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Last month I explained my theory of why we’re so screwed up infrastructure-wise or at least how we got to this point. This month I’ll try to show you the way out of the situation.
For a few minutes, forget everything you know or at least everything you think you know. Accept my argument that almost everything we’ve done in commercial IT has been based on transactional requirements. Open your mind.
There are two distinct types of data: dynamic and persistent. Dynamic data is in flux; this is where transactional data begins. Persistent data is fixed. It’s what it is and will never be anything else.
Just because data is dynamic doesn’t mean it starts and dies within an RDBMS. Structured database data starts as dynamic, but at some point it becomes a nonchanging record. It’s persistent. You may have reasons to keep it inside a database forever (although I doubt they’re valid ones), but those records are still persistent; they are what they are.
Here are a few rules that will help you:
Rule 1: Don’t confuse how something begins its life with how it will end. Everything begins dynamic and ends persistent. Stop delineating between structured, unstructured and semistructured. All types live dynamically for some period, whether it’s a Word document, a movie, a credit card transaction or an email. It all ends up as fixed digital content.
Rule 2: The attributes and requirements for each type of data are different. Read/write performance, throughput, redundancy, DR, etc., count more in the dynamic phase of data life; however, we’ve extended all of those philosophies to data that has stopped changing. Building data redundancies and protection schemas to handle real money transactions is good business; backing up a nonchanging data element a thousand times isn’t. Having your bulletproof transaction system capable of handling all the dynamic money events thrown at it is good business. But adding processing power, capacity, network infrastructure, etc., to keep it churning away rather than removing the 90% of the data that isn’t dynamic and can interfere with the real transactional stuff isn’t.
Rule 3: The ratio of true dynamic data (and data being “treated” dynamically) to persistent data is approximately 1:10, and that ratio will rapidly evolve to 1:100 and beyond. Dynamic data just doesn’t stay dynamic for very long.
Transactionally oriented systems are all about doing things fast. Perform the transaction fast, store the data fast and load the data into other systems fast. If it sits in a database, it’s easy to find, which is the point of a database. The persistent data world is all about finding things. The whole categorizing/ classifying/indexing/search thing is designed to add structure so we can find things. However, it seems to me that if we created two distinct “virtual” places to look for each distinct type of data, it would be a heck of a lot easier to find what we want. If all our dynamic data sat in one place designed to handle things like that and was then moved (based on business rules) into the persistent digital content store, we’d be able to architect this store entirely differently than the dynamic store.
If the dynamic store is about speed and redundancy, the persistent store is about infinite dynamic scale, finding things easily and quickly, and an autonomous self-managing/self-healing infrastructure. It should also be cheap to buy. Stop trying to turn the dynamic store into the persistent one, and also stop trying to make the persistent store dynamic. If you act differently, you’ll realize you can get back to making IT a competitive advantage.
Here's the follow on to last months' article, as seen in Storage Magazine.
First let me state that those are words I barely understand, and until recently have never even used the word "supplicant", correctly or otherwise. Having said that, kudos to Jon Oltsik for seeing a wrong in the world of IT and doing something about it. It turns out that some big guys bought some little guys and because of that, other big guys were about to have to create their own proprietary ways to provide basic security connectivity features for their edge products. No one really cared about giving a few bucks to Funk software (bought by Juniper) or to Meetinghouse (bought by Cisco), or using Microsoft's implementation when it was all but free, and really, who cares about Funk or Meetinghouse? When Cisco buys one and then Juniper the other, the picture changes. Since other big guys don't want to A: pay competitors and B: support the competitive cause, the only way around ending up with another batch of confusing, proprietary IT problems was to get everyone on board with an open source standard. There is no value in having a proprietary way to connect to something, but there are a ton of potential problems with having to do so.
Here are some FAQ's from their site - www.openseaalliance.org
What work is the alliance undertaking?
The initial effort will be to support the development of a robust open-source 802.1X supplicant.
What is 802.1X?
802.1X is an IEEE standard providing port authentication in LANs. It has since been used extensively in 802.11 wireless security and is a part of WPA. It is increasingly seeing use in wired Ethernet environments as well. The 802.1X specification provides an authentication framework enabling endpoint devices to be authenticated by a central authentication service. The 802.1X specification uses the Extensible Authentication Protocol (EAP) for exchanging messages as part of the authentication process.
What is an 802.1X supplicant?
