NetApp - Absolute Architect

What's on Top at Interop

 

NetApp, of course.  We are showcasing and demonstrating our interoperability with FCoE technology, breakthroughs in storage efficiency, and consolidating Ethernet storage. Vegas is not only the hot spot right now in terms of climate, but also for technology solutions that you should know about.  We've even got a Storage Efficiency Calculator that can tell you how much you'll save.  It's based on seven key business apps and six NetApp key storage efficiency components.  If you haven't checked it out yet, you should.  Additionally, we're showcasing our consolidation of Ethernet storage positioning where we talk about how you can consolidate and standardize your disparate DAS, NAS, and SAN environments into a unified infrastructure.  Stop by and check out NetApp at the Ethernet Alliance Pavilion, booth #527.

 

Also, given that my head is always up in the “Clouds”, I noticed some new products launched by my favorite 10 Gig vendor, Arista Networks.  There has been a lot of hype and publicity around this start-up, with their high performance and low-cost model that is leaving everyone else in the dust.  Information Week wrote an article about them where they stated “…Arista believes it's on to something with its 10-Gb Ethernet switches, particularly when it comes to high performance and cloud computing situations where a lot of data is getting moved around and there's little tolerance for latency or downtime or the traditional expense associated with overcoming either problem in mission critical environments.”

 

They’ve got a 1/10GBASE-T switch that is going to blow the socks off the competition since it will allow you to push 10 gigabits worth of traffic over a 1 gigabit cable.  Wall Street & Technology magazine was one publication that covered the launch.  The 7100T Series is a family of high performance, layer 2/3/4, 1/10GBASE-T, auto-negotiating datacenter switches that's positioned for server aggregation, high density 1/10G server virtualization, storage access and HPC cluster interconnects.  Here’s a video data sheet about it.  Check out some product demos and presentations at their Booth #1651.

 

Interop is the leading business technology event series, with in-depth educational programs, workshops, real-world demonstrations, and live technology implementations.  Interop 2009 takes place May 17–21 at the Mandalay Bay Convention Center in Las Vegas, Nevada.

NetApp on Cloud 9

 

I’ve written extensively about Cloud Computing and Cloud Networking in the past.  Now I want to take a deeper dive in regards to the components of a Cloud and what it takes to make it work and work well.  First off, we need the infrastructure to support it which entails compute power, networking, storage, and security.  Secondly, we need to have management which includes provisioning, billing/chargeback, and SLA metrics.  The third significant component is policies in the form of security and availability, and finally the last component is services comprised of application, platform, and infrastructure.

Players such as Amazon, Google, and SalesForce.com are known as Cloud Service providers.  Their role within this concept is to deliver application / platform / infrastructure services via the internet.

 

 

NetApp will play in the services component of cloud computing as a Cloud Enabler where we sell products and technologies which allow clouds to be built and cloud services to be delivered efficiently.  I care about storage, and specifically cloud storage is going to consist of a combination of hardware, software, and processes designed to efficiently deliver storage services and applications to an organization.

 

 

Let’s talk about the economics of service providers and subscribers and the benefits that Cloud Computing provides.  A previous post of mine referred specifically to the economics of Cloud Computing.  The service providers gain economics of scale via a multi-tenant infrastructure.  Additionally, they have a predictable recurring revenue system.  The subscribers on the other hand shift storage to operating expenses where the subscriber only pays for what they use.  They end up reducing operating expenses because it’s covered by the SLA.  Additionally, it moves power, cooling, and carbon footprint to the cloud service provider.  In regards to their control, they can balance SLAs with costs and on-demand capacity and performance provides business flexibility.  Sounds like a winning game plan, right?

There is such a thing as a recipe for success.  The ingredients are a mix between requirements and technologies.  The requirements are low operating expenses and as close to ‘commodity’ pricing as possible while having everything based on standards.  The technologies that are required in this formula are integration with server virtualization and scale-out NAS. Data reduction, utilization reporting, multi-tenant security, multi-drive support, and multi-interface support are also critical components.

