I am on the clock. You can try to frame your product in a term of reference that you might think is relevant to me but to be honest, you’ll probably get it wrong. 

Funnily enough, if you are trying to use my status as a blogger to try to influence my employer’s buying decisions; you are very misguided. I have little influence on those decisions but I do have influence on what my readers look at and consider. Admittedly my influence is probably quite low but I do have a fairly wide readership and for some strange reason, people seem to listen.

And may be that’s because I don’t just write about this stuff, I use this stuff; I think this is the core difference between the bloggers and most journalists. We have the scars from actually using products and these scars aren’t from paper-cuts. We can be a lot more critical and confrontational if you pitch something which is plainly stupid, wrong or just won’t work in our opinion. We are the poor suckers who might end having to make it work; we don’t simply move onto the next story. It’s not personal but we deal in reality, not press releases. 

Yet even that statement is not really true, if you want to find out what the latest speeds, feeds and features of the latest products, I don’t really do that. My blog is my soap-box, it is full of opinion, conjecture and speculation; I write about my reality, not the alternative reality which is vendor wonderland. But my reality is certainly not everyone else’s. 

When pitching to me as a blogger, remember that this is going to be a conversation and I will be expressing opinions; if you get this interaction right, you might well learn as much from me as I do from you. Certainly defend your position but don’t get defensive! By the way, most of the storage bloggers tend to be pretty smart guys and if they don’t get your product; you are probably pitching it wrong or you’ve just had an ‘ugly baby moment’! 

I will often bring up rival offerings from your competitors; I’d prefer it if you didn’t look blank, didn’t just simply dismiss it as inferior or generally try to position your product as somehow unique. There are very few unique ideas about and many of those products which are in some way ‘unique’, there may well be a reason why this is the case. 

As a blogger, I like to put things in context and not just as a product; for me, often the why is more important than the how. I want to know the question for which you believe your product is the answer. If I can’t see the question, I’m probably not going to blog on your product.

Anyway, just some thoughts which will probably develop on how to deal with this tribe of irritants which will hopefully grow; the independent blogger…or as EMC like to call them, Chad’s Reserves!

 

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.....

 

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. 

Back To Work

After a week away, I come back to the office and find that all is running fine. I have a nice clear day to catch up with emails and things which need attending to. No-one has booked a meeting with me and there is little urgent to deal with. For this, I'd like to thank a number of managers that I worked for in the past who gave me some tips.

1) One manager advised me never to come back to work on a Monday; his reasoning was that if something urgent came up on the preceding Friday, if it was known that you were coming back on Monday; there was a risk that it would be left for you to deal with first thing on Monday whereas if it was thought that you were coming back on Tuesday; it would probably be dealt with. 

I've twisted this, perception often trumps reality; so my 'Out-Of-Office' always says I will be back in the office a day after I am actually back. So generally, I come back to an empty diary and no crises to deal with.

2) Before opening your email, talk to your team and then your boss. You can avoid reading a lot of emails by simply getting them to tell you what you need to know. And if you have managed to keep your diary clear, talking to your team about your holiday can help to extend that feeling of well-being for a little longer.

3) When recruiting and building teams; always make sure that the people that you are recruiting are better than you in at least one thing. This means that you will always have someone to delegate a task to and you can trust them to do an excellent job. Don't be scared of recruiting people who are brighter and more capable than you; as a manager, you are there to lead and not to do everything yourself. 

4) For sanity's sake, have two mobile phone numbers; a work one and a personal one. It is easy to think that combining your work and personal numbers into one and having work pay for your calls as a 'perk'. It's not, it just ensures that you are on call, all of the time for a pittance. Same goes for the Blackberry. 

Having a number that can be turned off which lets you relax and not worry about being interrupted is worth every penny; if you insist, check your work mobile a couple of times a day but if possible, consider turning it off for the duration. If people know you can't be contacted, they'll deal with most situations themselves.

5) Work email; resist the urge to check it. Once people get the idea that you will reply even though you are on holiday, they will abuse it. You can always set up filter rules to forward emails which are really urgent from named subjects/people to a Google Mail or like account.

6) Visit a grave-yard; take note, the world is still turning despite everything!

Oh well, back to work now...

Finding Space and How You Can Help

For the last twenty years or so, anyone who has worked in an Enterprise IT department have had various traits drummed into them and if the Business has not got the IT department that they want, it is not just the IT department's fault. 

IT Managers have accounting principles banged into them; almost more so than any other department apart from the actual Finance department. In almost no other department apart from the Finance department are the concepts of TCO, ROI etc really understood; we deal with rapidly depreciating capital assets which also attract huge recurring costs. And unless IT is your core business, these are not seen as adding real value to the Business but a cost. 