An 802.1X supplicant acts as the client side of a client/server authentication handshake. When an 802.1X supplicant tries to access a network, it is challenged for authentication credentials by an 802.1X authenticator (typically an Ethernet switch or Wireless Access Point). The supplicant and authenticator then exchange authentication credentials over a particular type of EAP (i.e. PEAP, EAP-TLS, EAP-TTLS). When the supplicant provides authentication credentials, the authenticator forward them on to an authentication server via the RADIUS protocol for verification. If the authentication credentials are valid, the authentication server sends an “accepted” message to the authenticator which then grants network access to the supplicant.
The 802.1X standard has not been widely implemented in wired networks. Why is this?
Like many early standards, 802.1X has had a number of issues with standards implementation, product stability, and lack of user knowledge. As a result, 802.1X implementation is most often associated with wireless network implementation and has not gained a lot of traction in wired LAN environments.
The OpenSEA Alliance believes that it can act as an industry change agent to help overcome these early problems while advancing the technology. The OpenSEA Alliance can help stabilize 802.1X by developing and promoting a robust and widely available open source client. The OpenSEA Alliance also intends to champion 802.1X by becoming a champion for technology advancement and user education.
Is OpenSEA developing an open source 802.1X supplicant from scratch?
No. The initial source code for the project will rely heavily on the existing open-source Xsupplicant from the Open1X Project. The OpenSEA Alliance believes that its preliminary tasks for Open1X’s Xsupplicant include supporting WindowsXP, developing an easy-to-use GUI, and adding an API for extensibility. Following this extension of functionality, a robust testing effort will be the priority to enable Xsupplicant to become the “Firefox” of 802.1X clients.
Are there commercially available 802.1X supplicants?
Yes. The 3 largest providers of commercially available supplicants are Cisco (who acquired the technology from Meetinghouse), Juniper (who acquired the technology from Funk Software) and Microsoft. OpenSEA hopes to further 802.1X adoption by providing the market with an open-source alternative to these commercial offerings.
Oltsik came up with the idea, baked the program, and by using his brains and market muscle got a bunch of folks to belly up. I'm willing to bet that you will see the rest of the players fall into line with this program chop chop. Monday, the OpenSEA Alliance was announced in order to create an open source standard for "secure edge access" - and doesn't that seem like a dandy idea? Watch how many folks join the bandwagon by next weeks Interop show.
This is not the last open source standards initiative ESG will be driving. There are other areas we are exploring where we can help wrangle the cats for the common good of all. We need standard ways of doing the same things that don't add real value, but without standards can cause real problems. I'm hoping we have our next initiative announced in the infrastructure virtualization world in short order.
Nice work, Jonny.
Remind me never to complain about being in Orlando again. The weather has been stellar, and back in Boston it is 35 degrees and raining a foot an hour. Glad I'm not a marathon runner also (I'm not, though that may surprise you), as they discussed canceling the event for the first time ever. They elected to go forward, which is ridiculous, but should make for entertaining video on the news. Why I continue to reside in the great Northeast is becoming a better question all the time. Arizona seems nice.
Orlando must the U.S. leader in cheesy gift shops, surpassing Vegas in my humble opinion. Middle America is frightening. It is hard to imagine ourselves as the tech whizzes and global super power extraordinaire when in line at a drug store behind four non-related (seemingly) people with full-on mullets, and supremely bad facial hair - and those were the ladies.
I've already begun to receive the usual bulk batch of press releases since SNW starts today. Emulex announced an independent company validated their performance is superior to Q-logic in a VMware environment. The only problem is I've never heard of the company (Demartek) and the full report link doesn't work, not that I'm insinuating anything. So yes, of course I am biased in such things, I don't think anything worth proving should be done by anyone other than ESG Labs, so take it with a grain of salt. Having said that, testing aside, the play is brilliant. Why wouldn't you attach yourself to VMware in any way you could? I'm surprised that more folks haven't figured that out - creating parallel branding to VMware is a very, very smart thing to do right now. It will be interesting to see how many of the vendors at SNW have overt VMware programs under way.
In this morning's USA Today, the front page banner is "25 Stocks You Should Have Bought". People pay for this? Why not pay the hotel staff to sneak into my room and hit me in the head with a hammer instead?
