All posts by Randy Weis

Cloud Storage, Featured, hybrid cloud, Storage, Storage and Information Management

The Storage (R)Evolution or The Storage Superstorm?

The storage market is changing, and it isn’t changing slowly. While traditional storage vendors still dominate the revenue and units sold market share, IDC concludes that direct sales to hyperscale (cloud scale, rack scale) service providers are dominating sales of storage. Hyperscale is the ability of an architecture to scale appropriately as increased demand is added to the system; hyperscale datacenters are the type run by Facebook, Amazon, and Google. 

Quote to remember:

“…cloud-based storage, integrated systems, software-defined storage, and flash-optimized storage systems <are selling> at the expense of traditional external arrays.”

In my opinion, this is like the leading edge of a thunderstorm supercell or a “Sandy” Superstorm – the changes that are behind this trend will be tornadoes of upheaval in the datacenter technology business. As cloud services implementations accelerate and software defined storage services proliferate, the impact will be felt not only in the storage market, but also in the server and networking markets. These changes will be reflected in how solutions providers, consulting firms, and VAR/DVARs will help the commercial market solve their technology and business challenges.

EMC is still number one by a very large margin, although down 4% year over year. HP is up nearly 9%; IBM and NetApp are way down. EMC overall (with NAS) has 32.4% revenue share; NetApp number 2 with 12.3%. Even with the apparent domination of the storage vendor market, it is obvious to EMC, their investors, and storage analysts everywhere (including yours truly) that the handwriting on the wall says they must adapt or become irrelevant. The list of great technology firms that didn’t adapt is long, even in New England alone. Digital Equipment Corporation is just one example.

Is EMC next? Not if the leadership team has anything to say about it. The recent announcements by VMware (EMC majority owned) at VMworld 2015 show not only the renewed emphasis on hybrid cloud services but also the intensive focus on software defined storage initiatives enabling the storage stack to be centrally managed within the vSphere Hypervisor. VMware vSphere APIs for IO Filtering are focused on enabling third party data services, such as replication, as part of vSphere Storage Policy-Based Management, the framework for software-defined storage services in vSphere.

EMC is clearly doubling down on the move to Hybrid Clouds with their Federation EMC Hybrid Cloud, as well as all the VMware vCloud Air initiatives. GreenPages is exploring and advising their customers on ways to develop a hybrid cloud strategy, and this includes engaging the EMC FEHC team as well as the VMware vCloud Air­ solution. EMC isn’t the only traditional disk array vendor to explore a cloud strategy, but it seems to be much further along than the others.

Software Defined Storage is the technology to keep an eye on. DataCore and FalconStor software dominated this space before it was even called SDS by default – there were no other SDS solutions out there. EMC came back in a big way with ViPR, arguably the most advanced “true” software defined storage solution in the market place now. Some of the other software-only vendors surging in this space, where software manages advanced data services across different arrays, like provisioning, deduplication, tiering, replication and snapshots, include Nexenta, Hedvig and others. Vendor SDS is a valid share of the market and is enabled by storage virtualization solutions by IBM, NetApp and others. Once “virtualized,” the vendor software enables cross platform data services. Other software-enabled platforms for advanced storage solutions include Coho Data and Pivot3. Hyperconverged solutions such as VSAN, SimpliVity or Nutanix offer more options to new datacenter solutions that don’t include a traditional storage array. “Tier 2” storage platforms such as Nexsan can benefit from this surge because, while the hardware platforms are solid and well-built, those companies haven’t invested as much or as long in the add-on software services that NetApp (for example) has. With advanced SDS solutions in place, this tier of storage can step up with a more “commodity” priced solution for advanced storage solutions.

In addition to the Hybrid Cloud diversification strategy, EMC and other traditional storage manufacturers are keeping a wary eye on the non-traditional vendors such as Nimble Storage, which is offering innovative and easy-to-use alternatives to the core EMC market. There are also a myriad of startups developing new storage services such as Coho, Rubrik, Nexenta, CleverSafe and others. The All Flash Array market is exploding with advanced solutions made possible by the growing maturity of the flash technology and the proliferation of new software designed to leverage the uniqueness of flash storage. Pure Storage grabbed early market share, followed by XtremIO (EMC), but SolidFire, Nexenta, Coho and Kaminario have developed competitive solutions that range from service provider oriented products to software defined storage services leveraging commodity flash storage.

