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:
Identify what you need early.
Understand what’s being offered.
Validate the technical details.
Physically verify each proposal.
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.
If you’ve ever had the chance to listen to Rebecca talk, you know she’s really smart. This article on setting the technical direction for a team made for great reading.
All the kids like to talk about storage over networks, not storage area networks. What about when old meets new? Chin-fah posted an excellent article on Fibre Channel protocol in a zero trust world.
Welcome to Random Short Take #74. Let’s get random.
Chris Colotti put together a great article on VMware vSphere networking. It seems like a fairly fundamental issue, but one that I’ve seen plenty of times in the field.
Pure Storage recently had its annual shindig, resulting in a few announcements, including the FlashBlade//S. Chris M. Evans goes into more detail in this post.
My friend Vincent always does a great job of breaking down tasks into smaller, more manageable tasks. He’s also very good at explaining how to get things done in a succinct fashion. Here’s an article he wrote on using the NetApp Command Line to create a SVM with a CIFS/NFS share.
Datadobi recently announced StorageMAP – a “solution that provides a single pane of glass for organizations to manage unstructured data across their complete data storage estate”. I recently had the opportunity to speak with Carl D’Halluin about the announcement, and thought I’d share some thoughts here.
The Problem
So what’s the problem enterprises are trying to solve? They have data all over the place, and it’s no longer a simple activity to work out what’s useful and what isn’t. Consider the data on a typical file / object server inside BigCompanyX.
[image courtesy of Datadobi]
As you can see, there’re all kinds of data lurking about the place, including data you don’t want to have on your server (e.g. Barry’s slightly shonky home videos), and data you don’t need any more (the stuff you can move down to a cheaper tier, or even archive for good).
What’s The Fix?
So how do you fix this problem? Traditionally, you’ll try and scan the data to understand things like capacity, categories of data, age, and so forth. You’ll then make some decisions about the data based on that information and take actions such as relocating, deleting, or migrating it. Sounds great, but it’s frequently a tough thing to make decisions about business data without understanding the business drivers behind the data.
[image courtesy of Datadobi]
What’s The Real Fix?
The real fix, according to Datadobi, is to add a bit more automation and smarts to the process, and this relies heavily on accurate tagging of the data you’re storing. D’Halluin pointed out to me that they don’t suggest you create complex tags for individual files, as you could be there for years trying to sort that out. Rather, you add tags to shares or directories, and let the StorageMAP engine make recommendations and move stuff around for you.
[image courtesy of Datadobi]
Tags can represent business ownership, the role of the data, any action to be taken, or other designations, and they’re user definable.
[image courtesy of Datadobi]
How Does This Fix It?
You’ll notice that the process above looks awfully similar to the one before – so how does this fix anything? The key, in my opinion at least, is that StorageMAP takes away the requirement for intervention from the end user. Instead of going through some process every quarter to “clean up the server”, you’ve got a process in place to do the work for you. As a result, you’ll hopefully see improved cost control, better storage efficiency across your estate, and (hopefully) you’ll be getting a little bit more value from your data.
Thoughts
Tools that take care of everything for you have always had massive appeal in the market, particularly as organisations continue to struggle with data storage at any kind of scale. Gone are the days when your admins had an idea where everything on a 9GB volume was stored, or why it was stored there. We now have data stored all over the place (both officially and unofficially), and it’s becoming impossible to keep track of it all.
The key things to consider with these kinds of solutions is that you need to put in the work with tagging your data correctly in the first place. So there needs to be some thought put into what your data looks like in terms of business value. Remember that mp4 video files might not be warranted in the Accounting department, but your friends in Marketing will be underwhelmed if you create some kind of rule to automatically zap mp4s. The other thing to consider is that you need to put some faith in the system. This kind of solution will be useless if folks insist on not deleting anything, or not “believing” the output of the analytics and reporting. I used to work with customers who didn’t want to trust a vendor’s automated block storage tiering because “what does it know about my workloads?”. Indeed. The success of these kind of intelligence and automation tools relies to a certain extent on folks moving away from faith-based computing as an operating model.
But enough ranting from me. I’ve covered Datadobi a bit over thelast few years, and it makes sense that all of these announcements have finally led to the StorageMAP product. These guys know data, and how to move it.
Imply has announced Polaris, a Cloud Database Service for Modern Analytics Applications. You can read more about that here.