Speaking of VMware, the story they tell is one of the best you'll hear. I'm having trouble figuring out how Microsoft or Xen, etc. will be able to catch up. This game may be over before it starts and others will have to figure out how to play above (or below) that line. Second, EMC really has to be commended for leaving VMware alone - though now I think they have no choice. I'm amazed at how separated they really are - you would think that there would be much tighter integration with the EMC product set, but if anything, it's the opposite so far. EMC might be being a bit too nice in all of this - words I never thought I'd say.
I won't be there. For the first time in 87 years I shall not be attending SNW at all - not even one of those quick in and outs. It seems a tad weird. It turns out this year falls during our spring break, so I'll be taking my 87 kids to a quiet little out of the way hamlet called "Orlando" for some peace and tranquility. While some of you might rightfully feel that hanging with the SNW crowd would be way less stress inducing than my plan, you aren't taking into account the tremendous cost savings I'll be experiencing, as divorce is really, really expensive.
So, I will miss you, sort of. Fret not, there will still be 10 ESG smart folks all over the place so buy one a drink and share your tale.
I will miss this one particularly, however, as I've been focused a lot on how the very nature of data being different these days (digital content vs. transactional oriented) is directly causing many of our operational problems and is theoretically dooming our IT worlds. You'll just have to read about it instead.
As a final parting shot to my good friends in San Diego, you couldn't really ever expect to win a big football game when your team colors are light baby blue, could you? It is a lovely place, though.
Sorry for the delay, but I've been woefully behind. It seems I never catch up anymore. Anyhow, I made it worse for myself by deciding to get on a plane and head out to Silicon Valley last week, which I have been able to successfully avoid doing for over a year.
First, the trip started poorly. Sunday evening I was forced to watch Peyton Manning finally beat the Pats in a game that mattered. I like Peyton, so it isn't about that, but to watch him come back on us in such a way, and to see that Mr. Brady is human every now and then was a mongo bummer. Even worse, I had a house lined up in Miami for the Super Bowl - and if you have ever attended said event, housing is the hardest thing to find. So I limped off to bed at 10:30pm with a buzz and a belly full of really bad (for you) food.
My alarm went of 8 minutes later (4AM) so I could make my 6:30 AM United to SFO flight. There are no longer any flights between Boston and San Jose, two of the major business capitals of the country. I hate airlines, and truly wish the bad would die. Who would want to go to San Jose? Only anyone who sells too or buys from one of the 18 zillion tech companies along the 101. Was there ever an empty flight to San Jose? Maybe American felt the planes were getting too heavy. Fortunately, I was in first class - which is a nice way of saying I was in a slightly bigger, really cruddy uncomfortable seat with only one person to have to climb over to go to the bathroom vs. two. The good news is I was in row 1 so even my 14" legs had to be bent in half to sit. There had obviously been well over one billion other rear ends in my seat previously, as it was about as padded and comfy as my driveway. I don't have a rear end, per se. Big gut, no butt. I was in pain after 25 minutes. 5 hours later I was almost a cripple.
We landed on time, and a car was nicely waiting to pick me up to bring me to my first meeting, with Data Domain. DD is an impressive group - they invented the whole Data De-Duplication gig and have ridden that wave brilliantly. Now everyone and their brother is trying to catch up, but these guys have some great stuff and a big, impressive list of customers. Best of all, their CEO Frank Slootman, is Dutch. Therefore, upon meeting him, I immediately had to steal the line from Austin Power's Dad and say "there are two things I cannot stand - intolerance, and the Dutch." Frank looked at me as if I were insane, as apparently he hadn't heard that one before. We worked it out. I chatted with a bunch of their smart folks theorizing about where other implementations of this technology could really affect change in the world, and found quite a few. What if you could get the performance attributes required by a high percentage of today's applications on a primary store that happened to get 40 to 1 compression rates? Imagine the economic advantages and the consolidation potential. What if everything were stuffed into one place? Seems it may be easier to find things if it were all in one place.
Which got me to thinking about the fact that this is really the first time in this industry in a long, long time where so many "emerging" players have become legitimate, going business concerns. Historically there have always been start ups trying to become the next big thing, but most focus around a new technology or building a better mousetrap, and less about a getting to market and solving a heretofore unsolved problem with that technology. It is very rare indeed that someone comes around with a new new thing and be able to reach financial critical mass. Normally those companies are acquired along the way, or die trying. Rarely do they affect the incumbents, either positively or negatively.
