Random Short Take #87

Welcome to Random Short Take #87. Happy Fête Nationale du 14 juillet to those who celebrate. Let’s get random.

  • I always enjoy it when tech vendors give you a little peak behind the curtain, and Dropbox excels at this. Here is a great article on how Dropbox selects data centre sites. Not every company is operating at the scale that Dropbox is, but these kinds of articles provide useful insights nonetheless. Even if you just skip to the end and follow this process when making technology choices:
    1. Identify what you need early.
    2. Understand what’s being offered.
    3. Validate the technical details.
    4. Physically verify each proposal.
    5. Negotiate.
  • I haven’t used NetWorker for a while, but if you do, this article from Preston on what’s new in NetWorker 19.9 should be of use to you.
  • In VMware Cloud on AWS news, vCenter Federation for VMware Cloud on AWS is now live. You can read all about it here.
  • Familiar with Write Once, Read Many (WORM) storage? This article from the good folks at Datadobi on WORM retention made for some interesting reading. In short, keeping everything for ever is really a data management strategy, and it could cost you.
  • Speaking of data management, check out this article from Chin-Fah on data management and ransomware – it’s an alternative view very much worth considering.
  • Mellor wrote an article on Pixar and VAST Data’s collaboration. And he did one on DreamWorks and NetApp for good measure. I’m fascinated by media creation in general, and it’s always interesting to see what the big shops are using as part of their infrastructure toolkit.
  • JB put out a short piece highlighting some AI-related content shenanigans over at Gizmodo. The best part was the quoted reactions from staff – “16 thumbs down emoji, 11 wastebasket emoji, six clown emoji, two face palm emoji and two poop emoji.”
  • Finally, the recent Royal Commission into the “Robodebt” program completed and released a report outlining just how bad it really was. You can read Simon’s coverage over at El Reg. It’s these kinds of things that make you want to shake people when they come up with ideas that are destined to cause pain.

Random Short Take #86

Welcome to Random Short Take #86. It’s been a while, and I’ve been travelling a bit for work. So let’s get random.

  • Let’s get started with three things / people I like: Gestalt IT, Justin Warren, and Pure Storage. This article by Justin digs into some of the innovation we’re seeing from Pure Storage. Speaking of Justin, if you don’t subscribe to his newsletter “The Crux”, you should. I do. Subscribe here.
  • And speaking of Pure Storage, a survey was conducted and results were had. You can read more on that here.
  • Switching gears slightly (but still with a storage focus), check out the latest Backblaze drive stats report here.
  • Oh you like that storage stuff? What about this article on file synchronisation and security from Chin-Fah?
  • More storage? What about this review of the vSAN Objects Viewer from Victor?
  • I’ve dabbled in product management previously, but this article from Frances does a much better job of describing what it’s really like.
  • Edge means different things to different people, and I found this article from Ben Young to be an excellent intro to the topic.
  • You know I hate Netflix but love its tech blog. Check out this article on migrating critical traffic at scale.

Bonus round. I’m in the Bay Area briefly next week. If you’re around, let me know! Maybe we can watch one of the NBA Finals games.

Random Short Take #84

Welcome to Random Short Take #84. There’s a bit going on, so let’s get random.

Random Short Take #83

Welcome to Random Short Take #83. Quite a few press releases in this one, so let’s get random.

Random Short Take #82

Happy New Year (to those who celebrate). Let’s get random.

Random Short Take #81

Welcome to Random Short Take #81. Last one for the year, because who really wants to read this stuff over the holiday season? Let’s get random.

Take care of yourselves and each other, and I’ll hopefully see you all on the line or in person next year.

Brisbane VMUG – November 2022

The November 2022 edition of the Brisbane VMUG meeting will be held on Thursday 24th November at the Cube (QUT) from 5pm – 7pm. It’s sponsored by Pure Storage and promises to be a great afternoon. Register here.

Raise Your Kubernetes Infrastructure Status From Zero to Hero

If your developers or platform architects are asking you for storage features commonly found in your vSphere infrastructure but targeted towards Kubernetes, you are not alone – let Portworx help you go from “I don’t know” to “No problem”!

Locking yourself into a storage solution that is dependent on specific infrastructure is a sure way to reduce efficiency and flexibility for your developers and where their applications can run – Portworx elevates you to “Hero” status by:

  • Providing your team a consistent, cloud native storage layer you can utilise on ANY Kubernetes platform – whether on-premises or in the public cloud
  • Giving you the capability to provide Kubernetes native DR and business continuity not only for your persistent storage, but all of the Kubernetes objects associated with your applications (think SRM and vMSC for Kubernetes!)
  • Enabling you to provide Kubernetes-aware data protection, including ransomware protection and 3-2-1 backup compliance with RBAC roles that can fit the existing policies within your organisation
  • Delighting your developers that need access to modern databases such as Kafka, PostgreSQL, Cassandra, and more by delivering self-service deployments with best practices “built-in”, which accelerate development cycles without a dinosaur DBA or learning complex Kubernetes operators

Come join us to see how we can create your “Better Together” story with Tanzu and give you the tools and knowledge to bring agility for your developers to your underlying infrastructure for modern applications running on Kubernetes!

