Welcome to Random Short Take #45. The number 45 has taken a bit of a beating in terms of popularity in recent years, but a few pretty solid players have nonetheless worn 45 in the NBA, including MJ and The Rifleman. My favourite from this list is A.C. Green (“slam so hard, break your TV screen“). So let’s get random.
I was unlucky enough to work at a telco when 5G was first being spoken about as a new product. It was terrible. This is an interesting perspective on where things are really at.
WekaIO has announced a bunch of reference architectures to allow customers to work more effectively with object storage solutions. You can read more on that here.
Welcome to Random Short Take #41. A few players have worn 41 in the NBA, but it’s hard to go past Dirk Nowitzki for a quality big man with a sweet, sweet jumpshot. So let’s get random.
There have been a lot of articles written by folks about various home office setups since COVID-19 became a thing, but this one by Jason Benedicic deserves a special mention. I bought a new desk and decluttered a fair bit of my setup, but it wasn’t on this level.
Speaking of COVID-19, there’s a hunger for new TV content as people across the world find themselves confined to their homes. The Ringer published an interesting article on the challenges of diving in to the archives to dig up and broadcast some television gold.
Backblaze made the news a while ago when they announced S3 compatibility, and this blog post covers how you can move from AWS S3 to Backblaze. And check out the offer to cover your data transfer costs too.
Zerto has had a bigger cloud presence with 7.5 and 8.0, and Oracle Public Cloud is now a partner too.
Speaking of cloud, Leaseweb Global recently announced the launch of its Leaseweb Cloud Connect product offering. You can read the press release here.
One of my favourite bands is The Mark Of Cain. It’s the 25th anniversary of the Ill At Ease album (the ultimate gym or breakup album – you choose), and the band has started publishing articles detailing the background info on the recording process. It’s fascinating stuff, and you can read Part 1 here and Part 2 here.
The nice folks over at Scale Computing have been doing some stuff with various healthcare organisations lately. You can read more about that here. I’m hoping to check in with Scale Computing in the near future when I’ve got a moment. I’m looking forward to hearing about what else they’ve been up to.
Welcome to Random Short Take #38. Not a huge amount of players have worn 38 in the NBA, and I’m not going to pretend I was ever a Kwame Brown fan. Although it did seem like he had a tough time of it. Anyway let’s get random.
Ransomware is the new hotness. Or, rather, protecting storage systems from ransomware is the new hotness. My man Chin-Fah had a writeup on that here. It’s not a matter of if, but rather when you’ll run into a problem. It’s been interesting to see the various approaches being taken by the storage vendors and the data protection companies.
This was a great article from Alastair on some of the differences between networking with AWS and VMC on AWS. As someone who works for a VMware Cloud Provider, I can confirm that NSX (T or V, I don’t care) has a whole slew of capabilities and whole slew of integration challenges.
Are you Zoomed out? I am. Even when you think the problem can’t be the network, it might just be the network (I hope my friends in networking appreciate that it’s not always the storage). John Nicholson posted a typically comprehensive overview of how your bandwidth might be one of the things keeping you from demonstrating excellent radio voice on those seemingly endless meetings you’re doing at the moment. It could also be that you’re using crap audio devices too, but I think John’s going to cover that in the future.
Scale Computing has a good story to tell about what it’s been doing with a large school district in the U.S. Read more about that here.
This is one of those promotions aimed at my friends in Northern America more than folks based where I am, but I’m always happy to talk about deals on data protection. StorCentric has launched its “Retrospect Dads & Grads Promotion” offering a free 90-Day subscription license for every Retrospect Backup product. You can read more about that here.
Pure//Accelerate Online was this week, and Max did a nice write-up on Pure Storage File Services over at Gestalt IT.
Rancher Labsrecently announced the general availability of Longhorn (a cloud-native container storage solution). I’m looking forward to digging in to this a bit more over the next little while.