I look at the landscape now and see folks either at or rapidly approaching ciritcal mass ($100,000,000 for hardware, $25M for software) in revenues - in a market long dominated by just a few big guys. DD, Pillar, 3Par, Equallogic, Lefthand, Compellent, SANRAD, Copan, CommVault, Isilon, Riverbed, BlueArc, and a host of others, and I wonder why. It has to be because of two factors - the first is the market requirements have changed - i.e. the nature of the business itself has changed because this industry was developed on the fact that transactional data was where all the value was. Today, most of the data created is not transactional, it's fixed or persistent. It doesn't change. Even transactional oriented data can start as fixed - it may be an event for example, but eventually even if it is changing initially, it becomes fixed at some point. Treating all data the same at creation until we eventually nuke it is illogical. Therefore, the second element required for newbies to have real businesses is that the incumbents simply are not providing solutions with the attributes to address the new world order. No IT person wants to buy from a newbie, no matter how cool the stuff. There is too much risk, and lets face it, too much work to do to justify doing it. So if a risk averse, already overloaded IT dude is going to go to bat for a newbie company, it only makes sense that the newbie must be solving a problem the others don't. I find that interesting.
I went to dinner with Dave Hitz and Kris Newton of Netapp that evening, at one of the two meat joints in the Valley. Why are there no restaurants, nor hotels in Silicon Valley? It's the tech capital of the planet, there is TONS of money there, and yet there seem to be 3 hotels, a motel from 1948, 3 restaurants, and 12,000 Starbucks. Dave was kind enough to bring a bottle of his brother's wine - Chateau D'hitz (pronounced "ditz" of course). It was a fresh 2005 Meritage named Screaming Priest (I didn't ask), and it was darned tasty. Dave and I spent hours talking about the world of IT years from now (I can almost feel the boredom on my childrens faces). He is one of the best people on the planet to talk about ethereal IT concepts with. I was in town to speak to Dave and some others for a book I'm finally writing (it is one of six that I've been threatening for years). He's a fascinating guy and a superb human, inside of a complete weirdo genius (which I mean entirely complimentary, I could not have more respect, admiration, nor flagrant envy for the man). He is worthy of a book all on him, so maybe I'll make it seven.
I spent the next day with various mucky mucks I'm not telling you about. I did have a nice dinner that evening with Mike Klayko, Tom Buiocci, and Dan Crain of Brocade fame. They had just received their FTC approval a few hours previously for the McData acquisition, so all was well. I was a tad nervous that our government was going to make the wrong call on that one, which would have not only really irritated me as a tax payer, but would have been the cause of McData's death - the very thing they supposedly were trying to prevent. Without disclosing confidences, Brocade's integration efforts behind the scene are about the most thought out and complete as I've ever seen. The proof will be in the pudding, as they say, but from a planning and contingency perspective, they have their act together. Perhaps the most interesting part of the conversation, unfortunately, came about during some tangent on Cancer - of which I'm a survivor. Mike shared that his daughter (Christina) in-law is going through some tough stuff and dealing with a harsher dose of treatment than I went though - and mine sucked. Her link tells her story, which everyone should read - and donate twenty bucks to the cause. Puts the problems of IT into a different perspective.
Speaking of Pillar, I spoke at their sales meeting. I get asked to do this stuff a lot, which is flattering, but i refuse most, as I really do hate to travel. Since I was there, and I've been following the company since it wasn't a company, I said yes. (Really - my first trip to Israel in 2000 - I end up in my hotel after a brutal day of meetings, tired and semi-loaded, when on the way to the elevator a small man stood up and said "excuse me, Steve, may I speak with you a moment?" Too stunned to be terrified, I'm thinking oh oh, the Mossad. They aren't kidding when they tell you everybody knows everybody in that country. I never did find out how he knew I was coming, or when, or where I was staying, or how long he waited. He introduced himself as someone working with Digital Appliance, and asks if I'm familiar with them, which I am not. He explains how Mr. Larry Ellison had DA started to create the ultimate scaleable database machine - to support all the thin clients that were going to happen. That didn't work, but they stumbled upon a storage architecture that did. He wanted to know if there might be a business in what they had. I thought there was. Now I figure if this hits, Larry owes me a billion or two.)
