Hybrid Cloud Storage

Kite boarding circus on the Pacific

MA Farley — Tue, 14 May 2013 15:46:00 GMT

Last Sunday Gretchen and I were cruising Hwy 1 south of Half Moon Bay looking for migrating whales and loving the splendor of this coastline when we came across this group of kite boarders at Waddell Creek. As you can see, it was a windy day and the boarders were catching great waves and getting pretty good air. The beginning of the video shows one pretty good flight that was close to shore. The video was taken with my Windows 8 Phone - a Nokia 820 - and has an audio track made with Sony Acid Studio.

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The rise of cloud-integrated storage and EMC's ViPR

MA Farley — Tue, 07 May 2013 16:41:00 GMT

David Isenberg wrote his famous and controversial paper, The Rise of the Stupid Network in 1997. Its a short and historically interesting read. If you have never read it, follow the link there now. It will take you less than 10 minutes. If you want the Cliff notes version, the gist of his paper is copied below:

JUST DELIVER THE BITS, STUPID

A new network "philosophy and architecture," is replacing the vision of an Intelligent Network. The vision is one in which the public communications network would be engineered for "always-on" use, not intermittence and scarcity. It would be engineered for intelligence at the end-user's device, not in the network. And the network would be engineered simply to "Deliver the Bits, Stupid," not for fancy network routing or "smart" number translation.

Fundamentally, it would be a Stupid Network.

I've thought about corollaries in storage for many years. Networks and storage are much different. Storage is much more tightly coupled with data management in a way that networks will never be. Data management takes intelligence to make sure everything gets put in its optimal place where it can be accessed again complying with corporate governance, legal requirements and workers expectations. Networks don't really have these sorts of long-term consequences and so apples to apples comparisons aren't very useful.

But that doesn't mean there wouldn't be ways to eliminate unnecessary aspects of storage and lower costs enormously. As soon as data protection and management could be done without needing specialized storage equipment to do the job, that equipment would be eliminated. Cloud storage changes things radically for the storage industry, especially inventions like StorSimple's cloud-integrated storage (CiS) and a solution like Microsoft's hybrid cloud storage. But StorSimple was a startup and Microsoft isn't a storage company and so it wouldn't start becoming obvious that sweeping changes were underfoot until a major storage vendor came along to make it happen.

That's where EMC's ViPR software comes in. EMC refers to it as software-defined storage, which was predictable, but necessary for them. FWIW, Greg Schulz does a great job going through what was announced on his StorageIO blog.

One of the things ViPR does is provide an out-of-band virtualization layer that Greg's blog describes that opens the door to using less-expensive, stupid storage and protecting the data on it with some other global, intelligent system. This sort of design has never been very successful and it will be interesting to see if EMC can make it work this time.

The aspects of ViPR that are most interesting are its cloud elements - those that are expected initially and those that have been strongly hinted at, including:

It runs as a VSA (virtual storage appliance), which means it is a storage controller that runs as a virtual machine, including as a virtual machine in the cloud.
It will include access to object storage as a back end, which is how "real" storage works in the cloud, unlike AWS' EBS
It can use cloud APIs, which is obviously a cloud-thing

If EMC wants their technology to run on the cloud, and it's clear they do, they needed all three of these things. For instance, consider remote replication to the cloud - how would the data replicated to the cloud be stored in the cloud? To a piece of hardware? No. Using storage network/device commands? No. To what target? The backend to a hypothetical EMC VSA in the cloud uses object storage services and cloud APIs. There is no other way to do it. They could have a VSA that uses iSCSI to a facility like EBS, but that would be like putting the contents of a container ship on rowboats. So, a VSA that accesses object storage services using cloud APIs is the only way. It is a clear signal that ViPR will be their version of CiS. They probably won't call it that, but that's beside the point.

The important thing is what happens to data protection after ViPR is made fully cloud-capable? Once you start using cloud services for data protection, there are a few things that immediately become obvious:

You don't need separate data protection equipment any more because you are using a cloud service
You can actually use incremental-forever data protection schemes
You want to use primary dedupe and compression to reduce the amount of cloud traffic required
You maintain a hybrid cloud metadata system that identifies all data whether its on premises or in the cloud

Those are all things that hybrid cloud storage from Microsoft does today by the way, but that's beside the point too. What's interesting is what will happen to EMC's sizeable data protection business - how will that be converted to cloud solutions and what value can they add that enhances cloud storage services? The technologies they have available for hybrid cloud data protection are already mostly in place and there will undoubtedly be a transformation for Data Domain products in the years to come, but these are the sorts of things they need to figure out over time.

It's going to be a slow transition for the storage industry, but EMC has done what it usually does - it made the first bold move and is laying the groundwork for what's to come. It will be interesting to watch how the rest of the storage industry responds.