 

What does this coming superstorm of change mean to you, your company, and your data center strategy? It means that when you are developing a strategic plan for your storage refreshes or datacenter refreshes, you have more options than ever to reduce total cost of ownership, add advanced data services such as disaster recovery or integrated backups, and replace parts (or the whole) of your datacenter storage, server and networking stacks. Contact us today to continue this discussion and see where it leads you. 

 

 

 

 

 

By Randy Weis, Principal Architect

Cloud Storage, hybrid cloud, Storage, Storage and Information Management

The Storage (R)Evolution or The Storage Superstorm?

The storage market is changing, and it isn’t changing slowly. While traditional storage vendors still dominate the revenue and units sold market share, IDC concludes that direct sales to hyperscale (cloud scale, rack scale) service providers are dominating sales of storage. Hyperscale is the ability of an architecture to scale appropriately as increased demand is added to the system; hyperscale datacenters are the type run by Facebook, Amazon, and Google. 

Quote to remember:

“…cloud-based storage, integrated systems, software-defined storage, and flash-optimized storage systems <are selling> at the expense of traditional external arrays.”

In my opinion, this is like the leading edge of a thunderstorm supercell or a “Sandy” Superstorm – the changes that are behind this trend will be tornadoes of upheaval in the datacenter technology business. As cloud services implementations accelerate and software defined storage services proliferate, the impact will be felt not only in the storage market, but also in the server and networking markets. These changes will be reflected in how solutions providers, consulting firms, and VAR/DVARs will help the commercial market solve their technology and business challenges.

EMC is still number one by a very large margin, although down 4% year over year. HP is up nearly 9%; IBM and NetApp are way down. EMC overall (with NAS) has 32.4% revenue share; NetApp number 2 with 12.3%. Even with the apparent domination of the storage vendor market, it is obvious to EMC, their investors, and storage analysts everywhere (including yours truly) that the handwriting on the wall says they must adapt or become irrelevant. The list of great technology firms that didn’t adapt is long, even in New England alone. Digital Equipment Corporation is just one example.

Is EMC next? Not if the leadership team has anything to say about it. The recent announcements by VMware (EMC majority owned) at VMworld 2015 show not only the renewed emphasis on hybrid cloud services but also the intensive focus on software defined storage initiatives enabling the storage stack to be centrally managed within the vSphere Hypervisor. VMware vSphere APIs for IO Filtering are focused on enabling third party data services, such as replication, as part of vSphere Storage Policy-Based Management, the framework for software-defined storage services in vSphere.

EMC is clearly doubling down on the move to Hybrid Clouds with their Federation EMC Hybrid Cloud, as well as all the VMware vCloud Air initiatives. GreenPages is exploring and advising their customers on ways to develop a hybrid cloud strategy, and this includes engaging the EMC FEHC team as well as the VMware vCloud Air­ solution. EMC isn’t the only traditional disk array vendor to explore a cloud strategy, but it seems to be much further along than the others.

Software Defined Storage is the technology to keep an eye on. DataCore and FalconStor software dominated this space before it was even called SDS by default – there were no other SDS solutions out there. EMC came back in a big way with ViPR, arguably the most advanced “true” software defined storage solution in the market place now. Some of the other software-only vendors surging in this space, where software manages advanced data services across different arrays, like provisioning, deduplication, tiering, replication and snapshots, include Nexenta, Hedvig and others. Vendor SDS is a valid share of the market and is enabled by storage virtualization solutions by IBM, NetApp and others. Once “virtualized,” the vendor software enables cross platform data services. Other software-enabled platforms for advanced storage solutions include Coho Data and Pivot3. Hyperconverged solutions such as VSAN, SimpliVity or Nutanix offer more options to new datacenter solutions that don’t include a traditional storage array. “Tier 2” storage platforms such as Nexsan can benefit from this surge because, while the hardware platforms are solid and well-built, those companies haven’t invested as much or as long in the add-on software services that NetApp (for example) has. With advanced SDS solutions in place, this tier of storage can step up with a more “commodity” priced solution for advanced storage solutions.

