Welcome to Random Short Take #56. Only three players have worn 56 in the NBA. I may need to come up with a new bit of trivia. Let’s get random.
Are we nearing the end of blade servers? I’d hoped the answer was yes, but it’s not that simple, sadly. It’s not that I hate them, exactly. I bought blade servers from Dell when they first sold them. But they can present challenges.
22dot6 emerged from stealth mode recently. I had the opportunity to talk to them and I’ll post something soon about that. In the meantime, this post from Mellor covers it pretty well.
It may be a Northern Hemisphere reference that I don’t quite understand, but Retrospect is running a “Dads and Grads” promotion offering 90 days of free backup subscriptions. Worth checking out if you don’t have something in place to protect your desktop.
Running VMware Cloud Foundation and want to stretch your vSAN cluster across two sites? Tony has you covered.
Pure//Accelerate happened recently / is still happening, and there was a bit of news from the event, including the new and improved Pure1 Digital Experience. As a former Pure1 user I can say this was a big part of the reason why I liked using Pure Storage.
Speaking of press releases, this one from PDI and its investment intentions caught my eye. It’s always good to see companies willing to spend a bit of cash to make progress.
I stumbled across Oxide on Twitter and fell for the aesthetic and design principles. Then I read some of the articles on the blog and got even more interested. Worth checking out. And I’ll be keen to see just how it goes for the company.
*Bonus Round*
I was recently on the Restore it All podcast with W. Curtis Preston and Prasanna Malaiyandi. It was a lot of fun as always, despite the fact that we talked about something that’s a pretty scary subject (data (centre) loss). No, I’m not a DC manager in real life, but I do have responsibility for what goes into our DC so I sort of am. Don’t forget there’s a discount code for the book in the podcast too.
Welcome to Random Short Take #37. Not a huge amount of players have worn 37 in the NBA, but Metta World Peace did a few times. When he wasn’t wearing 15, and other odd numbers. But I digress. Let’s get random.
Pavilion Data recently added S3 capability to its platform. It’s based on a variant of MinIO, and adds an interesting dimension to what Pavilion Data has traditionally offered. Mellor provided some good coverage here.
Speaking of object storage, Dell EMC recently announced ECS 3.5. You can read more on that here. The architectural white paper has been updated to reflect the new version as well.
Online events are all the rage at the moment, and two noteworthy events are coming up shortly: Pure//Accelerate and VeeamON 2020. Speaking of online events, we’re running a virtual BNEVMUG next week. Details on that here. ZertoCON Virtual is also a thing.
Speaking of Pure Storage, this article from Cody Hosterman on NVMe and vSphere 7 is lengthy, but definitely worth the read.
I can’t recall whether I mentioned that this white paper covering VCD on VCF 3.9 is available now, and I can’t be bothered checking. So here it is.
I’m not just a fan of Backblaze because of its cool consumer backup solution and object storage platform, I’m also a big fan because of its blog. Articles like this one are a great example of companies doing corporate culture right (at least from what I can see).
I have the impression that Datadobi has been doing some cool stuff recently, and this story certainly seems to back it up.
Disclaimer: I recently attended Pure//Accelerate 2019. My flights, accommodation, and conference pass were paid for by Pure Storage. There is no requirement for me to blog about any of the content presented and I am not compensated by Pure Storage for my time at the event. Some materials presented were discussed under NDA and don’t form part of my blog posts, but could influence future discussions.
Pure Storage has been focused on making everything related to their products effortless from day 1. An example of this approach is the FlashArray setup process – it’s really easy to get up and running and serving up storage to workloads. They wanted to do the same thing with anything they deliver via cloud services as well. There is, however, something of a “cloud divide” in operation in the industry. If you’re familiar with the various cloud deployment options, you’ll likely be aware that on-premises and hosted cloud is a bit different to public cloud. They:
Deliver different application architectures;
Deliver different management and consumption experience; and
Use different storage.
So what if Pure could build application portability and deliver common shared data services?
Pure have architected their cloud service to leverage what they call “Three Pillars”:
Build Your Cloud
Run anywhere
Protect everywhere
What Is It?
So what exactly is Cloud Block Store for AWS then? Well, imagine if you will, that you’re watching an episode of Pimp My Ride, and Xzibit is talking to an enterprise punter about how he or she likes cloud, and how he or she likes the way Pure Storage’s FlashArray works. And then X says, “Hey, we heard you liked these two things so we put this thing in the other thing”. Look, I don’t know the exact situation where this would happen. But anyway …
100% software – deploys instantly as a virtual appliance in the cloud, runs only as long as you need it;
Efficient – deduplication, compression, and thin provisioning deliver capacity and performance economically;
Hybrid – easily migrate data bidirectionally, delivering data portability and protection across your hybrid cloud;
Consistent APIs – developers connect to storage the same way on-premises and in the cloud. Automated deployment with Cloud Formation templates;
Reliable, secure – delivers industrial-strength perfromance, reliability & protection with Multi-AZ HA, NDU, instant snaps and data at rest encryption; and
Flexible – pay as you go consumption model to best match your needs for production and development.
