Enterprise Architecture – When is good enough, good enough?

In a conversation with a large customer recently we were discussions their enterprise architecture.  A new CIO had come in and wants to move them to a converged infrastructure.  I digging into what their environment was going to look like as they migrated, and why they wanted to make that move.  It came down to a good enough design versus maximizing hardware efficiency.  Rather than trying to squeeze every bit of efficiency out of the systems, they were looking at how could they deploy a standard, and get a high degree of efficiency but the focus was more on time to market with new features.

My first foray into enterprise architecture was early in my career at a casino.  I moved from a DBA role to a storage engineer position vacated by my new manager.  I spend most of my time designing for performance to resolve poorly coded applications.  As applications improved, I started to push application teams and vendors to fix the code on their side.  As I started to work on the virtualization infrastructure design for this and other companies, I took pride in driving CPU and memory as hard as I could.  Getting as close to maxing out the systems while providing enough overhead for failover.  We kept putting more and more virtual systems into fewer and fewer servers.  In hindsight we spent far more time designing, deploying, and managing our individual snowflake hosts and guests that what we were saving in capital costs.  We were masters of “straining the gnat to swallow the camel”.

Good enterprise design should always take advantage of new technologies.  Enterprise architects must be looking at roadmaps to prevent obsolescence.  With the increased rate of change, just think about unikernel vs containers vs virtual machines, we are moving faster than our hardware refresh cycles on all of our infrastructure.

This doesn’t mean that converged or hyper-converged infrastructure is better or worse, it is an option, but one that is restrictive since the vendor must certify your chosen hypervisor, management software, automation software, etc. with each part of the system they put together.  On the other hand, building your own requires you do that.
The best solution is going to come with compromises.  We cannot continue to look at virtual machines or services per physical host.  Time to market for new or updated features are the new infrastructure metric.  The application teams ability to deploy packaged or developed software is what matters.  For those of us who grew up as infrastructure engineers and architects, we need to change our thinking, change our focus, and continue to add value by being partners to our development and application admin brethren.  That is how we truly add business value.

Enterprise Architecture – When is good enough, good enough?

There can be only one…or at least less than there are now.

Since the recent announcement  of Dell acquiring EMC, there has been great speculation on the future of the storage industry.  In previous articles I have observed that small storage startups are eating the world of big storage.  I suspect that this trend had something to do with the position EMC found themselves in recently.

Watching Nimble, Pure, and a few others IPO recently, one cannot help but notice there are still far more storage vendors standing, with new ones coming out regularly, and the storage market has not consolidated as we thought it would.  During recent conversations with some of the sales teams for  a couple storage startups, we discussed what their act two was to be.  I was surprised to learn that for a number of them, it is simply more of the same, perhaps less a less expensive solution to sell down market, perhaps some new features, but nothing really new.

Looking at the landscape, there has to be a “quickening” eventually.  With EMC being acquired, HP not doing a stellar job of marketing the 3Par product they acquired, Netapp floundering, and Cisco killing their Whiptail acquisition, we are in a sea of storage vendors with no end in sight.  HP splitting into two companies bodes well for their storage division, but the biggest challenge for most of these vendors is they are focused on hardware.

For most of the storage vendors, it is likely that lack of customers will eventually drive them out of business when the finally run out of funding.  For some, they will survive, get acquired, or merge to create a larger storage company, and probably go away eventually anyway.  For a few they will continue to operate in their niche, but for the ones who intend to have long term viability, it is likely they are going to need to find a better act two, something akin to hyper converged infrastructure, or more likely simply move to a software approach.  While neither are a guarantee, they do have higher margins, and are more inline with where the industry is moving.