In addition to the Hybrid Cloud diversification strategy, EMC and other traditional storage manufacturers are keeping a wary eye on the non-traditional vendors such as Nimble Storage, which is offering innovative and easy-to-use alternatives to the core EMC market. There are also a myriad of startups developing new storage services such as Coho, Rubrik, Nexenta, CleverSafe and others. The All Flash Array market is exploding with advanced solutions made possible by the growing maturity of the flash technology and the proliferation of new software designed to leverage the uniqueness of flash storage. Pure Storage grabbed early market share, followed by XtremIO (EMC), but SolidFire, Nexenta, Coho and Kaminario have developed competitive solutions that range from service provider oriented products to software defined storage services leveraging commodity flash storage.

 

What does this coming superstorm of change mean to you, your company, and your data center strategy? It means that when you are developing a strategic plan for your storage refreshes or datacenter refreshes, you have more options than ever to reduce total cost of ownership, add advanced data services such as disaster recovery or integrated backups, and replace parts (or the whole) of your datacenter storage, server and networking stacks. Contact us today to continue this discussion and see where it leads you. 

 

 

 

 

 

By Randy Weis, Principal Architect

EMC World 2015, Featured, hybrid cloud, hyperconverged infrastructure, Information Infrastructure, Storage, Storage and Information Management

EMC World 2015: Event Recap

After EMC World 2015, I’m languishing in airports today in post-conference burnout – an ideal time to deliver a report on the news, announcements and my prognostications on what this means to our business.

The big announcements were delivered in General Sessions on Monday (EMC Information Infrastructure & VCE) and on Tuesday (Federation: VMware & Pivotal). The Federation announcements are more developer and futures oriented, although important strategically, so I’ll pass on that for now.

EMC and VCE have updated their converged and Hyperconverged products pretty dramatically. Yes, VSPEX Blue is Hyperconverged, however unfortunate the name is in linking an EVO:RAIL solution to a reference architecture solution.

The products can be aligned as:

  1. Block
  2. Rack
  3.  Appliances

EMC World 2015

The VCE Vblock product line adheres to its core value proposition closely.

  1. Time from order to completely deployed on the data center floor in 45 days. (GreenPages will provide the Deploy & Implementation services. We have three D&I engineers on staff now.)
  2. Cross component Unified upgrade through a Release Candidate Matrix – every single bit of hardware is tested in major and minor upgrades to insure compatibility: storage, switch, blade, add-ons (RecoverPoint, Avamar, VPLEX).
  3. Unified support – one call to VCE, not to all the vendors in the build

However, VCE is adding options and variety to make the product less monolithic.

  1. VXblock – this is the XtremIO version, intended for large VDI or mission critical transactional deployments (trading, insurance, national healthcare claims processing). The Beast is a Vblock of eight 40 TB Xbrick nodes, 320 TB before dedupe and compression, or nearly 2 PB with realistic data reduction. Yes, that is Two Petabytes of All Flash Array. Remote replication is now totally supported with RecoverPoint.
  2. VXRack – this is a Vblock without an array, but it isn’t VSAN either. It is….ScaleIO, a software storage solution that pools server storage into a shared pool. The minimum configuration is 100 compute nodes, which can be dense performance (4 node form factor in 2 U chassis) or capacity. The nodes can be bare metal or hypervisor of any sort. This can scale to 328 Petabytes. Yes, Petabytes. This is web-scale, but they call it “Rack Scale” computing (first generation). More on that later…
  3. Vscale – Networking! This is Leaf and Spine networking in a rack to tie a VXrack or Vblock deployment together, at scale. “One Ring to Rule Them All”. This is big, literally. Imagine ordering a petabyte installation of VXblock, VXrack and Vscale, and rolling it onto the floor in less than two months.

So, that is Block and Rack. What about Appliance?

Enter VSPEX Blue, the EMC implementation of EVO:RAIL. This has definite value in…

  • Pricing
  • Unified management & support
  • The “app store” with
    • integrated backup (VDPA)
    • replication (vRPA)
    • Cloud Array integration (TwinStrata lives!), a virtual iSCSI controller that will present cloud storage to the system as a backup target or a capacity tier.

This post from Mike Colson provides a good explanation.

Future apps will include virus scanning, links to Public IaaS and others.

I set one up in the lab in 15 minutes, as advertised, although I had to wait for the configuration wizard to churn away after I initialized it and input all the networking. Professional Services will be required, as EMC is requiring PS to implement. Our team is and will be prepared to deploy this. We can discuss how this compares to other Hyperconverged appliances. Contact us for more information.