Enstratius joins Dell and the cloud ecosystem becomes deeper

MA Farley — Mon, 06 May 2013 15:06:00 GMT

I am genuinely excited by the surprising news this morning about Dell's acquisition of Enstratius. I don't have any first hand knowledge of the deal or Enstratius' technology, but the company has an excellent reputation and its CTO George Reese has been providing excellent, provocative thought leadership about cloud computing for a long time. Congratulations to both Dell and Enstratius for making this milestone decision.

What I know is that Enstratius develops cloud management technology that allows customers to manage cloud installations that span cloud boundaries, whether those clouds are private or public. They have built up a broad list of cloud partners that includes Windows Azure, Rackspace, AWS and others, which undoubtedly made them compelling to a company like Dell that wants to give their customers a lot of viable options. Giving customers management tools that span different cloud vendors is great for customers who are concerned about being locked in by one of the major cloud platforms. In the long run, it will make all cloud service providers work harder to attract and keep customers - and that competitive drivers make better industries and markets. Putting the technology within Dell should make it much more broadly available, assuming Dell will invest more in Enstratius. I suspect Dell will want to accelerate the business they acquired, just as Microsoft is accelerating our StorSimple business. It's a great recipe for success - these kinds of deals can work extremely well, something I have witnessed first hand a couple of times in my career. It's not that Enstratius couldn't have grown themselves over time, but this acquisition will compress that time by a few years.

I believe this deal is considered to be strategic for Dell - something they can build a business around - as opposed to kind of deal that fills a spot in the company's product line. That should be energizing for the people at Enstratius, who will find themselves travelling even more than they were previously - something they might not think is possible. Get ready George, you just went worldwide in a way that is difficult to imagine.

Calling baloney on Pivotal

MA Farley — Wed, 01 May 2013 18:05:00 GMT

Last week Pivotal came out of stealth mode and announced themselves to the world. It got a fair amount of attention because Paul Maritz is the guy there and because the company is being built on jettisoned technology assets that had been previously acquired by EMC and VMware. It was also interesting that General Electric was involved by making an investment in the company. Today it was reported that VMware was also selling off WaveMaker, but not to Pivotal, which begs the question - why not? I suspect it's because the ROI for VMware is deemed to be better selling it to somebody else as opposed to adding another ingredient to Pivotal's melting pot.

The question you always need to ask about any new venture is when it is going to start making money and how much of it they will be able to make and how they are going to take their products and services to market. Pivotal is no exception, unless you include the fact that they have a lot of overhead in people trying put all these disparate pieces together. Some see the amassed talent as great talent, but a CFO sees it as a whopping huge payroll that isn't being offset by anything right now. There are no existing product lines to leverage and there isn't even a new product line that can carry the company through it's development efforts. In other words, it's a science project made of plausible components that could possibly work.

So I'm sticking my neck out, but not very far, by saying I don't think there is a light at the end of the tunnel for Pivotal. Just because there are a lot of smart people, it doesn't mean there is a business. You may ask "What about GE, doesn't their endorsement mean something?" Yes, it certainly does. GE is making a big push to be a software company that tackles large scale data processing for various verticals they have a vested interest in such as health care (those Hugo Weaving ads are fantastic), manufacturing, energy and others I can't think of right now. Getting visibility for their business is probably well worth the effort and I'm not talking about publicity. As an investor in Pivotal they will get to see more technology from more ecosystem companies than they might have otherwise. It's a good move for a company that wants to increase its software business.

I could be wrong, but that's how I see it.

Are big data and the hybrid cloud mutually exclusive?

MA Farley — Mon, 29 Apr 2013 17:45:00 GMT

Then there is the whole problem of disaster protection and backup for big data. If the business becomes dependent on big data processes - especially the predictable/programmable/instantaneous type, there has to be a way of making it work again when humpty dumpty has a great fall. This is where the brute force analysis of hybrid data portability falls apart

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Hybrid Cloud Storage – Look Closely before Picking a Solution

MA Farley — Tue, 19 Feb 2013 15:30:00 GMT

Enterprise customers are increasingly looking at cloud storage as a way to leverage the benefits of cloud economics and agility without giving up performance and improving data protection capabilities. The Microsoft-StorSimple answer is to take a hybrid approach to allow you to extend existing on-premises storage investments while getting the strong benefits of the cloud.

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Storage from the other end of the telescope

MA Farley — Wed, 06 Feb 2013 19:00:00 GMT

Sometimes it helps to look at things from the other end of the telescope. So instead of thinking about longer latencies, think about how SSDs are being used in the hybrid storage model (not to be confused with hybrid cloud) where the most active data is stored on SSDs and the rest of the data is stored on rotating disks. Now add enterprise cloud storage to the mix and consider using it for the opposite end of the activity spectrum – storing dormant, unstructured data.

