Infrastructure, Cloud & DevOps

This week, Dell Technologies announced the release of its new PowerScale storage platform for unstructured (file and object) data. Despite the new name, PowerScale leverages the same OneFS technology that was the backbone of the Isilon brand for so many years.

Why isn’t it just called Isilon? Multiple reasons, Dell looks to be consolidating the naming for its infrastructure portfolio all under “Power” brands, such as PowerMax, PowerStore, PowerOne, and now PowerScale. Also, there is a lot more in this launch than just a new appliance.

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The COVID-19 pandemic has severely hindered our ability, whether as analysts or as IT vendors, to engage with our peers, partners, and customers. And few places represent this shift in the rules of customer engagement more than the current hiatus of large, in-person customer and partner events.

The big events are gone–so too are the spectacle of the keynotes, the famous speakers, the meet and greets, the live demos, and the tchotchkes. Those poor, poor tchotchkes. Will no one think of the tchotchkes?

Business, though, like life, finds a way. And that way is in the form of online digital events, which have so far produced mixed results, though often better than expected given the circumstances. After attending a few of these events, I pulled together a few thoughts, critiques, and recommendations from my peers here at ESG, as well as a few of my own, on what works, as well as less-effective features for digital events thus far. It all comes down to two simple rules:

1. Entertain and Engage as well as Inform

The experience of a massive, in-person event produces a certain level of grandeur. The shift to a digital format loses much of that. When building content, assume that it must be significantly more exciting and engaging than it would have needed to be for in-person presentation. Some components of presentations that increase viewer engagement include:

• Fewer, more powerful messages. Every product person wants their chance to shine, but focus on the big-ticket items: the major, transformational advances. It’s better to save the incremental updates for another day.
• Zero buffering (or viewers will change tabs). If a technology firm’s keynote buffers, viewers will assume the firm doesn’t have the best or latest technology.
• Shorter more, engaging content. Attention is easier to hold in person. Digital content must be clear and concise—less is more. But make it easy for viewers who want to learn more to access additional short content.
• More conversations, fewer scripts. In a similar fashion, conversations draw greater interest. Viewers have short attention spans, which get shorter when the host is reading from a script.
• Exceptional quality for prerecorded events. Leverage graphics, dynamic content, and other elements that entertain while getting the point across.

2. Assume No One Is Entertained or Engaged

Building engaging content is important, but remember that the environment has changed. Audiences are likely trying to work from home while juggling their personal lives in the process. For example, you may be tuning out the noise of other people in your household while reading this blog. Chances are good that viewers are multitasking, too, so presenters must:

• Make content easy to identify and find. Assume that everyone will need to watch a presentation more than once to understand the topic and make it easy for them to come back and find what they want when interruptions occur.
• Include multi-type, snackable content. Don’t make the audience watch an hour-long keynote just to find the five-minute demo for the new technology they want to see. Divide content into specific topics with easily watchable and rewatchable pieces.
• Make materials sharable. Digital content can increase the size of the potential audience, so help attendees share content with their peers.
• Work toward persona-based content. CIOs, security professionals, IT admins, and developers all have different questions. Help them find specific answers.
• Create “rolling thunder.” Participants likely didn’t get the full message the first time, or the second; remind them, and follow up with added content, experiences, feedback, and commentary on an ongoing basis after the event.

Bottom line is that digital engagement is different, but that does not mean it has to be less effective. Remember you will not have your audience’s undivided attention, so you must do more to grab that attention, hold on to it, and then remind them when that attention becomes lost.

Yesterday, NetApp announced that it has entered into an agreement to acquire Spot. While acquisitions are difficult to evaluate since the hard work really doesn’t begin until after the integration work is complete, I am finding it difficult to contain my excitement.

Spot is one of the more interesting young innovators in IT and its technology addresses a massive need in the industry. The firm has several different offerings but, in essence, Spot’s technology is about enabling its customers to achieve an application-driven infrastructure, where the technology provides tools that understand workload patterns, then provide visibility into those patterns, enabling more efficient use of infrastructure and automation. Spot understands how your applications leverage infrastructure including public cloud infrastructure, so you don’t have to.

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Pandemic? What pandemic? Last week, Pure Storage announced their first quarter fiscal 2020 financial results boasting a 12% revenue increase over last year. This revenue jump offered one of the few bright spots in a week that saw a flurry of less than positive financial news about multiple IT technology providers. Pure’s results also offer a reminder that business must go on even when a pandemic limits how and where businesses can operate.

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Last week, I was able to attend IBM’s virtual Think 2020 event. And though I still prefer the in-person versions of these events, I can say the announcements did not disappoint.

Whether it was by design or due to the pandemic, IBM focused its new technology introductions down to a few larger, broader-reaching technology solutions. A couple of which have the potential to be game-changing.

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In my recent article at SearchStorage, I took a look the hybrid cloud solutions offered by several of the major public cloud providers, Google Anthos, AWS Outposts, and Azure Stack, and their potential to help solve the modern challenges of hybrid cloud environments.

IT has a complexity problem, as nearly two thirds (64%) of IT decision makers recently surveyed by ESG indicated IT is more complex now compared with just two years ago. And for those that identify IT as more complex, more than a quarter (26%) of them identify the need to leverage both on-premises data centers and off-premises cloud providers as a driver of that increased complexity.