[image courtesy of Pure Storage]
Architecture
At the heart of it, the architecture for CVS is not dissimilar to the FlashArray architecture. There’re controllers, drives, NVRAM, and a virtual shelf.
EC2: CBS Controllers
EC2: Virtual Drives
Virtual Shelf: 7 Virtual drives in Spread Placement Group
EBS IO1: NVRAM, Write Buffer (7 total)
S3: Durable persistent storage
Instance Store: Non-Persistent Read Mirror
[image courtesy of Pure Storage]
What’s interesting, to me at least, is how they use S3 for persistent storage.
Procurement
How do you procure CBS for AWS? I’m glad you asked. There are two procurement options.
A – Pure as-a-Service
Offered via SLED / CLED process
Minimums 100TiB effective used capacity
Unified hybrid contracts (on-premises and CBS, CBS)
1 year to 3 year contracts
B – AWS Marketplace
Direct to customer
Minimum, 10 TiB effective used capacity
CBS only
Month to month contract or 1 year contract
Use Cases
There are a raft of different use cases for CBS. Some of them made sense to me straight away, some of them took a little time to bounce around in my head.
Disaster Recovery
Production instance on-premises
Replicate data to public cloud
Fail over in DR event
Fail back and recover
Lift and shift
Production instance on-premises
Replicate data to public cloud
Run the same architecture as before
Run production on CBS
Use case: Dev / test
Replicate data to public cloud
Instantiate test / dev instances in public cloud
Refresh test / dev periodically
Bring changes back on-premises
Snapshots are more costly and slower to restore in native AWS
ActiveCluster
HA within an availability zone and / or across availability zones in an AWS region (ActiveCluster needs <11ms latency)
No downtime when a Cloud Block Store Instance goes away or there is a zone outage
Pure1 Cloud Mediator Witness (simple to manage and deploy)
Migrating VMware Environments
VMware Challenges
AWS does not recognise VMFS
Replicating volumes with VMFS will not do any good
Workaround
Convert VMFS datastore into vVOLs
Now each volume has the Guest VM’s file system (NTFS, EXT3, etc)
Replicate VMDK vVOLs to CBS
Now the volumes can be mounted to EC2 with matching OS
Note: This is for the VM’s data volumes. The VM boot volume will not be usable in AWS. The VM’s application will need to be redeployed in native AWS EC2.
VMware Cloud
VMware Challenges
VMware Cloud does not support external storage, it only supports vSAN
Workaround
Connect Guest VMs directly to CBS via iSCSI
Note: I haven’t verified this myself, and I suspect there may be other ways to do this. But in the context of Pure’s offering, it makes sense.
Thoughts and Further Reading
There’s been a feeling in some parts of the industry for the last 5-10 years that the rise of the public cloud providers would spell the death of the traditional storage vendor. That’s clearly not been the case, but it has been interesting to see the major storage slingers evolving their product strategies to both accommodate and leverage the cloud providers in a more effective manner. Some have used the opportunity to get themselves as close as possible to the cloud providers, without actually being in the cloud. Others have deployed virtualised versions of their offerings inside public cloud and offered users the comfort of their traditional stack, but off-premises. There’s value in these approaches, for sure. But I like the way that Pure has taken it a step further and optimised its architecture to leverage some of the features of what AWS can offer from a cloud hardware perspective.
In my opinion, the main reason you’d look to leverage something like CBS on AWS is if you have an existing investment in Pure and want to keep doing things a certain way. You’re also likely using a lot of traditional VMs in AWS and want something that can improve the performance and resilience of those workloads. CBS is certainly a great way to do this. If you’re already running a raft of cloud-native applications, it’s likely that you don’t necessarily need the features on offer from CBS, as you’re already (hopefully) using them natively. I think Pure understands this though, and isn’t pushing CBS for AWS as the silver bullet for every cloud workload.
I’m looking forward to seeing what the market uptake on this product is like. I’m also keen to crunch the numbers on running this type of solution versus the cost associated with doing something on-premises or via other means. In any case, I’m looking forward to see how this capability evolves over time, and I think CBS on AWS is definitely worthy of further consideration.
Disclaimer: I recently attended Pure//Accelerate 2019. My flights, accommodation, and conference pass were paid for by Pure Storage. There is no requirement for me to blog about any of the content presented and I am not compensated by Pure Storage for my time at the event. Some materials presented were discussed under NDA and don’t form part of my blog posts, but could influence future discussions.
Here are my notes on gifts, etc, that I received as an attendee at Pure//Accelerate 2019. Apologies if it’s a bit dry but I’m just trying to make it clear what I received during this event to ensure that we’re all on the same page as far as what I’m being influenced by. I’m going to do this in chronological order, as that was the easiest way for me to take notes during the week. Whilst every attendee’s situation is different, I was paid by my employer to be at this event.