Welcome to Random Short Take #36. Not a huge amount of players have worn 36 in the NBA, but Shaq did (at the end of his career), and Marcus Smart does. This one, though, goes out to one of my favourite players from the modern era, Rasheed Wallace. It seems like Boston is the common thread here. Might have something to do with those hall of fame players wearing numbers in the low 30s. Or it might be entirely unrelated.
Scale Computing recently announced its all-NVMe HC3250DF as a new appliance targeting core data centre and edge computing use cases. It offers higher performance storage, networking and processing. You can read the press release here.
Dell EMC PowerStore has been announced. Chris Mellor covered the announcement here. I haven’t had time to dig into this yet, but I’m keen to learn more. Chris Evans also wrote about it here.
StorCentric’s Nexsan recently announced the E-Series 32F Storage Platform. You can read the press release here.
In what can only be considered excellent news, Preston de Guisehas announced the availability of the second edition of his book, “Data Protection: Ensuring Data Availability”. It will be available in a variety of formats, with the ebook format already being out. I bought the first edition a few times to give as a gift, and I’m looking forward to giving away a few copies of this one too.
Backblaze B2 has been huge for the company, and Backblaze B2 with S3-compatible API access is even huger. Read more about that here. Speaking of Backblaze, it just released its hard dive stats for Q1, 2020. You can read more on that here.
Hal recently upgraded his NUC-based home lab to vSphere 7. You can read more about the process here.
Jon recently posted an article on a new upgrade command available in OneFS. If you’re into Isilon, you might just be into this.
Welcome to Random Short Take #33. Some terrific players have worn 33 in the NBA, including Keith Closs and Stephon Marbury. This one, though, goes out to the “hick from French Lick” Larry Joe Bird. You might see the frequency of these posts ramp up a bit over the next little while. Because everything feels a little random at the moment.
I recently wrote about what Scale Computing has been up to with Leostream. It’s also done a bit with Acronis in the past, and it recently announced it’s now offering Acronis Cloud Storage. You can read more on that here.
The good folks at Druva are offering 6 months of free subscription for Office 365 and Endpoint protection (up to 300 seats) to help businesses adjust to these modern ways of working. You can find out more about that here.
I’ve been wanting to write about Panzura for a while, and I’ve been terribly slack. It’s enjoying some amount of momentum at the moment though, and is reporting revenue growth that looks the goods. Speaking of Panzura, if you haven’t heard of its Vizion.AI offshoot – it’s well worth checking out.
There’s a metric shedload of “how best to work from home” posts doing the rounds at the moment. I found this one from Russ White to be both comprehensive and readable. That’s not as frequent a combination as you might expect.
World Backup Day was yesterday. I’ll be writing more on that this week, but in the meantime this article from Anthony Spiteri on data displacement was pretty interesting.
Speaking of backup and Veeam things, this article on installing Veeam PN from Andre Atkinson was very useful.
Getting started with Leostream is surprisingly simple. To start with, you’ll need to deploy a Gateway and a Broker VM. These are CentOS machines (if you’re a Scale Computing customer you can get likely some minimally configured, pre-packaged qcow appliances from Alan). You’ll need to punch a hole through your firewall for SSL traffic, and run a couple of simple commands on the VMs, but that’s it.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. The way it works is that Leostream has a small agent that you can deploy across the PCs in your fleet. When users hit the gateway they can be directed to their own (physical) desktop inside the organisation. They can then access their desktops remotely (using RDP, SSH, or VNC) over any browser that supports SSL and HTML5. So, rather than having to go out and grab a bunch of laptops, setup a VPN (or scale it out), and have a desktop image ready to go (along with the prerequisite VDI resources hosted somewhere), you can have your remote workforce working remotely from day 1. It comes with a Windows, Java, and Linux agent, so if you have users running macOS or Linux they can still come to the party.
I know I’ve done a bad job of describing the solution, so I recommend you check out this blog post instead.
