The Hobbit Walks Through Dell World

Bilbo Baggins was middle aged and a bit rebellious for a hobbit, but had never been more than a few miles from his home.  His life completely changes when he begins an unexpected and transformational journey across Middle Earth.  The movie comes out this week, I would guess that most people reading this blog read the book many years ago.

I attended a panel session of Dell executives at Dell World earlier this week.  They took questions for half an hour and there were a few recurring questions or themes.  One theme was - How far along is Dell on it's transformational journey?

Bilbo had never been beyond the Shire (his neighborhood in Middle Earth) and never seen or done anything like this journey before.  If somebody had asked him along the way - How far along are you on your Journey?  I suspect that his answer would have been specific to his own expectations and experience  thus far into his journey.  When he set out he only knew vaguely was he was going to do.  Only near the end would have appreciated how far he had to go when he first left.

Michael Dell answered these questions about Dell's (the company) journey as well as could be expected.  He basically said that Dell is in a continual state of change and that their transformational journey is a constant.  He said that they are embracing change and will continue to change over time.  They realize that the endpoint is not clear while they know that they must do many things to get there.

After Bilbo's journey is complete he writes a book about his adventure and calls it There and Back Again.  No doubt a completely changed person from his Journey, Bilbo writes about the great things he saw and did.  The key events in his life are what happened on this adventure and he wouldn't be the same person without these experiences.  He also couldn't have even started on the book until the Journey was over, he wouldn't have had the context to understand what was the beginning, middle, and end.

Dell has entered into a key phase in it's corporate life.  It is working to become more than just a maker of hardware.  At the end of this phase it will still most likely make hardware in many forms, but it will also be other aspects of the IT business.  It will be interesting to see how it turns out.

Seems like some people at Dell World had the Hobbit on their minds this week.

A Bunch of Suits and a Guy In Jeans

I've always been impressed with Jeff Clarke of Dell for a variety of reasons.  He is an organically grown Dell executive.  He started out as an entry level guy and has worked his way up to reporting directly to Michael Dell.  He always seemed to give talks and presentations that were straightforward and easy to understand.  He also would answer questions directly.  He is one of the longest tenured Dell executives and understands the company and it's history very well.

So what's up with the jeans?

A distinguished panel of executives was presented before the press at the kick-off of DellWorld 2012 this afternoon in Austin.   Michael Dell was of course there as the CEO, Chairman of the Board, and former wunderkind who started a multi-billion dollar business from his dorm room.

Steve Felice was kind of the moderator of the panel and served to kick things off and introduce everyone.  Steve is a long time Dell executive that has essentially been successful at all of his posts at the company for the past decade.

The new guys in the form of Marius Haas and John Swainson were on stage as well as Suresh Vaswani who has been with Dell for about 5 years but was just last week moved to be the head of Dell Services in the wake of Steve Shuckenbrock's announced departure.

All of these guys are wearing sports coats, button down shirts, and slacks.  Jeff Clarke is also on stage, but he is wearing jeans and a casual button down blue checkered shirt.  Very relaxed.

What's the message with the jeans?

He definitely stood out from the panel on the stage.  Everybody will remember Jeff Clarke, Michael Dell, and some other guys in suits.  The reason for the jeans and relaxed shirt is probably at partly that he just like to wear that kind of stuff, but I think he also knows that he it puts him at an advantage.

The Q and A session goes by and nobody asks about the jeans. Too bad.

Technology Retro

On So Say SMEs Kong and I discussed retro trends and technology.  Yes, we managed to combine OS/2, the Pittsburgh Steelers, and Bruce Lee in one video.

And here are the referenced Steelers throwback uniforms:

And the Bruce Lee playing ping pong with nunchucks video:

The Future of Storage is Virtual, Again

The thing about storage is that it has been virtual for a long time.  So while the future is even more virtual, the past is virtual too.  When we look back we see a lot of the same virtualization ideas already in place.  It's kinda like Back To The Future in some ways, without the hover boards and DeLoreans.

Your desktop at home and your laptop at work are probably still more or less directly using their hard drives without a virtual layer in between, but on servers, storage arrays, filers, cloud backup, and just about any web app - storage is already virtual.  

Storage has been virtual for a long time.  A simple LUN is a virtual layer that takes many disks and presents them as if they were one.  A LUN could also be a slice of many disks presented as one single disk.  Sometimes these LUNs are referred to as Virtual Disks - depending on the vendor or tool.