Saturday
My wife kindly dropped me at the airport. I flew Qantas economy class from BNE – LAX – AUS courtesy of Pure Storage. I had a 5 hour layover at LAX. I stopped at the Rolling Stone Bar and Grill in the Terminal 7 and had a breakfast burrito. It wasn’t the best, but anything is pretty good after the smell of airplane food. When I got to Austin I was met by a driver that Pure had organised. I grabbed my suitcase and we travelled to the Fairmont Austin (paid for by Pure) in one of those big black SUVs that are favoured by many of the limousine companies.
I got presentable and then went down to the hotel bar to catch up with Alastair Cooke and his wife Tracey, Matt Leib, Gina Minks, and Leah Schoeb. I had a gin and tonic, paid for by Alastair, and then took the hotel courtesy car to Austin City Limits with Matt to see Joe Russo’s Almost Dead. It’s not the sort of gig I’d normally go to, but I appreciate live music in most forms, the crowd was really into it, and it’s always great to spend time with Matt. Matt also very kindly paid for my entry to the gig and bought me a beer there (a 16oz can of Land Shark Lager). I had a second beer and bought one for Matt too.
Sunday
I hadn’t really eaten since LAX, so I hit up Matt to come to lunch with me. We went for a wander downtown in Austin and ended up on 6th Street at Chupacabra Cantina y Tacqueria. I had one of the West Coast Burritos, a huge flour tortilla stuffed with refried beans, green chilli rice, jack cheese, crispy potato, lettuce, tomato, onion and chicken Tinga filling. It was delicious. I also had two Twisted X Austin Lager beers to wash it down.
In the afternoon I caught up with Matt and Chris Evans in the hotel bar. I had 3 Modelo Especial beers – these were kindly paid for by Emily Gallagher from Touchdown PR.
The Tech Field Day people all got together for dinner at Revue in the hotel. I had 3 Vista Adair Kolsch beers, some shrimp gyoza, chilli wonton dumplings, and okonomiyaki. This was paid for by Tech Field Day.
Monday
On Monday morning I had breakfast at the hotel. This was a buffet-style affair and I had scrambled eggs, huevo rancheros, bacon, jalapeño sausage, charcuterie, salmon and cream cheese, and coffee. This was paid for by Pure Storage. I received a gift bag at registration. This included a:
340g bag of emporium medium house blend cuvée coffee.
For lunch I had beef brisket, BBQ sauce and some green salad. I also picked up a Pure FlashArray//C t-shirt during the Storage Field Day Exclusive event.
Before dinner I had a Modelo in the hotel – this was paid for by Tech Field Day. We then attended an Analysts and Influencers reception at Banger’s. I had 3 beers there (some kind of Pilsner) and a small amount of BBQ. I then made my way over to Parkside on 6th Street for an APJ event. I had 4 Austin Limits Lagers there and some brisket and macaroni and cheese. I should have smoke-bombed at that point but didn’t and ended up getting my phone swiped from a bar. Lesson learnt.
Tuesday
I skipped breakfast in favour of some more sleep. For lunch I had beef tacos in the Analysts area. Dinner was an Analyst and Influencer and Executive Program reception at the hotel. I had 3 Modelo beers, some dumplings, and some beef skewers. I turned in relatively early as the jet-lag was catching up with me.
Wednesday
For breakfast we were in the Solutions Exchange area for a private tour of the Pure setup. I had a greasy ham, cheese and egg croissant, some fruit, and 2 coffees. After the keynote I picked up some Rubrik socks.
In the afternoon I took a taxi to the Austin PD to attempt to report my phone. I then grabbed lunch with Matt Leib at P. Terry’s Burger Stand downtown. I had a hamburger and a chocolate shake. Matt paid for this. Matt then paid for a ride-sharing service to the local Apple Store where I picked up a new handset. We then took another car back to the hotel, which Matt kindly paid for.
We had dinner at Banger’s with the remaining Tech Field Day crew. I had 3 Austin Beerworks Pearl-Snap beers, boiled peanuts, chilli fries, and jalapeño sausage. It was delicious. This was paid for by Tech Field Day. I then headed to Austin City Limits for the Pure//Accelerate appreciation party. Weezer were playing, and I was lucky enough to get a photo with them (big thanks to Stephen Foskett and Armi Banaria for sorting me out!).
I had 3 Landshark Lager beers during the concert. After the show we retired to the hotel bar where I had 2 more Modelo beers before calling it a night.
Thursday
On Thursday morning I ran into Craig Waters and Justin Warren and joined them for a coffee at Houndstooth Coffee (I had the iced latte to try and fight off the heat). This was paid for by Craig. We then headed to Fareground. I had a burger with bacon and cheese from Contigo. It was delicious. This was also paid for by Craig.
Returning to the hotel, I bumped into my old mentor Andrew Fisher and he bought me a few Modelos in the bar while re-booking his flights due to some severe weather issues in Houston. I then took a Pure-provided car service to the airport and made my way home to Brisbane via LAX.
Big thanks to Pure Storage for having me over for the week, and big thanks to everyone who spent time with me at the event (and after hours) – it’s a big part of why I keep coming back to these types of events.
Storage Field Day 18 was a little while ago, but that doesn’t mean that the things that were presented there are no longer of interest. Stephen Foskett wrote a great piece on IBM’s approach to data protection with Spectrum Protect Plus that’s worth read.
