* Posts by IRONYMAN

8 publicly visible posts • joined 6 Oct 2015

Activists launch legal challenge against NHS patient data-sharing deal

IRONYMAN

So what are my rights?

I am a UK citizen and as such am also an EU citizen at present too. I pay my taxes to the government and am registered across all of those government databases that matter HMRC, NHS, Criminal Records and all ad infinitum..........my taxation is used to provide all of those nice services that myself and other citizens of the UK and EU also have access to.

So why should my taxes be used to pay for someone who will not allow their personal data to be stored, accessed and shared in the same way that mine is?.......the arguments that illegal immigrants are paying their taxes indirectly is nonsense also as without a legal status, you do not have an NI number and can only work illegally.....doing who knows what?

I have the greatest sympathy for any individual escaping war or persecution and asking for asylum on entry to the UK......my problem is that so many travel across the entire continent of Europe to reach the UK and too many are not seeking refuge or asylum, just a better life without the duties or commitments to society that citizens endure.

How to breathe new life into your legacy kit now you've gone hybrid

IRONYMAN

I can see that you don't know an awful lot about Object Stores and how they provide global protection for component failure, unlike Tape and Tape Robots. I would not promote the use of legacy disk arrays as they do have a finite life, however, servers are a totally different proposition and the servers in conjunction with JBOD with a bit of intelligent Software Defined Storage makes a lot of sense, until they invent the software defined Tape Library of course.

With Object Storage you are moving to an environment that enables Metadata searches and very fast retrieval of data to higher performance storage and the ability to push ultra-cold data out to public cloud to keep cost down as low as possible, a bit quicker than sending it off to Iron Mountain?

IRONYMAN

The Big Rub is the software.

The big problem with the re-purposing of old kit to squeeze more life out of it is software licensing costs. From everything that I am seeing out there, the idea of utilizing the end of life kit is great until you start loading up legacy applications onto it, when you then start hitting the per core or per socket licensing models.

The idea of re-using old kit is great and allows the lifecycle for replacement to be extended particularly around servers, changing a lift and replace scheme into a continuous and less disruptive cycle.

To me the ideal usage case for this old kit is, as Dave points out tape replacement, on-premise cloud for new generation apps (avoiding traditional license schemas) and software defined object storage / data repository allowing companies to start using legacy data for analytics.

Licensing is a far bigger consideration for most companies than footprint or environmentals.

Finally – from brandbox to whitebox: Storage fabric is SDS realised

IRONYMAN

Welcome to the world of tomorrow

Trevor, this is a good article and would have been even better two or three years ago. Unfortunately the "big players" already got there in terms of enterprise level virtualization of white box storage, ingestion of existing storage and server based SAN & NAS. Take a look at Dell EMC ViPR currently running version 3.x and scaleIO pretty much the same. Massively scalable technologies already in enterprise customers delivering what you are talking about with a level of maturity that startups cannot match.

The software defined component is important because you still require the means to control the "whitebox" technology to deliver the services that you need. To do this you need a virtual array to mimic the data services of a fully functional physical storage array, particularly in the NAS arena. The virtual array also offers QoS, encryption and data services like tiering and compression.

As I said nice article, but, it is not a view of the future but of current reality.

Oh, 3PAR. One moment you're gliding along. The next, you're in the rain as HPE woos Nimble

IRONYMAN

HPE - Nimble Acquisition

I like the article, and broadly agree with the author on the storage architecture life cycle, however, I think 20 years is a historical reality and not a rule of thumb for the future. Major changes in storage technologies have been very few over the last 30 years (probably SCSI to FC being the biggest change). I think the new cycle will not be beyond 10 years.

This raises the question on strategy and whether storage vendors are innovators or acquirers of technology and IPR.

I do not believe that any large established vendor in the storage market has executed a strategy based on a long-term vision other than Dell EMC. The use of ASICS rather than CPU's was something EMC engineering did two or three generation ago and returned to CPU based systems based on what the author identified correctly as being a limitation on ASIC development cycle time.

My big issue with many storage vendors is around vision & strategy and HPE and NetApp don't have one that lasts more than 12 months.

DCIG rates top-selling EMC flash array as survey bottom-dweller

IRONYMAN
Terminator

Entertaining Discussion

Just to be clear, from a technical perspective the Inline de-dupe and compression should be table stakes for most AFA vendors, but how many of them actually guarantee that those services are always delivered that way.......very few. How many vendors have re-written RAID so that you get rid of duplicate writes and don't generate write amplification on the back-end array.......very few. If you don't get rid of traditional RAID how can you deliver the full IOPS capability of your entire array to a very small physical environment.....you can't! Everyone has replication capability for their AFA's.......most do and it is less than enterprise class. Funny that someone brought DSSD into the discussion........DSSD is something different again.......not meant as an AFA with full data services, looks like some homework is required!

IRONYMAN
Holmes

Entertaining Discussion

Well, my EMC bashing friends, it seems that Gartner, IDC, Wikibon and many more have got it all wrong on XtremIO and its status in the AFA marketplace and this should be fixed using cold hard facts!

So I hope that you can help me by explaining why it is not as good as ANother technology?

IRONYMAN

Entertaining discussion

Some very interesting views bouncing around in here, EMC portfolio is weak?...... #1 across virtually every data platform software and hardware?

All XtremIO has is speed, thats like what have the romans ever done for us?....Inline de-dupe, compression, 8% Raid overhead, no write amplification VSI and ESI to integrate with VMware, Oracle and SAP...... yeah......it is pretty basic!!!!!! oh and quick too!

If you know anything about flash, then you know that trying to run it through a platform designed as a "disk" array is like putting propellers on a 747.