Mike Carpendale

Mike joined Pure Storage in April 2021 as the APJ Regions Platform Architect. He has 20+ years experience in the industry, ranging from his expert level hands-on experience of designing and managing large scale on-prem as-a-service offerings underpinned by VMware, to his more recent work in the public cloud. 

 

PIZZA AND NETWORKING BREAK!

 

This will be followed by:

VMware Session

Peter Hauck – Senior Solutions Engineer

VMware

 

And we will be finishing off with:

 

Preparing for VMware Certifications

With the increase of position requirements in the last few years, certifications help you demonstrate your skills and move you a step forward on getting better jobs. In this Community Ssession we will help you understand how to prepare for a VMware certification exam and some useful tips you can use during the exam.

We will talk about:

Different types of exams

  • How to schedule an exam
  • Where to get material to study
  • Lessons learned from the field per type of exam

Francisco Fernandez Cardarelli – Senior Consultant (4 x VCIX)

 

Soft drinks and vBeers will be available throughout the evening! We look forward to seeing you there! Doors open at 5pm. Please make your way to The Cube.

Random Short Take #80

Welcome to Random Short Take #80. Lots of press release news this week and some parochial book recommendations. Let’s get random.

Verity ES Springs Forth – Promises Swift Eradication of Data

Verity ES recently announced its official company launch and the commercial availability of its Verity ES data eradication enterprise software solution. I had the opportunity to speak to Kevin Enders about the announcement and thought I’d briefly share some thoughts here.

 

From Revert to Re-birth?

Revert, a sister company of Verity ES, is an on-site data eradication service provider. It’s also a partner for a number of Storage OEMs.

The Problem

The folks at Revert have had an awful lot of experience with data eradication in big enterprise environments. With that experience, they’d observed a few challenges, namely:

  • The software doing the data eradication was too slow;
  • Eradicating data in enterprise environments introduced particular requirements at high volumes; and
  • Larger capacity HDDs and SDDs were a real problem to deal with.

The Real Problem?

Okay, so the process to get rid of old data on storage and compute devices is a bit of a problem. But what’s the real problem? Organisations need to get rid of end of life data – particularly from a legal standpoint – in a more efficient way. Just as data growth continues to explode, so too does the requirement to delete the old data.

 

The Solution

Verity ES was spawned to develop software to solve a number of the challenges Revert were coming across in the field. There are two ways to do it:

  • Eliminate the data destructively (via device shredding / degaussing); or
  • Non-destructively (using software-based eradication).

Why Eradicate?

Why eradicate? It’s a sustainable approach, enables residual value recovery, and allows for asset re-use. But it nonetheless needs to be secure, economical, and operationally simple to do. How does Verity ES address these requirements? It has Product Assurance Certification from ADISA. It’s also developed software that’s more efficient, particularly when it comes to those troublesome high capacity drives.

[image courtesy of Verity ES]

Who’s Buying?

Who’s this product aimed at? Primarily enterprise DC operators, hyperscalers, IT asset disposal companies, and 3rd-party hardware maintenance providers.

 

Thoughts

If you’ve spent any time on my blog you’ll know that I write a whole lot about data protection, and this is probably one of the first times that I’ve written about data destruction as a product. But it’s an interesting problem that many organisations are facing now. There is a tonne of data being generated every day, and some of that data needs to be gotten rid of, either because it’s sitting on equipment that’s old and needs to be retired, or because legislatively there’s a requirement to get rid of the data.

The way we tackle this problem has changed over time too. One of the most popular articles on this blog was about making an EMC CLARiiON CX700 useful again after EMC did a certified erasure on the array. There was no data to be found on the array, but it was able to be repurposed as lab equipment, and enjoyed a few more months of usefulness. In the current climate, we’re all looking at doing more sensible things with our old disk drives, rather than simply putting a bullet in them (except for the Feds – but they’re a bit odd). Doing this at scale can be challenging, so it’s interesting to see Verity ES step up to the plate with a solution that promises to help with some of these challenges. It takes time to wipe drives, particularly when you need to do it securely.

I should be clear that this data doesn’t go out and identify what data needs to be erased – you have to do that through some other tools. So it won’t tell you that a bunch of PII is buried in a home directory somewhere, or sitting in a spot it shouldn’t be. It also won’t go out and dig through your data protection data and tell you what needs to go. Hopefully, though, you’ve got tools that can handle that problem for you. What this solution does seem to do is provide organisations with options when it comes to cost-effective, efficient data eradication. And that’s something that’s going to become crucial as we continue to generate data, need to delete old data, and do so on larger and larger disk drives.

Random Short Take #78

Welcome to Random Short Take #78. We’re hurtling towards the silly season. Let’s get random.