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How does cloud affect the storage infrastructure?

// November 16th, 2011 // No Comments » // Technical Know-It-All

Surely everywhere you venture these days, there is talk about Cloud. A year or two ago, it was limited to the Enterprise, but now it seems that its found its way onto the consumer space as well (eg; iCloud).

I’m not the foremost expert in cloud, but I think everyone’s got a definition for it today. You decide if what I’m saying makes sense.

Is cloud a product?
I don’t think so. Its almost like asking if Internet is something you can buy.

Is cloud a technology?
Hmm… in some ways, but not completely accurate.

My definition is really that Cloud is more of a CONCEPT (for providers) and SERVICE (for users).

Think about it for a second, all you ever hear about cloud is really about a service you can buy or provide. Example being, IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service), PaaS (Platform as a Service), SaaS (Software as a Service) and etc. So don’t be completely fooled when vendors trys to sell you Cloud…

I think in-terms of storage, what vendors are really selling would probably be better termed “Cloud-Enabled“.

Features such as thin provisioning, wide striping, data resiliency, storage virtualisation, dynamic tiering and charge backs tools are some of the key features that makes sense to a cloud deployment. How so? I’m not gonna deep dive into the details but hope you will get the drift…

If you ask me, Cloud is just another buzz word in recent times that describes the evolution of the IT industry… Lets take a stroll back memory lane…

1. First there were built-in hard-disks. We realised that utilisation was low, so we built SAN’s for “sharing” storage.

2. We built the PC, but we wanted to communicate with the next PC. So we hooked them up. We realised then, we needed to “share” data with more PC’s, thus we built the LAN, then later the WAN, then the Internet.

3. Servers were great functioning as physical boxes. Again, low utilisation meant that we wanted to “share” to better utilise the resources. Tada… Server virtualisation!

4. Now we have SAN’s, NAS’s and etc. We realise that every vendor talks their own language. EMC doesn’t link with HDS and vice versa. So we have pockets of storage that is not properly utilised. If you don’t already know, this is now happening, and its called Storage Virtualisation, where all storages are consolidated into a single pool regardless of vendor. So we can “share” more efficiently.

5. What’s next on the roadmap? Not too sure if you have heard, FCoE and CEE is around the corner. In a nutshell, that is again, consolidation of SAN and LAN, so the networks can “share” a single common infrastructure.

So, if you look at the 5 points above, the common word amongst them is really sharing (in the enterprise, it’s better known as “cost saving” ).

Looking at cloud again, we combine all of the above, and again look at the possibility of further reducing costs and/or sharing. And the Cloud is born. Use the existing infrastructure in its entirety and share it out at a higher level.

So when shopping for your next enterprise purchase, be it storage, software or servers, make wise decisions as to how its features can be shared. Do not just take the vendors word for it, cause some just don’t quite make sense.

Earth Hour and the IT Industry

// March 26th, 2010 // No Comments » // Blogroll, Technical Know-It-All

Surely you guys would have heard of Earth Hour happening on the 8:30pm 27th March 2010. While it is a great move to spread awareness about being “green” and potentially save some “energy”, underneath it all we are still a society driven by energy. From a consumer’s point of view, the whole world going dark for a bit and it’s suddenly a statement being made. But what they probably don’t know is that one of the biggest power consumers in the world are datacenters and IT infrastructures. So the question is “why don’t they power-down for Earth Hour?” or maybe use less power. Sure. If you want your bank accounts frozen, mobile phones services offline, Facebook account going offline (OMG, that would be a disaster wouldn’t it), and airplanes sent flying blind just to name a few during Earth Hour. Having said that, I do support the cause of being greener whenever I can.

While much is being done to make datacenters and IT infrastructures greener, I seriously think it will still get worst. For example, virtualisation of servers to reduce hardware and carbon footprint sounds great, but as needs grow its inevitable that the infrastructure will consume more power. Traditionally, provisioning a new server requires quite a bit of time and usually justification, but with virtualisation, this process is made easier and much quicker. Now, admins provision servers in half the time and on readily available resources, and then here comes the catch. Where in the past, 1 physical server will usually run a few applications, today in a virtualised world, 1 virtual machine will often be dedicated to run a single app. After a while, we are back to square one, burning up just as many physical servers like we used to.

So what I’m really trying to say is that in order to be truly green, I suppose technology alone is not good enough, it requires management and education. Guess it’s something to ponder on this year’s Earth Hour.

p/s : I do not usually agree much on what Malaysian Orgs / Govt has to say, but there has been a viral thread circulating about that says “TNB wants to sue WWF for Earth Hour”. I suggest you guys should make your own judgements if its true because it is written on a blog and none of the big news players like Reuters or AP has picked it up. Go figure… I’m not gonna provide you guys the link to endorse it further.

File Virtualisation Recap

// March 24th, 2010 // No Comments » // Technical Know-It-All

Recently SearchStorage covered a piece on file virtualisation and where has it all gone. Interestingly enough, I have had the opportunity to deploy a “few” implementations of Brocade’s StorageX. It wasn’t Brocade’s hottest selling product by far, but I must say that the idea of file virtualisation was good. Having said that, I always knew it was gonna be a challenge for it to sustain long term (at least for Brocade).

1. While the product was great, it was always working on top of Microsoft’s DFS technology. It is heavily reliant on that. If you like, it was really a usable interface with additional bells and whistles riding on DFS. Obviously when compared to Microsoft’s feeble MMC console to manage DFS, the file virtualisation products were leaps and bounds ahead.

2. The product doesn’t work extremely well in a Unix environment. It requires quite a few tweaks and isn’t as straight forward to use compared to the Windows variant. Anyhow, some level of file virtualisation already exist in the traditional Unix systems anyhow, so it was never really gonna take off for the Unix side of things.

3. I’m quite sure most of us are used to the multitudes of drives being mounted as you log on to your laptops at work. While it’s a pain, admins over the years have invested hours creating fool-proof login scripts to ensure users have all the data within their reach. To change this, is to throw away all these hardwork. File virtualisation is supposed to makes things easier, but being easier means reducing all this scripts and potentially re-educating users. Sounds like a lot of work? Yes. Albeit only done 1 time, admins rather justify to have more hardware than to invest in a software as such.

4. Costing. In times like this, IT Departments are usually asked to do more with less. So with a file virtualisation product (which is really bundled free with Windows Server), the savvy admins will probably go through the hoops and get it done using Microsoft’s “improved” DFS MMC snap-ins while the non-savvy admins will be made to learn it. Period!

But having said all that, I personally think that maybe (just maybe), file virtualisation will make a comeback sometime in the future. With storage-tiering being a big thing, the fad of the word “virtualisation” and in-line with the mindset of “doing more with less”, file virtualisation could potentially be an alternative. Food for thought.

F5 ARX File Virtualisation