I find the idea of scale, and what it really means to different people, to be fascinating. The folks at Netflix know a bit about scale, and I found this article on the Rapid Event Notification System at Netflix to be particularly interesting.
Viktor posted this VMUGNL session recording: From idea to production with VMware Tanzu. It’s great to see folks finally able to get back to in-person VMUG meetings.
Howard put together a great guide on backing up iCloud documents – Can you back up iCloud documents? It’s something that I think not enough people look at too closely.
Have you ever had AV Upgraditis? I have, on plenty of occasions.
Speaking of cloud, I enjoyed this article from Chris M. Evans on the AWS “wobble” (as he puts it) in us-east-1 recently. Speaking of articles Chris has written recently, check out his coverage of the Pure Storage FlashArray//XL announcement.
Speaking of Pure Storage, my friend Jon wrote about his experience with ActiveCluster in the field recently. You can find that here. I always find these articles to be invaluable, if only because they demonstrate what’s happening out there in the real world.
Want some press releases? Here’s one from Datadobi announcing it has released new Starter Packs for DobiMigrate ranging from 1PB up to 7PB.
Data protection isn’t just something you do at the office – it’s a problem for home too. I’m always interested to hear how other people tackle the problem. This article from Jeff Geerling (and the associated documentation on Github) was great.
John Nicholson is a smart guy, so I think you should check out his articles on benchmarking (and what folks are getting wrong). At the moment this is a 2-part series, but I suspect that could be expanded. You can find Part 1 here and Part 2 here. He makes a great point that benchmarking can be valuable, but benchmarking like it’s 1999 may not be the best thing to do (I’m paraphrasing).
Speaking of smart people, Tom Andry put together a great article recently on dispelling myths around subwoofers. If you or a loved one are getting worked up about subwoofers, check out this article.
I had people ask me if I was doing a predictions post this year. I’m not crazy enough to do that, but Mellor is. You can read his article here.
In some personal news (and it’s not LinkedIn official yet) I recently quit my job and will be taking up a new role in the new year. I’m not shutting the blog down, but you might see a bit of a change in the content. I can’t see myself stopping these articles, but it’s likely there’ll be less of the data protection howto articles being published. But we’ll see. In any case, wherever you are, stay safe, happy holidays, and see you on the line next year.
I recently had the opportunity to speak Carl D’Halluin from Datadobi about DobiProtect, and thought I’d share some thoughts here. I wrote about DobiProtect in the past, particularly in relation to disaster recovery and air gaps. Things have progressed since then, as they invariably do, and there’s a bit more to the DobiProtect story now.
Ransomware Bad, Data Protection Good
If you’re paying attention to any data protection solution vendors at the moment, you’re no doubt hearing about ransomware attacks. These are considered to be Very Bad Things (™).
What Happens
Ransomware comes in through zero-day exploit or email attachments
Local drive content encrypted
Network shares encrypted – might be fast, might be slow
Encrypted file accessed and ransom message appears
How It Happens
Ransomware attacks are executed via many means, including social engineering, software exploits, and “malvertising” (my second favourite non-word next to performant). The timing of these attacks is important to note as well, as some ransomware will lay dormant and launch during a specific time period (a public holiday, for example). Sometimes ransomware will slowly and periodically encrypt content , but generally speaking it will begin encrypting files as quickly as possible. It might not encrypt everything either, but you can bet that it will be a pain regardless.
Defense In Depth
Ransomware protection isn’t just about data protection though. There are many layers you need to consider (and protect), including:
Human – hard to control, not very good at doing what they’re told.
Physical – securing the locations where data is stored is important.
End Points – BYOD can be a pain to manage effectively, and keeping stuff up to date seems to be challenging for the most mature organisations.
Networks – there’s a lot of work that needs to go into making sure workloads are both secure and accessible.
Application – sometimes they’re just slapped in there and we’re happy they run.
Data – It’s everything, but super exposed if you don’t get the rest of this right.
DobiProtect Then?
The folks at Datadobi tell me DobiProtect is the ideal solution for protecting the data layer as part of your defence in depth strategy as it is:
Software defined
Designed for the scale and complexity of file and / or object datasets
A solution that compliments existing capabilities such as storage system snapshots
Easy to deploy and does not impact existing configurations
A solution that is cost effective and flexible
Where Does It Fit?
DobiProtect plays to the strength of Datadobi – file and object storage. As such, it’s not designed to handle your traditional VM and DB protection, this remains the domain of the usual suspects.