There are other announcements, some in sheer scale and some in desirable new features.

Data Domain Beast: DD9500, 58.7 TB/hr. and 1.7 PB of capacity. This is rated at 1.5x the performance and 4x the scalability of the nearest competitor.

VPLEX News: The VPLEX Witness can now be deployed in the public Cloud (naturally EMC recommends the EMC Hybrid Cloud or vCloud Air). The Witness has to be outside the fault domains of any protected site, so where better than the Cloud? It is a very lightweight VM.

CloudArray (TwinStrata’s Cloud Array Controller) is integrated with VPLEX. You can have a distributed volume spanning on premise and cloud storage. I’m still trying to grasp the significance of this. The local cache for the CloudArray controller can be very fast, so this isn’t limited to low latency applications. The things you could do…

VPLEX is now available in a Virtual Edition (VPLEX/VE). This will obviously come with some caveats and restrictions, but this also is a fantastic new option for smaller organizations looking for the high availability that VPLEX provides, as well as data mobility and federation of workloads across metro distances.

VVOL: Chuck Hollis (@chuckhollis) led an entertaining and informative ‘Birds of a Feather’ session for VVOLs. Takeaway – this is NOT commonly deployed yet. Only a handful of people have even set it up, and mostly for test. This was in a room with at least 150 people, so high interest, but low deployment. Everyone sees the potential and is looking forward to real world policy based deployments on industry standard storage. This is an emerging technology that will be watched closely.

VNX/VNXe: I didn’t see or hear many striking features or upgrades in this product line, but an all flash VNXe was trumpeted. I’ll be looking at the performance and design specifications of this more closely to see how it might fit targeted use cases or general purpose storage for SMB and commercial level customers. There is talk around the virtualization of the VNX array, as well as Isilon, so pretty soon nearly every controller or device in the EMC portfolio will be available as a virtual appliance. This leads me to…

ViPR Controller and ViPR SRM: Software Defined Storage

ViPR Controller is definitely a real product with real usefulness. This is the automation and provisioning tool for a wide variety of infrastructure elements, allowing for creation of virtual arrays with policy based provisioning, leveraging every data service imaginable: dedupe, replication, snapshots, file services, block services and so on.

ViPR SRM is the capacity reporting and monitoring tool that provides the management of capacity that is needed in an SDS environment. This is a much improved product with a very nice GUI and more intuitive approach to counters and metrics.

I’d recommend a Storage Transformation Workshop for people interested in exploring how SDS can change the way (and cost) of how you manage your information infrastructure.

More on EVO:RAIL/VSPEX Blue

I met with Mike McDonough, the mastermind behind EVO:RAIL. He is indeed a mastermind. The story of the rise of EVO:RAIL as a separate business unit is interesting enough (300 business cases submitted, 3 approved, and he won’t say what the other mystery products are), but the implementation and strategy and vision are what matter to us. The big factor here was boiling down the support cases to come up with the 370 most common reasons for support, all around configuration, management and hardware. The first version of EVO:RAIL addressed 240 of those issues. Think of this as having a safety rail around a vSphere appliance to prevent these common and easily avoidable issues, without restricting the flexibility too much. The next version will incorporate NSX, most likely. Security and inspection are the emphases for the next iteration. Partners and distributors were chosen carefully. GreenPages is one of only 9 national partners chosen for this, based on our long history as a strategic partner and our thought leadership! The tightly controlled hardware compatibility list is a strength, as future regression tests for software and other upgrades will keep the permutations down to a minimum. (By the way, the EMC server platform is Intel, for VxRack, VSPEX Blue and I think for all of their compute modules for all their products). The implication here, competitively, is that as competitive appliances that are buying white box hardware with commodity contracts allowing for flexibility in drives, memory and CPU, will have an exponentially more difficult task in maintain the increasing permutations of hardware versions over time.

Final Blue Sky note:

Rack Scale is an Intel initiative that promises an interesting future for increased awareness of the hardware for hypervisors, but is a very future leaning project. Read Scott Lowe’s thoughts on this.

 

As always, contact us for more details and in-depth conversations about how we can help you build the data center of the future, today.

