For the last few years many IT organizations have been moving some workloads to the cloud but in my experience, most enterprises have a “no cloud” policy still.  That policy is, of course, not quite enforced and they have some cloud services being consumed due to shadow IT or Software-as-a-Service.  Most analysis today are predicting in the next few years the “no cloud” policy will be nearly extinct.  The problem many IT operations folks have with this is that you can’t outsource responsibility.  Now, what exactly does that mean? My favorite example of this has to do with what cloud providers think backup is versus what an enterprise thinks a backup is.  A cloud service provider things backup is a way to protect itself from failures they cause, but an IT operations person sees backup as a way to protect the organization against any conceivable.  The last thing they want is some VP calling and yelling atRead More →

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In: Backup, Business

In my twenty years of enterprise infrastructure experience, I’ve noticed a few things that are universal to every organization.  One of the most universally time-consuming things about working IT is usually disaster recovery testing. We all know that business continuity is extremely important, but that doesn’t make testing and executing recovery plans any less expensive.  It takes compute power to takes full and incremental copies of the data and, of course, storage to house the backups.Organizations also spend weeks and weeks of people’s time planning, documenting, executing, and remediating disaster recovery plans.  Until needed business resiliency often seems like a waste of money and time – but that all changes when you need it. When finally needed everyone remembers what a great investment data protection is, but what about all the rest of time?  Can’t data resilience be more than a one-trick pony? The simple answer is “yes” it is possible to use all the data copiesRead More →

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In: Backup, Business

Developer turned network engineer turned developer, Matt Oswalt discusses the goal of continuous integration networking. The goal of making changes to the network at peak and ensuring the change achieves the desired result. Matt introduces the concept of his open source project ToDD and how continuous integration is a achievable long term goal.    Show Notes  ToDD Github  Spirient Virtualization Field Day 6 Presentation Matt’s blog Touchless network configuration usecase Interop  Read More →

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In: Infrastructure

In the IT industry today it is nearly impossible not to hear the word cloud dozens of times a day, but many storage administrators treat cloud a four letter word.  The basic tenant for a storage administrator is to ensure an organization’s data is safe and secure.  If the storage administrator makes a mistake bad, bad things happen.  Companies fold, black holes collapse, and sun exploded.  NetApp is trying to change the minds of those storage administrators, and for good reason.  IT organizations are always looking to do more work with lesss money, and cloud storage can’t be ignored as a viable way to do that.   At Storage Field Day 9, NetApp talked a fair amount about how they are embracing cloud storage as key to the industry’s future.  No more a storage vendor affords not to embrace cloud storage,  and NetApp sees it as a key.  Part of the future for NetApp is expanding theRead More →

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In: Cloud, Storage
Pure Storage Logo

This week I’ve been spending some time at Pure Accelerate,  where I’ve been able to talk to the engineering and executive teams behind the new FlashBlade system. In an attempt to embrace its start up cultural roots, Pure Storage developed FlashBlade as a startup inside the company.  What that means is they hired new engineering staff to build a unique and separate product from the ground up.  The new team members, to keep the development secretive,  were not connected to other traditional Pure employees on Linkedin. While the development was largely separate,  some of the FlashArray development team did help where it main sense.  That collaboration resulted in a fork of the FlashArray management interface which is used by FlashBlade. The result of the startup of a company is a new and a unique product. The first thing to understand about FlashBlade is what it is not.  It is nor a replacement for a low latency andRead More →

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In: Cloud, Storage

It wasn’t that long ago that Violin Memory pioneered the high-performance flash market.  They created the market for speed but were lacking a rich data services offering.  It wasn’t long before many other all-flash storage arrays came to market which may not have been as fast but were good enough with a rich feature set. The lack of data services and competition ultimately causes a lot of pain for Violin Memory.  It was so bad that many people thought the company was doomed, but after our SFD8 presentation I’m not convinced. The meeting had started before the cameras were actually rolling, which I think was really unfortunate for Violin.  We were doing two things: eating breakfast and talking financials with the CEO.  As we listened to him talk one thing became apparent – Violin financials say they have a chance.  CEO Kevin DeNuccio said they had a quarterly burn rate of $12mm with a break-even point beingRead More →

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In: Storage

If you’ve worked in IT for any amount of time you’ve likely heard the term “secondary storage” which you’ve known as a backup tier.  You’ve also heard of “tier 2” storage for test and development workloads not needing the data services of production.  These two terms have had very different requirements.  Backups target storage is generally cheap, deep, and optimized for sequential writes.  Test/dev storage, on the other hand, needs to have different performance since it has actual workloads. Cohesity thinks this needs to change.  They content that secondary storage needs to be anything that is not primary storage. Redefining a term and carving out a new market segment is no small task, but Cohesity shows some pretty interesting use cases: Data Protection for VMware environments – Once a hypervisor snapshot is created the data is sent to the Cohesity array where things like deduplication and replication can be applied. This gives you unlimited snaps without theRead More →

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In: Cloud, Storage

Over the last decade, storage arrays have been evolving to becomes faster and protect data better.  They have become smarter with where and how data is stored and how to predict when data will be accessed.  However one thing has not, by and large, changed.  Storage arrays haven’t learned much about what data is actually stored on them.  In the last year, this has begun to, in part, change.  A few companies now have products which provide some type of data awareness, but they aren’t created equal. Content awareness is nothing new. However, it has mostly existed for legal and compliance separate from the storage array. Today I attended Storage Field Day 8 and had a chance to meet with Andy Warfield of Coho Data and I saw a different take on this.  A few months ago I saw Coho Data start talking about running containers directly on their storage array.  I dismissed this mostly edge casesRead More →

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In: Cloud, Storage

At VMworld this year I attended Tech Field Day Extra event as a delegate. Once of the more interesting presentations came from DataGravity. One of the reasons I found them so interesting is they are attempting to add a new dimension to the storage array market. Since the storage array market was created people have cared about three things: data resiliency, speed, and capacity. These three metrics should not come as a surprise since the intent was to leverage a larger pool of capacity for reduced cost and improved performance. Fast forward to now and these three things have not fundamentally changed much. We still care about protection our data, making it perform well, and how much data we can store. DataGravity is trying to change this by building new Data Analytics capabilities into their storage array. If you’ve every worked in a large enterprise, you have most likely dealt with legal and security teams. They alwaysRead More →

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In: Storage, Tech Field Day