[image courtesy of Datadobi]
Simple Deployment
The software-only nature of the solution, and the flexibility of going between file and object, means that it’s pretty easy to deploy as well.
[image courtesy of Datadobi]
Architecture
From an architecture perspective, it’s pretty straight forward as well, with the Core handling the orchestration and monitoring, and software proxies used for data movement.
[image courtesy of Datadobi]
Thoughts
I’ve been involved in the data protection business in some form or another for over two decades now. As you can imagine, I’ve seen a whole bunch of different ways to solve problems. In my day job I generally promote modern approaches to solving the challenge of protecting data in an efficient and cost-effective fashion. It can be hard to do this well, at scale, across the variety of workloads that you find in the modern enterprise nowadays. It’s not just some home directories, a file server, and one database that you have to protect. Now there’s SaaS workloads, 5000 different database options, containers, endpoints, and all kinds of other crazy stuff. The thing linking that all together is data, and the requirement to protect that data in order for the business to do its business – whether that’s selling widgets or providing services to the general public.
Protecting file and object workloads can be a pain. But why not just use a vendor that can roughly do the job rather than using a very specific solution like DobiProtect? I asked D’Halluin the same question, and his response was along the following lines. The kind of customers Datadobi is working with on a regular basis have petabytes of unstructured data they need to protect, and they absolutely need to be sure that it’s being protected properly. Not just from a quality of recovered data perspective, but also from a defensible compliance position. It’s not just about pointing out to the auditors that the data protection solution “should” be working. There’s a lot of legislation and stuff in place to ensure that it needs to be more than that. So it’s oftentimes worth investing in a solution that can reliably deliver against that compliance requirement.
Ransomware attacks can be the stuff of nightmares, particularly if you aren’t prepared. Any solution that is helping you to protect yourself (and, more importantly, recover) from attacks is a Very Good Thing™. Just be sure to check that the solution you’re looking at does what you think it will do. And then check again, because it’s not a matter of if, but when.
It’s been a while since I’ve looked at Dell Technologies closely, but Tech Field Day recently ran an event and Pietro put together a pretty comprehensive view of what was covered.
Dr Bruce Davie is a smart guy, and this article over at El Reg on decentralising Internet services made for some interesting reading.
Clean installs and Time Machine system recoveries on macOS aren’t as nice as they used to be. I found this out a day or two before this article was published. It’s worth reading nonetheless, particularly if you want to get your head around the various limitations with Recovery Mode on more modern Apple machines.
If you follow me on Instagram, you’ll likely realise I listen to records a lot. I don’t do it because they “sound better” though, I do it because it works for me as a more active listening experience. There are plenty of clowns on the Internet ready to tell you that it’s a “warmer” sound. They’re wrong. I’m not saying you should fight them, but if you find yourself in an argument this article should help.
Speaking of technologies that have somewhat come and gone (relax – I’m joking!), this article from Chris M. Evans on HCI made for some interesting reading. I always liked the “start small” approach with HCI, particularly when comparing it to larger midrange storage systems. But things have definitely changed when it comes to available storage and converged options.
Welcome to Random Short Take #52. A few players have worn 52 in the NBA including Victor Alexander (I thought he was getting dunked on by Shawn Kemp but it was Chris Gatling). My pick is Greg Oden though. If only his legs were the same length. Let’s get random.
I still love Fibre Channel (FC), as unhealthy as that seems. I never really felt the same way about FCoE though, and it does seem to be deader than tape.
VMware vSAN 7.0 U2 is out now, and Cormac dives into what’s new here. If you’re in the ANZ timezone, don’t forget that Cormac, Duncan and Frank will be presenting (virtually) at the Sydney VMUG *soon*.
This article on data mobility from my preferred Chris Evans was great. We talk a lot about data mobility in this industry, but I don’t know that we’ve all taken the time to understand what it really means.
I’m a big fan of Tech Field Day, and it’s nice to see presenting companies take on feedback from delegates and putting out interesting articles. Kit’s a smart fellow, and this article on using VMware Cloud for application modernisation is well worth reading.
Preston wrote about some experiences he had recently with almost failing drives in his home environment, and raised some excellent points about resilience, failure, and caution.
Speaking of people I worked with briefly, I’ve enjoyed Siobhán’s series of articles on home automation. I would never have the patience to do this, but I’m awfully glad that someone did.
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