 

 

NetApp’s opportunity is new build-outs in the corporate data center and the ability to partner with service providers to determine if it’s an appliance that is needed or a hybrid product.  All in all, there are two business models for cloud – Service Providers and Enablers.  The role of NetApp will consist of parts of the storage infrastructure being a ‘service’ and NetApp being the key enabler. 

 

NetApp == #1 BEST PLACE TO WORK

We are Numero Uno & I'm not surprised one bit.

NetApp rocks and it always has since Day #1 for me. I’ve been here for almost 5 years now and still feel like it's my first month on the job. The excitement level, the ambition, the infectious positive attitudes are all components of why I love my job and why the rest of the nation recognizes it year over year. Our former President and current Vice Chairman Tom Mendoza always said “Catch someone doing something right.” Trust me; there is a lot of that going on around here.

Our CEO, Dan Warmenhoven, stated that “other examples of our strong worldwide culture are the many local “Best Companies” awards NetApp has received this year. In Australia, we ranked in the top 8 of “The Best Places To Work In Australia”, our NANE site was named a “Top Place to Work in Massachusetts”, our RTP site ranked the #2 “Best Place To Work”. In Silicon Valley we have been acknowledged as one the “Bay Area’s Most Admired Companies” by San Jose Magazine, and most recently we ranked #10 on the “Best Places to Work” list from GlassDoor.com. We have also received several awards for corporate philanthropy and corporate responsibility this year, which reflect the generosity of time, effort and resources you contribute to your communities worldwide. Over the past year we have also received many environmental awards for innovation in our datacenter including the InfoWorld Green 15, ComputerWorld Top 15 Green IT Companies, & the Uptime Enterprise Green Enterprise IT awards.”

That’s a whole lot of recognition and I’m more than proud, to say the least. It is an absolute privilege and pleasure to work for such a phenomenal company as NetApp. Ever since Day#1, it’s been #1 for me, so cheers to you, great place to work, and may the wind be at your back, and the sun upon your face… and may the winds of destiny carry you aloft to dance with the stars.

 

NetApp == Best of Breed

I talk to customers all the time about the value that NetApp brings to the table.  It's not even hard because there's so much to tell and so many wins to describe, especially in the solution areas that I focus closely on.  For starters, we've made some great strides in VTL with our deduplication offering.  As expected, we remove duplicate data so that common points of data are stored only one (1) time.  Our dedupe takes place for all of the data associated with a virtual library and works by scanning (terabytes of data) for repeating data, making references to it that point to the common set of data, and then removing and reclaiming the capacity used by the duplicate data.  It rocks.

NetApp VTL Deduplication delivers 95% (20:1) savings

ü      Fingerprinting inline, byte compare and deduplication post-process for now

ü      Leverages hardware compression for additional savings and speed

ü      Configured on virtual library basis for flexibility

It's all about the Benjamins.

In 2008, Cloud Computing was more popular than what A-List celebrities wore on the red carpet.   As the worst economic year since 1931 came to a close, why does Cloud Computing remain such a hot topic for 2009?  The driving force?  Arista Networks Chairman and Co-Founder (& Sun Microsystems Co-Founder), Andy Bechtolsheim, said it best in one word – Economics.    It’s all about the “Benjamins” and what a cloud computing infrastructure can do for your wallet.   

Analysts tend to agree; according to IDC, the market for cloud spending is expected to grow 6x faster than traditional IT spending in the foreseeable future and will reach $42 Billion by 2012.  That’s huge and definitely something worth exploring for vendors.   

Additionally, IDC predicts that Total IT Spending will grow an average of 7% per year from 2008 to 2012 whereas Cloud Spending will grow a staggering 27% per year.  The pie chart from IDC below shows that over half of IT Cloud spending will be for the application side.  By moving the application layer to the Internet, vendors can implement a “software-as-a-service” business model due to its ease of deployment across multiple sites while at the same time separating the user and the physical datacenter location.  Companies such as Facebook and Yahoo have already been reaping the benefits from a vendor perspective.