Thoughts
I’m not at all passionate about VDI and End User Computing in the same way some people I know are. I always thought it was a neat solution that was frequently poorly executed and oftentimes cost a lot of money. But it’s a weird time for the world and, sadly, it might be something like a global pandemic that finally means that VDI gets its due as a useful solution for remote workers. I’d also like to point out that this is just a part of what Leostream can do. If you’re after something outside of the Scale Computing alliance – they can probably help you out.
I’ve spoken to Alan and the Scale Computing team about Leostream a few times now, and I really do like the idea of being able to bring users back into the network, rather than extending the network out to your users. You don’t have to go crazy acquiring a bunch of laptops or mobile devices for traditionally desk-bound users and re-imaging said laptops for those users. You don’t need to spend a tonne of cash on extra VPN connectivity or compute to support a bunch of new “desktop” VMs. Instead, in a fairly short amount of time, you can get users working the way they always have, with a minimum of fuss. This is exactly the kind of approach that I’ve come to expect from Scale Computing – keep it simple, easy to deploy, cost-conscious, and functional.
As I said before – VDI solutions don’t really excite me. But I do appreciate the flexibility they can offer in terms of the ability to access corporate workloads from non-traditional locales. This solution takes it a step further, and does a great job of delivering what could be a complicated solution in a simple and functional fashion. This is the kind of thing we need more of at the moment.
Welcome to Random Short Take #31. Lot of good players have worn 31 in the NBA. You’d think I’d call this the Reggie edition (and I appreciate him more after watching Winning Time), but this one belongs to Brent Barry. This may be related to some recency bias I have, based on the fact that Brent is a commentator in NBA 2K19, but I digress …
I find Plex to be a pretty rock solid application experience, and most of the problems I’ve had with it have been client-related. I recently had a problem with a server update that borked my installation though, and had to roll back. Here’s the quick and dirty way to do that on macOS.
I recently had the chance to speak with Michael Jack from Datadobi about the company’s announcement about its new DIY Starter Pack for NAS migrations. Whilst it seems that the professional services market for NAS migrations has diminished over the last few years, there’s still plenty of data out there that needs to be moved from on box to another. Robocopy and rsync aren’t always the best option when you need to move this much data around.
There are a bunch of things that people need to learn to do operations well. A lot of them are learnt the hard way. This is a great list from Jan Schaumann.
Analyst firms are sometimes misunderstood. My friend Enrico Signoretti has been working at GigaOm for a little while now, and I really enjoyed this article on the thinking behind the GigaOm Radar.
Alastair isn’t just a great writer and moustache aficionado, he’s also a trainer across a number of IT disciplines, including AWS. He recently posted this useful article on what AWS newcomers can expect when it comes to managing EC2 instances.
Welcome to Random Short Take #29. You’d think 29 would be a hard number to line up with basketball players, but it turns out that Marcus Camby wore it one year when he played for Houston. It was at the tail-end of his career, but still. Anyhoo …
I love a good story about rage-quitting projects, and this one is right up there. I’ve often wondered what it must be like to work on open source projects and dealing with the craziness that is the community.
I haven’t worked on a Scalar library in over a decade, but Quantum is still developing them. There’s an interesting story here in terms of protecting your protection data using air gaps. I feel like this is already being handled a different way by the next-generation data protection companies, but when all you have is a hammer. And the cost per GB is still pretty good with tape.
I always enjoy Keith’s ability to take common problems and look at them with a fresh perspective. I’m interested to see just how far he goes down the rabbit hole with this DC project.
Backblaze frequently comes up with useful articles for both enterprise punters and home users alike. This article on downloading your social media presence is no exception. The processes are pretty straightforward to follow, and I think it’s a handy exercise to undertake every now and then.
The home office is the new home lab. Or, perhaps, as we work anywhere now, it’s important to consider setting up a space in your home that actually functions as a workspace. This article from Andrew Miller covers some of the key considerations.