Speaking of data protection, it’s not just for big computers. Preston wrote a great article on the iOS recovery process that you can read here. As someone who had to recently recover my phone, I agree entirely with the idea that re-downloading apps from the app store is not a recovery process.
NetApp were recently named a leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Primary Storage. Say what you will about the MQ, a lot of folks are still reading this report and using it to help drive their decision-making activities. You can grab a copy of the report from NetApp here. Speaking of NetApp, I’m happy to announce that I’m now a member of the NetApp A-Team. I’m looking forward to doing a lot more with NetApp in terms of both my day job and the blog.
Disclaimer: I recently attended Pure//Accelerate 2019. My flights, accommodation, and conference pass were paid for by Pure Storage. There is no requirement for me to blog about any of the content presented and I am not compensated by Pure Storage for my time at the event. Some materials presented were discussed under NDA and don’t form part of my blog posts, but could influence future discussions.
Pure Storage announced two additions to its portfolio of products today: FlashArray//C and DirectMemory Cache. I had the opportunity to hear about these two products at the Storage Field Day Exclusive event at Pure//Accelerate 2019 and thought I’d share some thoughts here.
DirectMemory Cache
DirectMemory Cache is a high-speed caching system that reduces read latency for high-locality, performance-critical applications.
High speed: based on Intel Optane SCM drives
Caching system: repeated accesses to “hot data” are sped up automatically – no tiering = no configuration
Read latency: only read performance is affected – no changes to latency
High-locality: only workloads that reuse often a dates that fits in the cache will benefit
According to Pure, “DirectMemory Cache is the functionality within Purity that provides direct access to data and accelerates performance critical applications”. Note that this is only for read data, write caching is still done via DRAM.
How Can This Help?
Pure has used Pure1 Meta analysis to arrive at the following figures:
80% of arrays can achieve 20% lower latency
40% of arrays can achieve 30-50% lower latency (up to 2x boost)
So there’s some real potential to improve existing workloads via the use of this read cache.
DirectMemory Configurations
Pure Storage DirectMemory Modules plug directly into FlashArray//X70 and //X90, are inserted into the chassis, and are available in the following configurations:
3TB (4x750GB) DirectMemory Modules
6TB (8x750GB) DirectMemory Modules
Top of Rack Architecture
Pure are positioning the “top of rack” architecture as a way to compete some of the architectures that have jammed a bunch of flash in DAS or in compute to gain increased performance. The idea is that you can:
Eliminate data locality;
Bring storage and compute closer;
Provide storage services that are not possible with DAS;
Bring the efficiency of FlashArray to traditional DAS applications; and
Offload storage and networking load from application CPUs.
FlashArray//C
Typical challenges in Tier 2
Things can be tough in the tier 2 storage world. Pure outlined some of the challenges they were seeking to address by delivering a capacity optimised product.
Management complexity
Complexity / management
Different platforms and APIs
Interoperability challenges
Inconsistent Performance
Variable app performance
Anchored by legacy disk
Undersized / underperforming
Not enterprise class
<99.9999% resiliency
Disruptive upgrades
Not evergreen
The C Stands For Capacity Optimised All-Flash Array
Flash performance at disk economics
QLC architecture enables tier 2 applications to benefit from the performance of all-flash – predictable 2-4ms latency, 5.2PB (effective) in 9U delivers 10x consolidation for racks and racks of disk.
Optimised end-to-end for QLC Flash
Deep integration from software to QLC NAND solves QLC wear concerns and delivers market-leading economics. Includes the same evergreen maintenance and wear replacement as every FlashArray
“No Compromise” enterprise experience
Built for the same 99.9999%+ availability, Pure1 cloud management, API automation, and AI-driven predictive support of every FlashArray
Flash for every data workflow
Policy driven replication, snapshots, and migration between arrays and clouds – now use Flash for application tiering, DR, Test / Dev, Backup, and retention
Configuration Details
Configuration options include:
366TB RAW – 1.3PB effective
878TB RAW – 3.2PB effective
1.39PB RAW – 5.2PB effective
Use Cases
Policy based VM tiering between //X and //C
Multi-cloud data protection and DR – on-premises and multi-site
Multi-cloud test / dev – workload consolidation
*File support (NFS / SMB) coming in 2020 (across the entire FlashArray family, not just //C)
Thoughts
I’m a fan of companies that expand their portfolio based on customer requests. It’s a good way to make more money, and sometimes it’s simplest to give the people what they want. The market has been in Pure’s ear for some time about delivering some kind of capacity storage solution. I think it was simply a matter of time before the economics and the technology intersected at a point where it made sense for it to happen. If you’re an existing Pure customer, this is a good opportunity to deploy Pure across all of your tiers of storage, and you get the benefit of Pure1 keeping an eye on everything, and your “slow” arrays will still be relatively performance-focused thanks to NVMe throughout the box. Good times in IT isn’t just about speeds and feeds though, so I think this announcement is more important in terms of simplifying the story for existing Pure customers that may be using other vendors to deliver Tier 2 capabilities.