Storage arrays have engaged in doing virtual stuff that does amazing things for a long time now.  Moving data around to different disks without interrupting access (kinda like vMotion for data) and replicating to a different location for backup and disaster recovery without impact to the applications are great examples.

Finally all the cloud based storage is completely virtual.  Amazon's storage service is probably the best example but other things like Mozy and Carbonite are cloud based backup solutions that are big virtual backup tapes in the sky.

The virtualization of storage keeps going from there.  The storage functions and features are going to increasingly become more virtual.  In some cases vSphere does things that were previously done by storage arrays like snapshots and cloning while in other ways the arrays will work directly with vSphere to do these same things from a VM specific perspective. The VAAI api that enables arrays to work more directly with vSphere is a great example.

So in the future, storage will be more virtual.  There are two examples of things that have already been released that I think are signs of where things will go.

The first is the concept of taking local storage on servers and combining it across the network to create virtual shared storage.  The vSphere Storage Appliance or VSA is an example.  It was originally released with vSphere 5.0 and allows for the local storage of several servers to be combined and presented as a set of NFS shares that are highly available due to replication between the hosts that happens automatically in the background.  At VMworld earlier this year there were also a technology preview uses local disks to create a virtual SAN.

Secondly is the idea of the storage arrays themselves becoming virtual machines.  NetApp released a virtual storage appliance that can be used to create a virtual NetApp filer.  It runs the same OnTap software that the  physical based NetApp filers use.  As a result this virtual filer has the same high end capabilities including stuff like snapshots and deduplication as well as the ability to NFS and iSCSI based connections.

So storage becomes more virtual and virtualization get more storage capabilities, again.  

What I Did Last Summer or SAP HANA on VMware vSphere Performance Testing

The stuff that I have been working on for most of this year was made public in a press release just before the Thanksgiving break a couple of weeks ago.  SAP's HANA database, an in-memory high performance wonder, has been officially blessed to run on VMware vSphere 5.1 for test and development by SAP.

I wrote the official VMware blog that was posted on the same day as the press release and it does a pretty good job of covering the basics of the announcement.

An additional really cool thing that happened was HP announced on the same day their plans to ship a HANA appliance based on vSphere and loaded with HANA VMs soon.

My specific role in this has been pretty interesting.  I've been working with SAP to test the performance of HANA on vSphere.  The goal was to show that HANA in a vSphere VM could perform almost as good as HANA on native hardware.  By running lots of tests with several different workloads over many months we were able to show that performance was pretty good.  I'll be able to share more details on the performance soon.

I'm continuing the work on performance testing HANA on vSphere to cover more scenarios and some new workloads.  Should be lots of fun.

Star Wars and Donunts

You might think that the combination of Star Wars and donuts would be something new, but a simple search shows that's not the case.

Kong and I discussed both Star Wars and Donuts at the iconic Round Rock Donuts in episode 45 of So Say SMEs.

I think that Chewbacca would have particularly liked Round Rock donuts and appreciate their new larger sign and straight forward branding.

The Future of Storage Is Speed

Storage has finally reached an inflection point over the past year where the speed of the average storage device is beginning to go up dramatically.  For many moons we saw the capacity and associated cost per GB improved dramatically every year, but the actual raw performance only improved incrementally.

Speed is the future.

You can see this in both the consumer and enterprise spheres.

Many laptops and tablets now ship with only SSD as an option.  It is only in the lower end of the market where you still spinning disks as an option.  The performance improvement of your new notebook over the old one is mostly due to the 5400 rpm spinning disk being replaced by an SSD.  Sure that nice new Intel i Series processor helps - but it's not the key to great performance for your shiny new laptop.

Enterprise class storage on servers and in storage arrays are making use of SSDs extensively.  They are used for huge caches, high performance data partitions, and specialized high speed storage companies and arrays use avoid spinning disks entirely.  The increased performance of SSDs at the reasonable prices of today make them very compelling.  Many storage arrays are constrained in terms of IOPS performance before capacity becomes an issue.  This means that adding some SSDs of lower capacity but much higher performance can re-balance the equation.  The larger capacity can be put to use with good performance.

In addition to SSD we also have the PCI flash based storage that is even faster.

These trends show clearly that spinning disks are going to be like tape drives soon.  They will still be around, but mostly as a large capacity, slow storage option.

What we see today with the high water benchmarks of 1 million IOPS on high end storage arrays will be common performance in all data centers.  The hundreds of thousands of IOPS possible on workstation class flash storage today will be routine on laptops, desktops, and tablets.  It will happen faster than we expect.