Here are some FACTS, not opinions, about what Cloud Computing  can do for vendors:

Easier for application vendors to reach new customers.

Delivering & supporting applications is easier and cost effective.

Using commodity server & storage hardware costs less.

Driving down data center operational costs saves money.   

Everything above in bold == economics.  Nuff said.

Dubai or Not to Buy? That is the Question.

I just spent a weekend in a place that likes to create their own islands.  They're literally adding habitable land mass to the earth while as they dredge up the bottom of the ocean and dump it back up to make up enormous piles of sand, thus PALM island and THE WORLD.  I'm not "talking about place called Aspen where women instinctively flock to you like the salmon of Capistrano..." [Dumb & Dumber movie quote]  I'm talking about Dubai, United Arab Emirates.

It's considered the "Las Vegas of the Middle East".  I don't know about that, but what I do know is that they have hotel resorts that could possible put The Bellagio to shame.  With nightclubs and bars on every corner, I'm sure that these folks may quite well partake in some shenanigans of their own.  But... what I'm most interested is in the technology sector that is booming and what's to come in the future.  Enter NetApp!

Dubai is also often referred to as "Internet City".  With all of the development and construction that is underway (I've never seen so many cranes in a single square mile in my life), my mind wanders to the opportunity at hand as it pertains to high tech and storage.

In my eyes, I just see NetApp all over Dubai.

Today Will Go Down in History for Cloud Networking!

As I sit here catching up on email in a high-rise penthouse tonight in downtown Dubai, I can’t help but feel the excitement and hype that is going on in the Valley right now as if I were back home halfway across the globe.  Today marks a day that will forever go down in history!  Arista Networks has appointed very well-respected industry veteran Jayshree Ullal, (check out her blog), as their President & CEO while founder Andy Bechtolsheim leaves Sun Microsystems to focus whole-heartedly on this latest and greatest venture. 

Arista Networks is gaining ground and rising to the very top on being known for having best-of-breed 10 Gigabit Ethernet switches that deliver Cloud Networking Solutions for large scale datacenter and computing environments.  (I've been watching them very closely and you should too!)  If you need a refresher, check out this 10GigE whitepaper. 

Why is this so cool? With all that is going on with Cloud Computing & Networking, it’s really awesome to see such strides in innovation with some of the best & brightest people in the world leading the charge – literally.

As discussed in my previous post, In order for this to work, and work well, you need to have better cost-performance over your current network infrastructure.  You also need better capacity to store everything and improved latency for the users who are depending on it to deliver their application delivery.  The diagram below from the up-and-coming leader sums it up nicely:

 

source Arista Networks

So, as I look out my high-rise window at the Burj Dubai, which is twice as tall as the Sears Tower FYI, I can’t help but think of it as a metaphor for what’s to come in the world of 10Gbit and Cloud Networking. I guess the sky really is the limit & I can’t wait to follow along and see where this best-of-breed technology takes us!

NY Times | BusinessWeek | Forbes | CNET | GigaOM | Huliq | MarketWatch

Every Cloud Has A Silver Computing Lining.

Cloud Computing has been getting a lot of hype lately... and rightfully so.  NetApp refers to a form of it as Grid Computing and ever since it's conception, my heads been in the clouds thinking about it and how it's going to change the way we run IT and our businesses.  This particular topic has been on the forefront of my mind recently...

According to Wikipedia, Cloud Computing is based development and use of computer technology where the cloud is a metaphor for the Internet and an abstraction for the complex infrastructure it conceals.  It is a style of computing where IT-related capabilities are provided “as a service”, allowing users to access technology-enabled services from the Internet without knowledge of, expertise with, or control over the technology infrastructure that supports them.