We are clearly at a point where hardware is becoming commoditized.  If your storage array can’t provide performance, and most of the features we now assume to be standard, then you shouldn’t even bother coming to the table.  The differentiation has to be something else, something outside the norm.  Provide some additional value with the data, turn it into software, integrate it with other software, make it standards based.  Being the best technology, the cheapest price, or simply the biggest company doesn’t matter any more.  Storage startups, watch out, your 800lb gorilla of a nemesis being acquired might make you even bigger targets.  You better come up with something now or your days are numbered.

There can be only one…or at least less than there are now.

Software Defined Storage – Hype or the Future?

If you have a twitter account, or read any of VMware’s press releases, or any of the technical blogs, you have to know by now, VMware is back in the storage business with a vengeance.  As most of us will recall, the first rollout, their Virtual Storage Appliance, VSA, was less than exciting, so I have to admit when I first heard about vSan I was a little skeptical.  Of course over the past several months, we have watched things play out on social media with the competitors, arguments over software defined storage versus traditional hardware arrays, which begs the question, is Software Defined Storage all Hype, or is this the future of storage?

So as always, in the interests of full disclosure, I work for HP, who clearly has a dog in this fight, I have worked with VMware products for nearly ten years now, as a customer, a consultant, and in my current role speaking about VMware to customers, and in various public presentation forums as often as possible.  While I attempt to be unbiased, I do have some strong opinions on this.  That being said…

When I first touched VMware, I was a DBA/Systems Engineer at a Casino in Northern California.  We badly needed a lab environment to run some test updates in, and despite some begging and pleading, I was denied the opportunity to build the entire production environment in my test lab.  We debated going with workstations and building that way, but one of our managers had read about VMware, and wanted us to determine if we could use it for a lab, with the thought that we could virtualize some of our production servers.  Keep in mind this was in the early ESX 2 days, so things were pretty bare at that point, documentation was spotty, and management was nothing like we have today.  By the time we completed our analysis and were ready to go to production, ESX 3 was released and we were sold.  We were convinced that we would cut our physical infrastructure substantially, and we thought that servers would become a commodity.  While compute virtualization does reduce physical footprint, it does introduce additional challenges, and in most cases it simply changes the growth pattern, as infrastructure becomes easier to deploy, we experience virtual sprawl versus physical sprawl, which leads to growth of physical infrastructure.  Servers are far from a commodity today, server vendors are pushing harder to distinguish themselves and to go further, higher density, and give just a little bit more performance or value.  In the end, VMware’s compute virtualization just forced server vendors to take it to another level.

When VMware started talking about their idea of a vSan, I immediately started trying to find a way to get in on the early beta testing.  It was a compelling story, and I was eager to prove that VMware was going to fall short of my expectations again.  There is no way the leader in compute virtualizaiton can compete with storage manufacturers.  Besides, software defined storage was becoming fairly common in many environments, and something that is moving from test/dev into production environments, so the market was already pretty saturated.  As I started to research and test vSan for myself, as well as reading up on what the experts were saying about it, I was quite surprised.  This is a much different way of looking at software defined storage, especially where VMware is concerned.

At the end of the day there are a lot of choices out there from a software defined storage perspective.  The biggest difference is who is backing them.  When I was building my first home lab, and software defined storage was not really prime time, we used to play around with Openfiler and Freenas, which were great for home labs at the time.  They gave us iSCSI storage so we could test and demo, but I have only met a few customers using it for production, and they usually were asking me to help them get something with support to replace it.  The main difference with vSan, and the other commercially supported software defined storage implementations are the features.  The reality is that no matter what you choose, far more important than which is the best solution, is having enterprise level support.  The important thing is to look at the features, put aside all the hype, and decide what makes sense for your environment.

I don’t think we will see the end of traditional storage anytime soon, if ever, although I think in many environments, we will continue to see high availability move into the application layer and shared storage will become less of an issue, think Openstack.  I do think though that most of us will agree that software defined storage is the future, for now, so it is up to you, the consumer to decide what features make sense, and what vendor can support your environment for the term of the contract.

Software Defined Storage – Hype or the Future?