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The business case for multiple hypervisors

MA Farley — Wed, 09 Jan 2013 19:35:00 GMT

I just finished reading a good post on Wikibon by the "other" Scott Lowe where he discusses the differences between vSphere and Hyper-V and what the adoption rate of Hyper-V will likely be. He delves into the cost comparisons being made by both VMware and Microsoft as well as broadly touching on the differences of their management approaches. I encourage people to read his article, it's not that long, but the take away is that he thinks Hyper-V is catching up to vSphere in functionality, that vSphere is better suited for enterprise installations and that pricing pressure will impact the margins of both companies.

Smart CIOs and IT leaders will try to find ways to run both hypervisors in their data centers. For starters, the only way to future proof your data center from vendor lock-in is to have skills in competing technologies that can replace each other. Moreover, shrewd negotiators know the most powerful word in their vocabulary is "no". But no doesn't mean no if you can't actually implement the changes you decide to make and that takes a commitment and that has costs associated with it.

Freedom from lock-in isn't free, neither is negotiating leverage. It's prudent to avoid painting your organization into a corner and having to deal with being stuck in a place where the only way out is long and expensive.

How Hybrid Cloud Storage offloads storage management to the cloud

MA Farley — Wed, 09 Jan 2013 02:02:00 GMT

As the saying goes, "when you’re up to your neck in alligators, it’s easy to forget that the initial objective was to drain the swamp."

IT professionals are plenty familiar with compelling interruptions that need to be dealt with quickly, but keep them from getting high-priority work done. That's one of the reasons IT leaders are looking for SAAS solutions - to decrease the potential for technology alligators to delay the projects they are being measured on.

A big advantage of SAAS is offloading the infrastructure needed to run applications in-house. In a traditional data center, application workload changes may require infrastructure changes that have secondary impacts that disrupt productivity on other applications and systems. SAAS circumvents both primary and secondary infrastructure impacts by isolating the application and it's infrastructure on an external site. The SAAS provider keeps customers up to date on the newest capabilities but also manages the bug fixes, workloads and all the infrastructure elements needed. That leaves a lot more time for the IT team to focus on delivering the technology solutions that business leaders want. SAAS is a terrific solution, but there are many applications - especially line of business applications - that are not available or do not otherwise fit the SAAS model. The whole concept of Hybrid IT is based on this reality. SAAS works great for some things but not others.

Hybrid Cloud Storage is similar to SAAS in several ways. It is an infrastructure enabler that transfers time-consuming management tasks, processes and their secondary impacts to the cloud. Like SAAS, there are some applications Hybrid Cloud Storage is not a good solution for, such as low latency transaction processing, but there are many where it works extremely well.

Managing storage capacity growth is a great example of a time consuming storage management process that data center managers know well. As application workloads scale, the available storage capacity is consumed, threatening the ability to meet service levels. Storage administration is largely an exercise in planning and implementing the response to this endless cycle. Sometimes it involves upgrading the capacity in arrays and re-balancing workloads, sometimes it involves migrating workloads with virtualization technologies, sometimes it involves acquiring additional arrays and sometimes it involves all of these. My friends at 3PAR used to call this Storage Tetris. The process becomes increasing difficult over time until there are few options left but to acquire additional arrays, along with the associated costs of data center footprint/power and data protection they impose. When you couple this dynamic with the limited life-span of most storage products it's easy to see why storage consumes such a large part of the IT team's attention and budget.

Hybrid Cloud Storage circumvents this capacity-growth cycle by uploading dormant data to the cloud and freeing capacity on-premises for new, active data and workloads. This is a fundamentally different approach than traditional storage where data consumes primary storage capacity regardless of whether it is being used or not. Dormant, unstructured data is very difficult to manage with traditional storage, but is automatically and transparently managed by Hybrid Cloud Storage. At some point the cloud storage containers used with Hybrid Cloud Storage run out of capacity too but they have scaling limits that are many times larger than on-premises arrays. That means capacity management in the cloud is done far less frequently and because it happens in the cloud it does not have secondary impacts on other applications and systems on-premises. Tetris is much easier when there is a lot of space to work with and when you don't have to worry about upsetting other workloads in the mix.

Putting data on Hybrid Cloud Storage also transfers the associated costs of footprint and power to the cloud. For some corporate data centers, this isn't that big a deal, but for others it's critical to get more done with the facility limitations they have. Also, when you consider the additional data protection hardware that is typically needed to backup the data that is stored on new arrays, the ability to move backup data to the cloud is also an important secondary benefit of Hybrid Cloud Storage (as opposed to being a secondary problem).

I will have other blog posts soon that discuss the significant changes that Hybrid Cloud Storage brings to data protection in much greater detail.

Expectations for software-defined storage: 2013 will be raucous!

MA Farley — Tue, 18 Dec 2012 23:38:00 GMT

I don't know about 2013 being the year for SDS, but I suspect 2103 will be the year of SDN and SDS hype and confusion. It's bad enough having one marketing battle royale (SDN) but having two of them at the same time will drive many of us crazy.

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