I’m also pretty excited about DirectMemory Cache, if only because it’s clear that Pure has done its homework (i.e. they’ve run the numbers on Pure1 Meta) and realised that they could improve the performance of existing arrays via a reasonably elegant solution. A lot of the cool kids do DAS, because that’s what they’ve been told will yield great performance. And that’s mostly true, but DAS can be a real pain in the rear when you want to move workloads around, or consolidate performance, or do useful things like data services (e.g. replication). Centralised storage arrays have been doing this stuff for years, and it’s about time they were also able to deliver the performance required in order for those companies not to have to compromise.
You can read the press release here, and the Tech Field Day videos can be viewed here.
Disclaimer: I recently attended Pure//Accelerate 2018. My flights, accommodation and conference pass were paid for by Pure Storage via the Analysts and Influencers program. There is no requirement for me to blog about any of the content presented and I am not compensated in any way for my time at the event. Some materials presented were discussed under NDA and don’t form part of my blog posts, but could influence future discussions.
Here’s a quick post with links to the other posts I did covering Pure//Accelerate 2018, as well as links to other articles related to the event that I found interesting.
Gestalt IT Articles
I wrote a series of articles about Pure Storage for Gestalt IT.
I had a busy but enjoyable week. I would have liked to get to more of the technical sessions, but being given access to some of the top executives and engineering talent in the company via the Analyst and Influencer Experience was invaluable. Thanks again to Pure Storage (particularly Armi Banaria and Terri McClure) for having me along to the show.
Disclaimer: I recently attended Pure//Accelerate 2018. My flights, accommodation and conference pass were paid for by Pure Storage via the Analysts and Influencers program. There is no requirement for me to blog about any of the content presented and I am not compensated in any way for my time at the event. Some materials presented were discussed under NDA and don’t form part of my blog posts, but could influence future discussions.
Here are my notes on gifts, etc, that I received as a conference attendee at Pure//Accelerate 2018. This is by no stretch an interesting post from a technical perspective, but it’s a way for me to track and publicly disclose what I get and how it looks when I write about various things. I’m going to do this in chronological order, as that was the easiest way for me to take notes during the week. While everyone’s situation is different, I took 5 days of unpaid leave to attend this conference.
Saturday
My wife dropped me at the BNE domestic airport and I had some ham and cheese and a few coffees in the Qantas Club. I flew Qantas economy class to SFO via SYD. The flights were paid for by Pure Storage. Plane food was consumed on the flight. It was a generally good experience, and I got myself caught up with Season 3 of Mr. Robot. Pure paid for a car to pick me up at the airport. My driver was the new head coach of the San Francisco City Cats ABA team, so we talked basketball most of the trip. I stayed at a friend’s place until late Monday and then checked in to the Marriott Marquis in downtown San Francisco. The hotel costs were also covered by Pure.
Tuesday
When I picked up my conference badge I was given a Pure Storage and Rubrik co-branded backpack. On Tuesday afternoon we kicked off the Analyst and Influencer Experience with a welcome reception at the California Academy of Sciences. I helped myself to a Calicraft Coast Kolsch and 4 Aliciella Bitters. I also availed myself of the charcuterie selection, cheese balls and some fried shrimp. The most enjoyable part of these events is catching up with good folks I haven’t seen in a while, like Vaughn and Craig.
As we left we were each given a shot glass from the Academy of Sciences that was shaped like a small beaker. Pure also had a small box of Sweet 55 chocolate delivered to our hotel rooms. That’s some seriously good stuff. Sorry it didn’t make it home kids.
After the reception I went to dinner with Alastair Cooke, Chris Evans and Matt Leib at M.Y. China in downtown SF. I had the sweet and sour pork and rice and 2 Tsingtao beers. The food was okay. We split the bill 4 ways.
Wednesday
We were shuttled to the event venue early in the morning. I had a sausage and egg breakfast biscuit, fruit and coffee in the Analysts and Influencers area for breakfast. I need to remind myself that “biscuits” in their American form are just not really my thing. We were all given an Ember temperature control ceramic mug. I also grabbed 2 Pure-flavoured notepads and pens and a Pure Code t-shirt. Lunch in the A&I room consisted of chicken roulade, salmon, bread roll, pasta and Perrier sparkling spring water. I also grabbed a coffee in between sessions.
Christopher went down to the Solutions Expo and came back with a Quantum sticker (I am protecting data from the dark side) and Veeam 1800mAh keychain USB charger for me. I also grabbed some stickers from Justin Warren and some coffee during another break. No matter how hard I tried I couldn’t trick myself into believing the coffee was good.
There was an A&I function at International Smoke and I helped myself to cheese, charcuterie, shrimp cocktail, ribs, various other finger foods and 3 gin and tonics. I then skipped the conference entertainment (The Goo Goo Dolls) to go with Stephen Foskett and see Terra Lightfoot and The Posies play at The Independent. The car to and from the venue and the tickets were very kindly covered by Stephen. I had two 805 beers while I was there. It was a great gig. 5 stars.