IT Managers also become pretty expert in the area of contract law, leasing law and many other forms of corporate law; at various times in my career, I have been involved in drafting complex support documents, negotiating penalty clauses, get-out clauses, payment schedules and other minutiae which I had no intention of getting involved in when I decided to do IT. 

Innovation within Enterprise IT often comes second to day-to-day keep the lights on which is all kind of sad because most IT guys I know have a ton of creativity and ideas on how to improve IT. A lot of people get into IT because it is their passion and their hobby.

However, perhaps the vendors can help with all this and perhaps instead of coming up with fairly trite redefinitions of accepted terms and sound-bites; perhaps they can try answering those questions which they can help with?

So next time an Enterprise IT guy asks the question 'What's the TCO Model?', 'Can you help build the ROI Business Case?'; if you answer the question, you might find that you have a much happier and more loyal customer who will say good things about you? Perhaps you will find a customer who actually has time to listen to your latest product pitch? The New IT will still have to follow all the good financial governance that we are supposed to practise today, so there is no pointing pretending that it doesn't. 

Help give your customers the space to innovate and perhaps you can help turn IT departments into the IT partners which businesses need and want now?  

!EMCWorld #storagebeers reminder

I am fairly sure that someone will be running a #storagebeers event at EMCWorld.

This is a reminder to those people who aren't attending and who are in and around London. There will be a !EMCWorld #storagebeers event on May 13th at the Counting House nr Bank Station in the City of London. Event should start about 18:00.

Please come along, I am hoping that we can have some discussion about future #storagebeers events as well discussing the inevitable EMC announcements.

Also, I want to remind everyone that there will be a special #storagebeers event on May 18th after the SNIA Europe Academy event, also in London. This time we should have a special guest in the form of Val Bercovici, NetApp's Cloud Czar. Venue TBA later on this week.

This Changes Everything...honest!

Val tweeted this and I kind of took exception to it as no where in the linked marketing fluff does it actually say that NetApp enabled Guitar Hero to beat Rockband to market. But it lead me to thinking about something; can a change in technology really lead to this kind of advantage? 

I don't think that the answer is all that clear cut, a change in technology can be the catalyst which enables a change in process; this can lead to an advantage. But is that change in technology actually necessary to enable to the change in process? And does the investment in new technology really pay off and how do you know? 

Marketing fluff is not a good place to start in evaluating whether new technology will actually pay off for you. 

No CIO is going to get up and say to his boss, 'You know that new technology that we bought, well it's a piece of crap! I was totally lead astray by the shiny-shiny lights and boy do I have egg on my face now!'

Equally no CIO is going to get up and say to his boss, 'That new technology that we bought well it's excellent and it has completely changed the way we work! But you know what, we didn't need to change the technology really, we could have just changed the way we work!'

So what happens is a jolly little cosey-up; a nice deal is cut, a bit of marketing fluff is sometimes agreed as exchange for a really great deal on price and everyone's happy. 

Cynical? Yes very! Does it happen? Sure it does, all the time. Whenever I see a press-release or a case-study, I always ask myself what deal was done to enable this; free services, an extra couple of points of discount? 

Sometimes, I think that we fail to see the wood for the trees in IT. If we want to institute major change; we change everything, whether we need to or not. How often do we see the tag-line 'This Changes Everything!'? How often does the question get asked whether everything needs to be changed as opposed to just changing something? As technologists, we look to change technology first and process second.  

All the changes that Chuck et all are talking about, evangelising about are completely worthless without process change but many of the benefits can be felt with a process change. You do not need a technology change to achieve many of the benefits or if you do; it does not need to be a huge technology change.

Actually if you try to do this without a huge technology change; you may reap more benefits. The problem with large technology changes is that you often fail to do anything with the legacy tail; you simply deploy new stuff onto the new technology. The legacy just sits and moulders, costing money to maintain and manage. Of course you could simply just decide not to maintain the legacy, which will save you money in the short-term but when it breaks, you could find yourself spend even more money trying to fix a system which no-one really understands. If you try to change the process before rolling in the new technology, you will probably stand a greater chance of dealing with the legacy tail.

So don't expect miracles from a change in technology! 

Without process change, technology changes are probably just cost!

People Trump Processes Trump Technology

Don't simply accept a vendor's claim that the only way to change your processes is to change to their technology!

When caught up in the new, don't forget the stuff your business runs on today!

Marketing folks even lie in their sleep, their dreams are the lies they plan to tell you tomorrow!

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

This is a very early warning of #storagebeers on May 13th but this is #storagebeers with a twist! I want the 'bods of the world to join in #!EMC-World! 

So where-ever you are, gather your fellow bods be they of a storage, virtualisation or any persuasion and go to the local bar and partake of your favourite brew! The only place which is not permitted to hold a #storagebeers event is Boston!