 

By Randy Weis, Practice Manager, Information Infrastructure

DRaaS, Featured, Storage and Information Management

Disaster Recovery as a Service: Does it make sense for you?

Does disaster recovery as a service make sense for your organization? It is oftentimes more cost effective and less of a headache than traditional disaster recovery options. As the importance of information infrastructure and applications grows, disaster recovery continues to become more and more critical to a company’s success. In this video, I break down the benefits of Disaster Recovery as a Service and discuss how you go about finding a solution that fits your needs. Benefits include:

  • You can get up and running in almost no time. Decrease implementation time from between 6 months-1 year down to 1 month or even a few weeks.
  • Shift from CapEx to OpEx
  • More affordable
  • No hardware refreshes
  • No software support

If you’re interested in learning more about Disaster Recovery as a Service and how it could impact your organization, reach out!

 

Disaster Recovery as a Service: Does it make sense for you?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8kYOIGxhBRc

 

 

By Randy Weis, Practice Manager, Information Infrastructure

Featured, flash storage, Storage, Storage and Information Management

Flash Storage: Is it right for you?

In this video, I discuss flash storage. Remember, flash storage isn’t just an enterprise play. It’s important to understand how it can be used and when you should purchase it. Who are the mayor players? What’s the difference between all-flash and hybrid or adaptive flash? What about single cell or multi-level cell? What’s the pricing like?

What you should be doing is designing a solution that can take can take advantage of the flash that is right for your applications and that fits your needs and purposes. A combination of flash drives and spinning drives put together correctly with the right amount of intelligent software can address nearly everybody’s most critical application requirements without breaking the bank.

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Nn1O3C3Vqo

 

If you’re interested in talking more about flash storage, reach out!

 

 

By Randy Weis, Practice Manager, Information Infrastructure

Data, Data management, Featured, Information Infrastructure, Storage, Storage and Information Management

Storage Has Evolved – It Now Provides the Context & Management of Data

 

Information infrastructure is taking storage, which is a very fundamental part of any data center infrastructure, and putting context around it by adding value on what has been typically seen as a commodity item.

Bits in and of themselves have little value. Add context to it and assign value to that information and it becomes an information infrastructure. Organizations need to seek to add value to their datacenter environments by leveraging some advanced technologies that have become part of our landscape. These technologies include software defined storage, solid state storage, and cloud based storage. Essentially, there is a new way to deliver a datacenter application data infrastructure.

Storage has evolved

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yzbwG0g-Y7c

Interested in learning more about the latest in storage technologies? Fill out this form and we’ll get back to you!

By Randy Weis, Practice Manager – Information Infrastructure

Featured, Information Infrastructure, IT Management, Storage, Storage and Information Management

EMC Acquired TwinStrata in July. What’s This Mean For You Moving Forward?

Video with Randy Weis, Practice Manager, Data Center   http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=McUyYF9NIec   Back in July, storage giant EMC acquired TwinStrata. Information infrastructure and storage expert Randy Weis breaks down TwinStrata’s capabilities and explains what this means for your organization.   Interested in speaking with Randy about the latest trends in storage? Email us at socialmedia@greenpages.com  …Read More »

Backup, Cloud Storage, Featured, recovery, Storage and Information Management

Why Nirvanix Doesn’t Mean the End of Cloud Storage

By Randy Weis, Practice Manager, Virtualization & Data Management

By now everyone is familiar with the Nirvanix fiasco. Now that the dust has settled, I decided to talk about the implications this has had, and will have, on the cloud storage market as well as to highlight some silver linings organizations can take away from the meltdown.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mtQmGQBWzbc

If you’re looking for more content around storage and information management check out my recent posts “A Guide to Successful Big Data Adoption” as well as “10 Storage Predictions for 2014.”

Do you have questions for Randy about storage & data management? Email us at socialmedia@greenpages.com

Big Data, Data management, Featured, Storage, Storage and Information Management

A Guide to Successful Big Data Adoption

By Randy Weis, Practice Manager, Data Management & Virtualization

In this video, storage expert Randy Weis talks about the impact big data is having on organizations and provides an outline for the correct approach companies should be taking in regards to big data analytics.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jZ3V2ynOD44

What is your organization doing in regards to big data? Email us at socialmedia@greenpages.com if you would like to talk to Randy in more depth about big data, data management, storage, and more.