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’ve been doing some stuff with Runecast in my day job, so this post over at Gestalt IT really resonated.
I enjoyed this article from Alastair on AWS Design, and the mention of “handcrafted perfection” in particular has put an abrupt end to any yearning I’d be doing to head back into the enterprise fray.
Speaking of AWS, you can now hire Mac mini instances. Frederic did a great job of documenting the process here.
Liking VMware Cloud Foundation but wondering if you can get it via your favourite public cloud provider? Wonder no more with this handy reference from Simon Long.
Ransomware. Seems like everyone’s doing it. This was a great article on the benefits of the air gap approach to data protection. Remember, it’s not a matter of if, but when.
Speaking of data protection and security, BackupAssist Classic v11 launched recently. You can read the press release here.
Using draw.io but want to use some VVD stencils? Christian has the scoop here.
Speaking of VMware Cloud Director, Steve O has a handy guide on upgrading to 10.2 that you can read here.
Disclaimer: I recently attended VMworld 2019 – US. My flights and accommodation were paid for by Digital Sense, and VMware provided me with a free pass to the conference and various bits of swag. There is no requirement for me to blog about any of the content presented and I am not compensated by VMware 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 “HBI2537PU – Cloud Provider CXO Panel with Cohesity, Cloudian and PhoenixNAP”, a panel-type presentation with the following people:
Ari Paul – Product Marketing, Cloud Providers, VMware
YR: William, given your breadth of experience, what are some of the emerging trends you’ve been seeing?
WB: Companies are struggling to keep up with the pace of information generation. Understanding the data, storing and retaining it, and protecting it. Multi-cloud adds a lot of complexity. We’ve heard studies that say 22% of data generated is actually usable. It’s just sitting there. Public cloud is still hot, but it’s settling down a little.
YR: William comes from a massive cloud provider. What are you guys using?
WB: We’ve standardised on vCloud Director (vCD) and vSphere. We came from build our own but it wasn’t providing the value that we hoped it would. Customers want a seamless way to manage multiple cloud resources.
YR: Are you guys familiar with VCPP?
AP: VCPP is the crown jewel of our partner program at VMware. 4000+ providers, 120+ countries, 10+ million VMs, 10000+ DCs. We help you save money, make money (things are services ready). We’re continuing to invest in vCD. Kubernetes, GPUs, etc. Lots of R&D.
YR: William, you mentioned you standardised on the VMware platform. Talk to us about your experience. Why vCD?
WB: It’s been a checkered past for vCD. We were one of the first five on the vCloud Express program in 2010 / 11. We didn’t like vCD in its 1.0 version. We thought we can do this better. And we did. We launched the first on-demand, pay by the hour public cloud for enterprise in 2011. But it didn’t really work out. 2012 / 13 we started to see investments being made in vCD. 5.0 / 5.5 improved. Many people thought vCD was gong to die. We now see a modern, flexible portal that can be customised. And we can take our devs and have them customise vCD, rather than build a customised portal. That’s where we can put our time and effort. We’ve always done things differently. Always been doing other things. How do we bring our work in visual cloud into that cloud provider portal with vCD?
YR: You have an extensive career at VMware.
RR: I was one of the first people to take vCD out to the world. But Enterprise wasn’t mature enough. When we focused on SPs, it was the right thing to do. DIY portals needs a lot of investment. VMware allows a lot of extensibility now. For us, as Cohesity, we want to be able to plug in to that as well.
WB: At one point we had 45 devs working on a proprietary portal.
YR: We’ve been doing a lot on the extensibility side. What role are services playing in cloud providers?
AP: It takes away the complexities of deploying the stack.
JT: We’re specifically in object. A third of our customers are service providers. You guys know that object is built for scale, easy to manage, cost-effective. 20% of the data gets used. We hear that customers want to improve on that. People are moving away from tape. There’s a tremendous opportunity for services built on storage. Amazon has shown that. Data protection like Cohesity. Big data with Splunk. You can offer an industry standard, but differentiate based on other services.
YR: As we move towards a services-oriented world, William how do you see cloud management services evolving?
WB: It’s not good enough to provide some compute infrastructure any more. You have to do something more. We’re stubbornly focussed on different types of IaaS. We’re not doing generic x86 on top of vSphere. Backup, DR – those are in our wheelhouse. From a platform perspective, more and more customers want some kind of single pane of glass across their data. For some that’s on-premises, for some its public, for some it’s SaaS. You have to be able to provide value to the customer, or they will disappear. Object storage, backup with Cohesity. You need to keep pace with data movement. Any cloud, any data, any where.