Being a veteran of a million years and a million sales meetings, I thought I'd seen it all. Two things occurred that were very new to me. First, the evening before as I was heading into the Santa Clara Marriott (which is the interviewing capital of North America in case you were wondering), I heard a loud ruckus. It was Pillar. I popped my head in only to witness the most organized U.S. vs. Great Britain beer swilling contest I've ever encountered. There were two lines facing each other and one person on each team guzzled their beer to completion prior to turning it upside down and putting it on their head, and the next guy would go. It was quite exciting, and the Americans won, but I'm fairly confident cheating was involved. Tough to out drink a Brit, I've found.
The next day I went down to do my thing, and walked to the back of the room to first listen to CEO Mike Workman's speech, which is where I witnessed the second unique thing of the sales meeting. Mike was on stage wearing a WWII jacket and helmet, in front of the Pillar version of a giant flag. Mike was doing his Patton thing, which is fine, except Mike makes me look like Bill Walton - the man is seriously short. His speech was hilarious, albeit loaded with profanity. (Yes, I said that. I was no longer concerned with my content.) It says something when your leader can have some fun and do semi-insane things in an almost public setting. His act was funny - but his messages were deadly.
Pillar isn't ashamed of the fact that they have been put on this earth via Larry Ellison to single handedly alter the entire economic and operational landscape of storage within IT. Their mission is to build storage for the new world order - simple, scalable, Q of S, unified storage that is smarter than you are - and cheaper than lunch. Why you ask? My theory is that Larry doesn't like all the value that is placed on something as mundane as storage infrastructure. Larry wants the value to remain entirely at a higher place - namely the Database. If he can help move storage the way that IP networking evolved down an inevitable standardized commodity curve, he can grab more of the higher value dough. Larry has spent well over a hundred million bucks on this so far, and that's just what he found between the cushions of his couch. He can be patient. He isn't a VC who needs this exit to save his portfolio. He's got all the time in the world. That's a pretty good advantage, since I've always loved saying that all problems we face can be solved with enough time and money.
I don't mean to imply that the Pillar folks aren't trying to solve real problems with real engineering - they are - as are a lot of others. They have what looks like a brilliant story around their unification story, the data center efficiency improvements and their ability to optimize the cost per performance per measure of space. The difference is that they are pursuing this goal knowing that they have a seemingly endless pile of money to get it done. These guys will be around for a long time I think. This could very well end up being book number 8 - maybe with enough intrigue, suspense, and violence to be a movie!
I took the red eye back, which might be the worst overall traveling experience one can do. The airport is closed, and there is no one around except the living dead of the IT industry trying to get home. It looks like a B-grade hung over horror movie. The only planes that ever arrive early are the red eyes back from the west coast - so if you were going to be able to sleep all cramped up and wildly uncomfortable, forget it, because you just landed. The good news is I didn't drive, I took a car service, so being early was of absolutely no value. The better news is it was approximately 2 degrees (Fahrenheit, which is roughly 1100 below zero Celsius) out, and I had nothing but a sport coat, which I clung too while tromping by the endless line of limo clones, none of which had my name misspelled.
I'm looking forward to not getting on a plane next week.
My latest in CW on thinking about power, cooling, air flow, standards, and all sorts of other fun stuff.
My latest CW rant. If foks were really good with statistics and numbers, wouldn't they be hanging in vegas instead of counting tape cartridges?
Here's my latest Storage Magazine article
I have seen the end …
… and it’s all about infrastructure—and business users couldn’t care less.
It came to me in a dream, but it might as well have been during some kind of peyote ritual. I get it now; I know where we have to go. Forget the application world for a minute or, as I like to call it, the users. I want to talk about IT as the owners of infrastructure and the keepers of data.
There are two absolutes. On one end of the world are users who connect to our universe via an application interface. The only thing users care about is their application. The only thing that application cares about is the data it requires to perform its function. Data is at the other end of the world. Everything in the middle is infrastructure, which is our problem.
We’re all willing to accept the fact that while some of us like infrastructure, and the acronym-filled language of infrastructure that we communicate with, users couldn’t care less. We should also accept that users hate us because of it. To a user, infrastructure is never good, it’s only bad. It’s the excuse as to why they can’t do their jobs, send their e-mail or do whatever other task they want to do. Infrastructure is like Latin to my seventh grader; it won’t hurt him to know about it, it might even be good for him, but he would rather chew tinfoil than spend time learning it.