Thursday
For breakfast I had fruit, a chocolate croissant and some coffee. Scott Lowe kindly gave me a printed copy of ActualTech’s latest Gorilla Guide to Converged Infrastructure. I also did a whip around the Solutions Expo and grabbed:
Lunch was boxed. I had the Carne Asada, consisting of Mexican style rice, flat iron steak, black beans, avocado, crispy tortilla and cilantro. We were all given 1GB USB drives with a copies of the presentations from the A&I Experience on them as well. That was the end of the conference.
I had dinner at ThirstBear Brewing Co with Alastair, Matt Leib and Justin. I had the Thirstyburger, consisting of Richards Ranch grass-fed beef, mahón cheese, chorizo-andalouse sauce, arugula, housemade pickles, panorama bun, and hand-cut fried kennebec patatas. This was washed down with two glasses of The Admiral’s Blend.
Friday
As we didn’t fly out until Friday evening, Alastair and I spent some time visiting the Museum of Modern Art. vBrownBag covered my entry to the museum, and the Magritte exhibition was terrific. We then lunched in Chinatown at a place (Maggie’s Cafe) that reminded me a lot of the Chinese places in Brisbane. Before I went to the airport I had a few beers in the hotel bar. This was kindly paid for by Justin Warren. On Friday evening Pure paid for a car to take Justin and I to SFO for our flight back to Australia. Justin gets extra thanks for having me as his plus one in the fancier lounges that I normally don’t have access to.
Big thanks to Pure Storage for having me over for the week, and big thanks to everyone who spent time with me at the event (and after hours) – it’s a big part of why I keep coming back to these types of events.
Disclaimer: I recently attended Pure//Accelerate 2018. My flights, accommodation and conference pass were paid for by Pure Storage via the Analysts and Influencers program. There is no requirement for me to blog about any of the content presented and I am not compensated in any way for my time at the event. Some materials presented were discussed under NDA and don’t form part of my blog posts, but could influence future discussions.
Here are my notes from the “Chat with Charlie Giancarlo” session for Analysts and Influencers at Pure//Accelerate.
Chat with Charlie Giancarlo
You’ve said culture is important. How do you maintain it? “It’s the difference between hiring missionaries and hiring mercenaries”. People are on a mission, out there to prove something, drive the company forward. There’s not an exact, formulaic way of doing it. Hire people you have experience with in the industry. Pure does have a good interview process. It tends to bring out different sides of the interviewee at the same time. We use objective tests for engineering people. Check on the cultural backgrounds of sales talent.
Are there any acquisitions on the horizon? Gaps you want to fill? We have an acquisition strategy. We’ve decided where we’re going, identified the gaps, looked at buy versus build versus partner. There’s a lot of research to do around strengths and weaknesses, fit, culture. There are different types of companies in the world. Get rich quick, play in your own sandbox, people who are on a mission. We have gaps in our product lines. We could be more cloud, more hyper-converged. FlashBlade is still not 3.0 product.
Other companies are under pressure to be more software or cloud. Given your hardware background, how’s that for you? Our original product was software on commodity hardware. All except one SDS vendor sells hardware. At the end of the day, selling pure software that goes on any box is insanely hard to achieve. Majority of SDS still sell on hardware – one throat to choke. Some customers, at scale, might be able to do this with us. Why build our own hardware? 4RU and 1PB versus 1.5 racks. We understood the limitations of commodity hardware. We’re not wedded to the hardware – we’re wedded to providing more value-add to our customers.
Has anyone taken you up on the offer? Some are enquiring.
One of your benefits has been focus, one thing to sell. You just mentioned your competitors don’t have that. Now you’re looking at other stuff? We’re making data easier and more economic to consume. Making the entire stack easier to consume. When I say more HCI, what do I mean? Box with compute, storage and network and you can double it, etc. Another way to look at HCI is a single pane of glass for orchestration, automated discovery, ease of use issue. Customers want us to extend beyond storage.
Single throat to choke and HCI. You provide the total stack, or become an OEM. I have no intention of selling compute. It’s controlled by the semi-conductor company or the OS company.
How about becoming an OEM provider? If they were willing, I’d be all ears. But it’s rare. Dell, Cisco, they’re not OEM companies. Margin models are tough with this.
Developing international sales? Our #2 goal is to scale internationally. Our goals align the company around a few things. It’s not just more sales people. It’s the feature set (eg ActiveCluster). ActiveCluster is more valuable in Europe than anywhere else. US – size is difficult (distance). In Europe they have a lot of 100km apart DCs. Developing support capability. Scaling marketing, legal, finance. It’s a goal for the whole company.
The last company to get to $1B was NetApp. What chance does Pure have to make it to $5B? Well, I hope we do. It’s my job. Storage? That’s a terrible business! Friends in different companies have a lot of different opinions about it. Pure could be the Arista of storage? The people who are engaged in storage don’t believe in storage anymore. They’re not investing in the business. It’s a contrarian model. Compete in business, not just tech. We’re investing 20% in R&D. You need to invest a certain amount in a product line. They have a lot of product lines. We could be bought – we’re a public company. But Dell won’t buy. HPE have bought Nimble. Hitachi don’t really buy people. Who does that leave? I think we have a chance of staying independent.