AP: I’ve been at VMware long enough not to drink the Kool-Aid. Our whole cloud provider business is rooted in some humility. vCD can help other people doing better things to integrate. vCD has always been about reducing OPEX. Now we’re hitting the top line. Any cloud management platform today needs to open, extensible, not try to do anything.
YR: Is the crowd seeing pressure on pure IaaS?
Commentator: Coming from an SP to enterprise is different. Economics. Are you able to do a show back with vCD 9 and vROps?
WB: We’re putting that in the hands of customers. Looking at CloudHealth. There’s a benefit to being in the business management space. You have the opportunity to give customers a better service. That, and more flexible business models. Moving into flexible billing models – gives more freedom to the enterprise customer. Unless you’re the largest of the large – enterprises have difficulty acting as a service provider. Citibank are an exception to this. Honeywell do it too. If you’re Discount Tire – it’s hard. You’re the guy providing the service, and you’re costing them money. There’s animosity – and there’s no choice.
Commentator: Other people have pushed to public because chargeback is more effective than internal show back with private cloud.
WB: IT departments are poorly equipped to offer a breadth of services to their customers.
JT: People are moving workloads around. They want choice and flexibility. VMware with S3 compatible storage. A common underlying layer.
YR: Economics, chargeback. Is VMware (and VCPP) doing enough?
WB: The two guys to my right (RR and JT) have committed to building products that let me do that. I’ve been working on object storage use cases. I was talking to a customer. They’re using our IaaS and connected to Amazon S3. You’ve gone to Amazon. They didn’t know about it though. Experience and cost that can be the same or better. Egress in Amazon S3 is ridiculous. You don’t know what you don’t know. You can take that service and deliver it cost-effectively.
YR: RR talk to us about the evolution of data protection.
RR: Information has grown. Data is fragmented. Information placement is almost unmanageable. Services have now become available in a way that can be audited, secured, managed. At Cohesity, first thing we did was data protection, and I knew the rest was coming. Complexity’s a problem.
YR: JT. We know Cloudian’s a leader in object storage. Where do you see object going?
JT: It’s the underlying storage layer of the cloud. Brings down cost of your storage layer. It’s all about TCO. What’s going to help you build more revenue streams? Cloudian has been around since 2011. New solutions in backup, DR, etc, to help you build new revenue streams. S3 users on Amazon are looking for alternatives. Many of Cloudian’s customers are ex-Amazon customers. What are we doing? vCD integration. Search Cloudian and vCD on YouTube. Continuously working to drive down the cost of managing storage. 1.5PB in a 4RU box in collaboration with Seagate.
WB: Expanding service delivery, specifically around object storage, is important. You can do some really cool stuff – not just backup, it’s M&E, it’s analytics. Very few of our customers are using object just to store files and folders.
YR: We have a lot of providers in the room. JT can you talk more about these key use cases?
JT: It runs the gamut. You can break it down by verticals. M&E companies are offering editing suites via service providers. People are doing that for the legal profession. Accounting – storing financial records. Dental records and health care. The back end is the same thing – compute with S3 storage behind it. Cloudian provides multi-tenanted, scalable performance. Cost is driven down as you get larger.
YR: RR your key use cases?
RR: DRaaS is hot right now. When I was at VMware we did stuff with SRM. DR is hard. It’s so simple now. Now every SP can do it themselves. Use S3 to move data around from the same interface. And it’s very needed too. Everyone should have ubiquitous access to their data. We have that capability. We can now do vulnerability scans on the data we store on the platform. We can tell you if a VM is compromised. You can orchestrate the restoration of an environment – as a service.
YR: WB what are the other services you want us to deliver?
WB: We’re an odd duck. One of our major practices is information security. The idea that we have intelligent access to data residing in our infrastructure. Being able to detect vulnerabilities, taking action, sending an email to the customer, that’s the type of thing that cloud providers have. You might not be doing it yet – but you could.
YR: Security, threat protection. RR – do you see Cohesity as the driver to solve that problem?
RR: Cohesity will provide the platform. Data is insecure because it’s fragmented. Cohesity lets you run applications on the platform. Virus scanners, run books, all kinds of stuff you can offer as a service provider.
YR: William, where does the onus lie, how do you see it fitting together?
WB: The key for us is being open. Eg Cohesity integration into vCD. If I don’t want to – I don’t have to. Freedom of choice to pick and choose where we went to deliver our own IP to the customer. I don’t have to use Cohesity for everything.
JT: That’s exactly what we’re into. Choice of hardware, management. That’s the point. Standards-based top end.
YR: Security
*They had 2 minutes to go but I ran out of time and had to get to another meeting. Informative session. 4 stars.
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.