So for IT to ever be more than the equivalent of old Aunt Edna (who gets a place at the table “just because”), IT has to change its mission and become invisible. If users/business units didn’t have to know that IT existed, life would be better for everyone. IT needs to become the Secret Service: critically important, but rarely noticed.
That means two things. First, the industry needs to make infrastructures capable of becoming invisible. That’s hard, but necessary. IT needs a way to have everything connected to everything, and to understand and control the delivery of data to applications on a dynamic, liquid basis. In other words, I don’t want users to ever know that we moved their application from server A to virtual server B; from array 9 to virtual arrays 11, 16 and 42; from file system Foo on NAS box X-Ray to virtual file system Bar spread over 13 physical and four virtual machines; and from Fibre Channel to Ethernet—and back again—all while they were working away, completely oblivious to the massive undertaking that just occurred.
The business unit created the requirement and handed it to IT, and that’s where it ended. IT does all the adds, deletes, replacing, migrating, virtualizing, protecting and pushing without any negative impact on anything else that’s going on and in real-time. The business unit, and the users within it, spends all of its time doing business things and not worrying about infrastructure issues. IT is the deliverer of data.
Second, IT is also the controller of data. The business unit/app/user creates data, but IT has to make that data useful beyond its original intent. IT has to put rich context about the data in place so it can repurpose that data later on. IT has to understand the data so it can enforce rules on it, enable other business units to benefit from it and be ready to deliver value to a mission that hasn’t even been thought up yet. It has to classify and categorize, search and destroy, protect and serve.
IT doesn’t need to care what the data means in its current state, as the application and the business unit already handle that. What it needs to understand is the context about the data so it can extract value from it in a future state.
To support the business, we have to be a business. We’ve created our own problems by not looking out far enough. We are tactical in IT. We have to deliver IT as a service, so that all of the actions we take—right or wrong—have no negative impact on the user constituencies we serve. We also have to realize that our positive achievements will go unnoticed by 99% of the world. The 1% who do know, however, will be the ones making sure that you get to sit at the head table far from Aunt Edna.
Up to a bit over $30,000 in this years Sylvia's Haven fundraising efforts. Netapp once again is leading the pack with a combined corporate and personal total of $10,000. McData was nice enough to pledge $5k before getting acquired by Brocade, who will simply HAVE to match the McData offer, less I ridicule them!! The $500 dollar donations have been nice to see from a lot of the little companies, so keep them coming.
There is plenty of time left, and no pledge is too small (or too big) - for an individual. If you are a company of more than 30 people, I'm expecting some serious generosity.....
John McKnight gave me this analogy, and I can't be happier about it. It really helps people understand what this "virtualization" thing is all about.
You used to pick stocks. You watched them perform, you bought and sold based on that performance, and you always tried to optimize the outcome. You most likely also did this as a self-created part-time job, since you probably were paid to do something else. Regardless, you did it - and it was almost feasible when you had a few stocks to watch, but once you had dozens or hundreds or thousands, it becomes an exercise in futility.
Most people with real jobs don't do that as much anymore. They buy mutual funds. They can create objectives for their overall performance requirements and have a single view into the fund in order to make macro decisions. People don't have to worry about watching all 100 stocks in the fund - because someone else does it - with the help of automation. In our virtual view, we really just judge the fund manager. We don't look at the individual components (stocks), we view it holistically. Imagine if every time the fund manager wanted to make a change - for all the right reasons, they had to call us and ask us permission. How inefficient that would be. What if every time a change was made to one stock, it kept me the individual from performing my job until that change was complete? That would get you fired I think.
Infrastructure virtualization is the mutual fund. Instead of stocks think about file servers or block devices. There are tons of them out there, each one managed individually. How inefficient. By virtualizing the file and/or block world, we can put a portal up to the user. When we need to move their data from one box to another (for good reason or bad) - today we stop them from doing their job. By creating an abstraction layer the user doesn't need to be affected when we make the move - just like when we sold or bought an individual stock within our mutual fund - we don't know it. All we care about is that we are up, we can work, and the performance is acceptable. The IT manager (or the fund manager) is judged on the overall availability and performance of the holistic shop - not one box, just like we wouldn't judge the fund manager on the performance of one stock.