You could buy somebody. I believe we have a very good sales force. There are a lot of ways to build an acquisition strategy. We have a good sales force.
You’re a public company. You haven’t been doing well. What if Mr Elliott comes into your company? (Activist investor). Generally they like companies with lots of cash. Or companies spending too much on R&D without getting results. We’re growing fast. We just posted 40% profit. Puritans might believe our market cap should be higher. The more we can show that we grow, the more exciting things might be. I don’t think we’re terribly attractive to an activist right now.
Storage is not an interesting place to be. But it’s all about data. Do you see that shifting with investors? What would cause that? I believe we need to innovate too. I think that the investors would need to believe that some of the messages we’re sending today, and over the next year, create an environment where our long term growth path is higher and stronger than it is today. Sometimes its sheer numbers, not storyline. The market believes that NetApp, EMC, etc that they can cause pricing and growth challenges for us for a long time. We need them to believe we’re immune to those challenges.
How about China as a marketplace? China as a competitive threat with new technologies? China is a formidable country in every respect. Competition, market. It’s more difficult than it was 10 years ago as a market. Our administration hasn’t help, China has put a lot of rules and regulations in place. I wish we’d focus on those, not the trade deficit. It’s a market we’re experimenting in. If it only works out as well as our competitors can achieve, it may not be worthwhile. And the issue of competition. I worry about Huawei, particularly in third world countries. Viable, long-lasting commercial concerns. In Europe it’s a bit different. The Chinese are very innovative. The US does well because of a market of 300 million, China has 1.4 billion people.
Joe Tucci said 4-5 years ago that the industry was merging. He said you can’t survive as a small player. How many times have we seen this picture? Huge conglomerates falling apart under their own weight. I hate to disagree with Joe. It’s a misunderstanding of scale. It’s about individual products and capabilities, not the size of the business. If you’re just big, and not growing, you no longer have scale. All you’ve done is create a large company with a lot of under scaled products. Alan Kay “perspective is worth 40 IQ points” [note: it’s apparently 80, maybe I misheard].
Disclaimer: I recently attended Pure//Accelerate 2018. My flights, accommodation and conference pass were paid for by Pure Storage via the Analysts and Influencers program. There is no requirement for me to blog about any of the content presented and I am not compensated in any way for my time at the event. Some materials presented were discussed under NDA and don’t form part of my blog posts, but could influence future discussions.
Here are my rough notes from Thursday’s General Session at Pure//Accelerate 2018.
Dave Hatfield
Dave Hatfield takes the stage, reports that there have been over 10000+ viewers and participants for the show. Cast your minds back to the “Summer of love” in 1968. This was also the time of the first big tech demo – “The Mother of All Demos” by Doug Engelbart – and it included the introduction of the mouse, network computing, hypertext linking, collaboration, multiple windows. You can see the clip here.
Pure is about embracing the tools of transformation.
Dr Kate Darling
Dr Kate Darling (MIT Media Lab) then takes the stage. She is a researcher with expertise in AI and robotics. She just flew in from Hong Kong. She mentions she had a baby 6 months ago. People say to her “Kate, it must be so interesting to watch your baby develop and compare it to AI development”. She says “[m]y baby is a million times more interesting than anything we’ve developed”.
AI is going to shape the world her baby’s growing up in. Like electricity, we don’t know how it will shape things yet. Some of the applications are really cool. A lot of it is happening behind the scenes. E.g. They took a Lyft to the airport and the driver was using Waze (which uses AI). There’s a bit of hype that goes on, and fear that AI might self-evolve and kill us all. This distracts from the benefits. And the actual problems we face right now (privacy, security, etc). Leads people to over-estimate where we are right now in terms of development.
She works in robotics. We’ve been doing this for centuries. We’re a long way from them taking over the world and killing us all. If you search for AI (via google images) you see human brain / robots pictures. Constantly comparing AI to human intelligence. This image is heavily influenced by sci-fi and pop culture. Automation will have an impact on labour markets. But AI is not like human intelligence. We’ve developed AI that is much smarter than people. But the AI is also a lot dumber. E.g. Siri, I’m bleeding, call me an ambulance. Ok, I’ll call you “an ambulance” from now on.
We’ve been using animals for 1000s of years, and we still use them. E.g., Dolphins for echo-location. Autonomous and unpredictable agents. Their skills are different to ours, and they can partner with us and extend our abilities. We should be thinking outside of the “human replacement” box.
Examples:
Japan looks to AI to simplify patent screening
Recognise patterns in peoples’ energy consumption
Spam filters
Work in human – robot interaction. People’s psychological reactions to physical robots. Treat them like they’re alive, even though they’re machines. Perceive movement in our personal space as intent. The Roomba is really dumb. Military robots – soldiers become attached to bomb disposal robots. Paro Robotics – seal used in nursing homes. A lot of people don’t like the idea of robots for them. But this replaces animal therapy, not human care.
AI can shape how we relate to our tools, and how we relate to each other. The possibilities are endless.