For those of you who are still into Sunny Computing, wouldn't it be more logical to use services and not have to know anything about the infrastructure that supports it?  This is one of the main benefits I think consumers will feel.  Who wouldn't want to access their apps and technology-enabled services via the Internet?  After all, you don't need to bother yourself with knowing the infrastructure in which it resides since you simply get to use what you need as you normally would via the network.  Some common cloud computing applications today are Facebook, Google Apps, & Microsoft Online. 

My very good friend and colleague, NetApp's CTO-at-Large , Val Bercovici feels that Cloud Computing represents a promising intersection of technical and economic trends to form a new kind of ‘information chain’ akin to supply chains in the manufacturing industry.  Networking improvements, web services, grid computing and  scalable storage solutions are enabling new economies of scale for service providers.  They are leveraging huge capital equipment investments to offer virtual computing infrastructure rentals with common interfaces, just-in-time availability and granularity billing.  This gives IT consumers of all sizes new options for shifting large capital infrastructure costs towards more incremental operational expenses in order to better enable their businesses.

This is what I like to hear.  The ability to leverage your equipment investments into virtual computing rentals is, what I feel, to be around in the present and near future.  It is the most cost-effective and logical way for service providers to do business.

As I think about my NetApp customers and consumers in general, I realize the need for them to not own the infrastructure per se, but rather simply access and use resources as a service and pay as they go for what they use (as long as the storage infrastructure is NetApp, of course) The payment model for this type of offering is similar to that of a utility computing model where you are billed on a subscription basis.  You share your city's water and electricity with your neighbors and similarly you'll share you computing power between multiple users.  The cool thing is that since we're sharing resources, servers out there wont be left idle and hence utilization rates will improve and costs will decrease.

Someone is going to be the leader in all of this... and I'm watching closely and doing my own research to find out just who the front-runner is going to be.  Somewhere... over the rainbow... Cloud Computing is the wave of the future.

I'm Just a Million Miles Away.

I'm exactly half way across the globe and I feel like I need to blog and that makes me more of a globe-blogger than a globe-trotter.  I had the pleasure and privilege of presenting the Technical Breakout Session for the APAC Technical Partner Summit here in Kovalam, Kerela in India this week. 

It's always interesting talking to our partners and hence, indirectly to our customers,  to see the technology trends that are occurring out here in addition to the new ways they are doing business in light of the economic crisis.  My counterparts out here are feeling quite positive about it all and feel that it's in fact a phenomenal opportunity to capitalize on this and really relay NetApp's value proposition and help our customers now more than ever.  I couldn't agree more.

 

One of my colleagues who works for NetApp and resides in Amsterdam, Holland jokes that we can no longer draw parallels and be analogous between our Thin Provisioning and the ways that banks loan money.  The irony was both humorous and sad at the same time.

 

So, here's to the wonderful people of NetApp India and the NetApp Partners who have so much faith and hope and drive that it would warm anyone's heart.  Well, maybe not the hearts of Evil Machines but anyone who's warm blooded would indeed share the sentiment.

Go NetApp!  ONE Team!

All Data is Not Created Equal.

We create data.  We create even more data.  Then we back it up, and then we replicate it.  Then we do it again onto tertiary storage.  & then some more.  How many copies of that data has been created?  More importantly, how much of that data warranted being copied so many times?  How do we apply business value to data which we spend our time & money backing up and replicating for a final archival?  Grab your magnifying glass and take a look... it's time to drill down and gain some visibility into what it is we are protecting & replicating.

Indexing and Classification engines have been doing this for quite some time now and are becoming borderline requirements in some organizations.  Whether it's to classify data, tag it for standard migration purposes, or for avoiding litigation and fine for compliance reasons, it has become a very useful tool in determining the business value of data.  After all, not all data is created equal.  How many of you out there are classifying your data to tier it best?  This topic is of much interest to me.  More to come on who out there is doing it best!