Applying technology behind the scenes to automate processes in order to optimize the overall performance and economic return on the fund is not different than trying to do the same for the IT infrastructure. Keeping the moves from affecting the productivity of the "user" is always a good idea. Fund managers use computers to track the individual stock assets and apply intelligence to make decisions on them - i.e. if the price hits X then sell, Y then buy, etc. - all within the holistic portfolio's mission. This is like ILM for a mutual fund. In our world, once we obviated the need to screw up the individual users life by micro managing infrastructure, wouldn't it be great if we applied automated intelligence to that infrastructure behind the scenes? Our policy might be "if a file gets hit X number of times in this time frame, move it from A to B or replicate it to D - and once it cools off, put it back" or "if we haven't accessed this file for Y period, move it from expensive asset 1 to cheapo asset 4". You get the point.
Perhaps the biggest thing to take out of this train of thought is that it is inevitable. There were lots of people who made a fortune on Wall St. doing things "the old fashioned way" who fought the advancement of technology. They lost. You can still design a car by hand, but no one does. You can still not use electronic banking, but why? Would you use an accountant that didn't use a computer today? Change scares people, but change for efficiency improvements cannot be stopped.
It would be foolish continue to do things the same way in IT even if we weren't adding new stuff constantly. IT Infrastructure Virtualization will happen because it must happen. Sure, there will be some folks left behind, clinging to their abacus's, but that's the price of progress.
Hu Yoshida, of HDS fame, spoke about a conference in his latest blog, and one of the topics was virtualization.
Hu says that users at a CIO panel commented that "the next step in virtualization is virtualized environments. Where you can swap out a compliance environment for instance and then bring it back later when it is needed".
Exactly. When we speak about virtualization in specific tactical terms, such as storage virtualization for migration purposes, or server virtualization for consolidation purposes, we lose the higher potential of the concept - which is really to do two things: First, it should abstract the user from the infrastructure on thier way to and from the data they care about, and second, behind that abstraction should be a living, breathing, morphable blob that can alter itself in order to best fullfil the requirments from the top of the stack (user) or the bottom (data).
I like the fact that people are talking about the V word more openly, and with less visible disdain - even if it is in terms that are still too simplistic - such as "improved utilization". Eventually people will come to grips with the fact that a fully integrated "Enterprise IT Virtualization" strategy will be the IT equivilant of the industrial revolution.
I wrote more on it in this weeks CW column.
Here's my Computerworld article trying to explain that if we only adjusted our assumptions and expectations, we might actually get things done.
I'm in Orlando with my 4 kids, one wife, one niece, and two in-laws so i won't be blogging this week. I picked Orlando because it's so secluded during school vacation week. You'll probably hear a lot from me next week, as i'm guessing i'll be bolting to the office as soon as I can.
I've got to resign myself that I'm cursed with longer eyeballs than most. It seems I'm like a B movie psychic when it comes to IT sometimes - I see whats going to happen, but there's not much I can do about it.
It's not that I'm smart, mind you. It's only that I have the luxury of watching things for a living. Sometimes if you look long enough, you just see the way the game is going to play out. Security is one of those things.
I'm not the guru - I was just smart enough to hire the guru three years ago (Jon Oltsik). Last year I hired another one (Eric Ogren) because the privacy laws started to be violated. You don't have to be a NASA engineer to figure out that consumer privacy breaches (or threats of breaches - as most of the laws cover) aren't a new phenomenon - only newly reported. I knew it would get juicy.
So here we are - now every day it seems some new debacle is on the news around who lost what consumer data. It's going to get worse - much, much worse. Most states in the U.S. still don't even have privacy laws.
Check out this free abstract of Jon Oltsik's "Protecting Confidential Data" - it's loaded with data that should scare the heck out of you.
The good news is the storage folks - who hold all this data that keeps getting breached one way or another, can no longer ignore the issue, or make nothing statements like "we're going to adhere to any security practice the customer chooses". Protecting data in flight is nice - but only 2% of our data is ever in flight. Protecting the perimeter is nice - but I can't even keep Spam out. Identity management is brilliant - if you use it. I don't care what anybody says - sooner or later you will HAVE to encrypt anything you care about - everywhere it lives.
Here's an excerpt from Hu Yoshida of HDS fame in one of his blogs:
"While the accumulating reports of data loss, have captured the headlines and focused attention on encryption, there is much more to storage security than encryption. Data does not have to be lost to be exposed. A hacker can access storage and steal information, without leaving any trace. Other areas of concern are authentication, authorization, immutability, non repudiation, integrity, privacy, logging, and auditing."