Scale Computing was really busy last year. How busy? Busy enough to pump out a press release that you can check out here. The company also has a snazzy new website and logo that you should check out.
Veeam v10 is coming “very soon”. You can register here to find out more. I’m keen to put this through its paces.
I’ve written in the past about additions to the HC3 Edge Platform. But those things had a rack-mount form factor. The newly announced HE150 runs on Intel NUC devices. Wait, what? That’s right, hyper-converged infrastructure on really small PCs. But don’t you need a bunch of NICs to do HC3 properly? There’s no need for backplane switch requirement, as they use some software-defined networking to tunnel the backplane network across the NIC. The HC3 platform uses less than 1GB RAM per node, and each node has 2 cores. The storage sits on an NVMe drive and you can get hold of this stuff at a retail price of around $5K US for 3 nodes.
[image courtesy of Scale Computing]
Scale at Scale?
How do you deploy these kinds of things at scale then? Conboy tells me there’s full Ansible integration, RESTful API deployment capabilities, and they come equipped with Intel AMT. In short, these things can turn up at the remote site, be plugged in, and be ready to go.
Where would you?
The HE150 solution is 100% specific to multi-site edge implementations. It’s not trying to go after workloads that would normally be serviced by the HE500 or HE1000. Where it can work though, is with:
Oil and Gas exploration – with one in each ship (they need 4-5 VMs to handle sensor data to make command decisions)
Grocery and retail chains
Manufacturing platforms
Telcos – pole-side boxes
In short, think of environments that require some amount of compute and don’t have IT people to support it.
Thoughts
I’ve been a fan of what Scale Computing has been doing with HCI for some time now. Scale’s take on making things simple across the enterprise has been refreshing. While this solution might surprise some folks, it strikes me that there’s an appetite for this kind fo thing in the marketplace. The edge is often a place where less is more, and there’s often not a lot of resources available to do basic stuff, like deploy a traditional, rackmounted compute environment. But a small, 3-node HCI cluster that can be stacked away in a stationery cupboard? That might just work. Particularly if you only need a few virtual machines to meet those compute requirements. As Conboy pointed out to me, Scale isn’t looking to use this as a replacement for the higher-preforming options it has available. Rather, this solution is perfect for highly distributed retail environments where they need to do one or two things and it would be useful if they didn’t do those things in a data centre located hundreds of kilometres away.
The edge presents a number of challenges to enterprises, in terms of both its definition and how to deal with it effectively. Ultimately, the success of solutions like this will hinge on ease of use, reliability, and whether it really is fit for purpose. The good folks at Scale don’t like to go off half-cocked, so you can be sure some thought went into this product – it’s not just a science project. I’m keen to see what the uptake is like, because I think this kind of solution has a place in the market. The HE150 is available for purchase form Scale Computing now. It’s also worth checking out the Scale Computing presentations at Tech Field Day 20.
Here’s a semi-regular listicle of random news items that might be of some interest.
This is a great article covering QoS enhancements in Purity 5.3. Speaking of Pure Storage I’m looking forward to attending Pure//Accelerate in Austin in the next few weeks. I’ll be participating in a Storage Field Day Exclusive event as well – you can find more details on that here.
My friends at Scale Computing have entered into an OEM agreement with Acronis to add more data protection and DR capabilities to the HC3 platform. You can read more about that here.
Commvaultjust acquired Hedvig for a pretty penny. It will be interesting to see how they bring them into the fold. This article from Max made for interesting reading.
DH2i are presenting a webinar on September 10th at 11am Pacific, “On the Road Again – How to Secure Your Network for Remote User Access”. I’ve spoken to the people at DH2i in the past and they’re doing some really interesting stuff. If your timezone lines up with this, check it out.
I caught up with Zerto while I was at VMworld US last week, and they talked to me about their VAIO announcement. Justin Paul did a good job of summarising it here.
Speaking of VMworld, William has posted links to the session videos – check it out here.
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