If you’re interested in AI. It’s kind of a “hypey buzzword” thrown around at conferences. It’s not a method and more of a goal. Most of what we do is machine learning. eg. Hot dog example from Silicon Valley. If you’re into AI, you’ll need data scientists. They’re in high demand. If you want to use AI in your business, it’s important to educate yourself.
There are so many amazing new tools being developed. OSS machine learning libraries. There’s a lot to worry about as a parent, but there’s a lot to look forward to as well. eg. AI that sorts LEGO. Horses replaced by cars. Cars now being replaced by a better version of an autonomous horse.
Dave Hatfield
Dave Hatfield takes the stage again. How can you speed up tasks that are mundane so you can do things that are more impactful? You need a framework and a way to ask the questions about the pitfalls. DevOps – institutionalised knowledge of how to become software businesses. Introduces Jez Humble.
Jez Humble
Why does DevOps matter?
The enterprise is comprised of business, engineering, and operations. The idea for a project occurs, it’s budgeted, delivered and thrown over the wall to ops. Who’s practicing Agile? All about more collaboration. Business people don’t really like that. Now delivering into production all the time and Operations aren’t super happy about that. Operations then create a barrier (through change management), ensuring nothing ever changes.
How does DevOps help?
No real definition. The DevOps Movement is “a cross-functional community of practice dedicated to the study of building, evolving and operating rapidly changing, secure, resilient systems at scale”. There’s some useful reading (Puppet’s State of DevOps Reports) here, here, and here.
Software delivery as a competitive advantage
High performers were more than twice as likely to achieve or exceed the following objectives
Quantity of products or services
Operating efficiency
Customer satisfaction
Quality of products or services provided
Achieving organisational and mission goals
Measures that demonstrate to external parties whether or not the organisation is achieving intended results
IT Performance
Lead time for changes
Release frequency
Time to restore service
Change fail rate
We’re used to thinking about throughput and stability and a trade-off – that’s not really the case. High performers do both.
2016 IT performance by Cluster
(From the 2016 report)
High IT Performers
Medium IT Performers
Low IT Performers
Deployment Frequency
For the primary application or service you work on, how often does your organisation deploy code?
On demand (multiple deploys per day)
Between once per week and once per month
Between once per month and every 6 months
Lead time for changes
For the primary application or service you work on, what is your lead time for changes (i.e. how long does it take to go from code commit to code successfully running in production)?
Less than an hour
Between one week and one month
Between one month and 6 months
Mean time to recover (MTTR)
For the primary application or service you work on,how long does it generally take to restore service when a service incident occurs (e.g. unplanned outage, service impairment)?
Less than an hour
Less than one day
Less than one day
Change failure rate
For the primary application or service you work on, what percentage of the changes either result in degraded service or subsequently require remediation (e.g. lead to service impairment, service outage, require a hotfix, rollback, fix forward, patch)?
0-15%
31-45%
16-30%
“It’s about culture and architecture”. DevOps isn’t about hiring “DevOps experts”. Go solve the boring problems that no-one wants to do. Help your people grow. Grow your own DevOps experts. Re-orgs sucks the energy out of company. They often don’t produce better outcomes. Have people who need to work together, sit together. The cloud’s great, but you can do continuous delivery with mainframes. Tools are great, but buying “DevOps tools” doesn’t change the outcomes. “Please don’t give developers access to Prod”. DevOps is learning to work in in small batches (product dev and org change). You can’t move fast with water / scrum / fall.
Architectural Outcomes
Can my team …
Make large-scale changes to the design of its system without the permission of somebody outside the team or depending on other teams?
Complete its work without needing fine-grained communication and coordination with people outside the team?
Deploy and release its product or service on demand, independently of other services the product or service depends on?
Do most of its testing on demand, without requiring an integrated test environment?
Perform deployments during normal business hours with negligible downtime?
Deploying on weekends? We should be able to deploy during the day with negligible downtime
DevOps is learning to build quality in. “Cease dependence on mass inspection to achieve quality. Improve the process and build quality into the product in the first place”. W. Edwards Deming.
DevOps is enabling cross-functional collaboration through value streams
Dave Hatfield takes the stage again. Don’t do re-orgs? We had 4 different groups of data scientists pop up in a company of 2300. All doing different things. All the data was in different piggy banks. We got them all to sit together and that made a huge difference. “We need to be the ambassadors of change and transformation. If you don’t do this, one of your competitors will”.
Please buy our stuff. Thanks for your time. Next year the conference will be in September. We’re negotiating the contracts right now and we’ll let you know soon.
We use cookies on our website to give you the most relevant experience by remembering your preferences and repeat visits. By clicking “Accept”, you consent to the use of ALL the cookies.
This website uses cookies to improve your experience while you navigate through the website. Out of these cookies, the cookies that are categorized as necessary are stored on your browser as they are essential for the working of basic functionalities of the website. We also use third-party cookies that help us analyze and understand how you use this website. These cookies will be stored in your browser only with your consent. You also have the option to opt-out of these cookies. But opting out of some of these cookies may have an effect on your browsing experience.