Good point, and as Oltsik will concur - most attacks are from within. Those attacks don't make the Wall St. Journal though - but some tape jockey dropping a tape behind the rack during an audit does.
I guess what strikes me as the most odd in all of this is that the CEO has absolutely no idea (typically) of the sheer magnitude of the potential for problems. They don't know that there are tons of people with "root" privileges in their company that can see anything they want, any time they want. 99% of the time those folks are morally sound and doing all the right things, but sometimes.....
I was in D.C. today, speaking at Softek's sales meeting. To me Softek embodies the concept of boring - they solve real, boring problems and get paid for it. They make money. How boring.
Data Migration is like the dirty little secret of IT - everybody does, but nobody talks about it. I'm not sure why. Big shops have to migrate data all the time from one array to another. They do it because they need newer, faster, better arrays. They do it because their old arrays are off lease. They do it because they need more space. They do it because they want to "tier" their infrastructure. They do it because some sales guy talked them into doing it.
They do it all the time. The average migration in a fortune 500 shop takes about 3 months of planning - and days of praying. Softek moves data non-disruptively - from anything to anything. Softek has about 800 mainframe customers - the kind where "let's hope it works" just won't cut it.
I think that boring old Softek is the perfect kind of company to start to preach the real business value of the solutions they offer - like improved return on assets (the non-disruptive nature probably means 5-10% increased application availability - which means my $50,000,000 IT world just got a much higher return), improved lease utilization (big shops role out arrays off lease seemingly daily, which means they tend to either de-commission them months early, wasting money, or months late, wasting even more money), and a seriously improved return on human assets (not planning for 3 months and not staying up all weekend during a move would probably yield a better life to boot).
These are the kind of boring solutions to real problems that don't get talked about enough - because most folks don't know you can do this kind of stuff. Softek has solved the problem on mainframes, but their own customers open systems world typically doesn't know they also have the answer to their migration issues.
Plus, Sunday night I went to dinner in Georgetown with my wife and some family, and as we're sitting there two big black Yukon's whip up to the front and after unloading all the secret service folks, who hops out but Condoleezza Rice. Impressive, nice lady. Very friendly to the crowd. As an embarrassed republican, it was nice to see a strong, intelligent person such as her to remind me again of why I chose my particular political affiliation.
Check out my latest Computerworld article to find out my thoughts.
Read Jon Oltsik's blog on all the money that not encrypting backup tapes is really costing folks.
Very quietly (I mean, who would want to be noisy about the fact that they need encryption?) the really big banks are spending tons of time and money making sure their tapes are getting encrypted, and the stuff they transfer to partners like credit bureaus is also encrypted.
Sure, they can afford it - but can the rest of us afford not too? I'll be buying laptop encryption this weekend, because my Rolodex is pretty loaded......
Finally, Dave Hitz wrote a blog yesterday about where it makes sense to encrypt disk (versus tape), and while he is correct practically - the reality is that there is no data that matters that shouldn't be encrypted - no matter where it resides. I realize there are practical ramifications to this, but as far as the overriding objective - plan on encrypting everything - eventually.
Someone at Fidelity lost a laptop. One laptop. It happened to have the names, social security numbers, and accounts of all of Hewlett Packards 196,000 pension fund owners. Oops.
That will cost Fidelity $50,000 just in stamps to tell those 196,000 about the fact that they may have an issue. How much will it cost them in goodwill? I'm not sure it's calculable among that crowd - or the millions that have seen it on TV - mercilessly over the last 24 hours. How much will it cost to offer them a free year of credit service bureau service? $10 each? That's $2,000,000 more.
The irony is Fidelity claims that the laptop was loaded up with those names so they would be prepared for a meeting with HP, to discuss the pension plan. Fabulous.
How much would it cost to put encryption on that laptop? About a hundred bucks. You wanna bet how many other places those names are located at Fidelity? A lot I'm guessing. How many backup tapes have those names? How many replica's exist of the volumes where those names reside on file servers in some spreadsheet? A gazillion?
This was going to happen - the numbers alone mean it's inevitable. Stop being naive. This is going to happen at your shop too. Fidelity is considered the gold standard as far as IT goes - and they just coughed up a hairball. Do you really think it's not going to happen to you?
I'll be back to start tossing ideas about dealing with this kind of stuff later. I gotta go stuff my mattress with my money first.
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