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The much-anticipated Dell EMC PowerStore was announced yesterday, the heir apparent to both the Dell EMC Unity and the SC technology portfolios.

At first glance, PowerStore delivers on all the expectations nearly anyone might have for a next generation mid-range storage array. You name it, it has it, including end-to-end NVMe, support for block and file storage, ability to scale up and/or out, a host of enterprise storage features, and a 4:1 data reduction ratio guarantee.

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With the face-to-face interaction still on hold, Red Hat held its virtual experience event. All in all, I was impressed with the execution. There was a technical hiccup here and there, but even live events don’t always go 100% as planned.

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In a time where nearly every business is searching for some good news, IBM’s storage systems business impresses with strong growth. In IBM’s recent earnings announcement this week, the company reports that its enterprise storage systems revenue grew by 18%, for the second consecutive quarter of growth for IBM Storage.

This high growth rate is on par with some of IBM’s other high growth businesses such as its cloud business, up 19%, and Red Hat, which also grew 18%.

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In Nassim Talib’s book, The Black Swan, he focuses on the extreme impact of rare outlier events. I highly recommend adding it to your quarantine reading list. The key takeaway is that you can’t predict these events, so don’t try. Instead, prioritize creating robustness, whether in your life or in your business, so that you are prepared. It is not an if; it’s a when. 

So, how robust do you feel?

For the past few years, when I spoke about digital transformation, I typically highlighted the opportunity that leveraging data effectively could create for businesses. If I thought about digital transformation as a risk mitigation strategy, it was only as competitive necessity. In other words, if you don’t reap these benefits, your competition will. What I forgot, however, was Talib’s Black Swan theory.

The business world looks quite different now than it did a month or so ago. There is a much higher risk and cost associated with direct face-to-face communication and manual activities. In a matter of days to weeks, businesses have had to become completely reliant upon digital, remote work and increase their usage of cloud services. Everything that can be digital, needs to be digital.

Need remote, automated IT? Welcome to the cloud.

The show must go on. Business must continue. And when it comes to standing up and supporting new digital services, manual, on-location, traditional processes are no longer just costly, they are not an option right now. And when it comes to delivering digital services without manual, onsite interaction and activity, public cloud services typically have the advantage.

Hybrid cloud maybe the current de facto standard of IT, but both sides of the hybrid equation are not equal when it comes to automation. In a 2019 study of storage administrators using both on- and off-premises storage infrastructure, admins were 2.5 times more likely to perceive cloud services as superior at enabling IT automation.

It’s not surprising then that cloud adoption is taking off even more than it was before. So much so that in a recent Wall Street Journal article titled, “One Business Winner Amid Coronavirus Lockdowns: the Cloud,” it was reported that Microsoft Azure was running into its limits in some locations.

Where is my automated data center?

While there are tools and technologies that deliver similar levels of remote control and automation to the data center, the usage of these tools is not where it needs to be. This is likely due to a combination of under investment by IT organizations along with the challenges of automating a diverse set of heterogenous vendors and technologies.

For example, in a recent ESG study, IT orchestration and automation was identified by more than one-third of IT organizations as a problematic skill shortage. Think about that for a second. Automation is meant to reduce the number of personnel you need. When you are saying you can’t hire enough people to manage your automation, maybe the automation technology is too complex to be of any real use.

Innovation and investment continue in the area of IT automation, orchestration, and remote management, but is it moving fast enough? The answer at the beginning of the year might have been yes. The answer now is probably different. Given the realities of Covid-19, this could become a real concern for on-premises IT vendors.

Two Paths, One Destination

What does Covid-19 mean for the data center and for business and for IT moving forward? Is this a momentary anomaly or the start of the long-term shift? Let’s think about the options using a “choose your own adventure” style.

• Path A: You were successful weathering the storm. You and your business were able to continue operations and find some success during this difficult time. Moving forward, you will likely recognize that this was due to your investment and experience with digital productivity tools and cloud services, encouraging more investment in the future. You might even recognize that if operations were able to continue without those big expensive office buildings, maybe you don’t need those anymore and you accelerate remote, digital work programs.
• Path B: Your business took a significant hit during the pandemic. In this scenario, day-to-day operations took a huge hit. Either your organization is too reliant on physical employees being at a specific location or you under invested in remote digital services and automation. When the crisis hit, maybe there was a significant investment, but the roll out and learning curve took too long, and the damage was done in terms of lost revenue and lost market share. Moving forward, assuming the business is still intact, your executive team will want to be better prepared. As a result, you increase investment in digital collaboration tools and public cloud services.

Ultimately, both paths end up at the same location, with businesses prioritizing investment in digital transformation activities and investing in cloud services. In other words, investing in ways to make sure the business can operate with people doing as few physical, manual tasks as possible.

Traditionally, I would expect these types of investment to span both on- and off-premises resources. Unless on premises technology can improve its automation and remote management capabilities quickly, cloud services will likely capture the lion’s share of this investment moving forward.

Covid-19 is a wake-up call to all businesses on the necessity of digital transformation. But it should also be a wake-up call to data center technology providers. IT needs the ability to deploy, provision, and manage new services automatically and remotely, with little to no manual interaction. IT needs the automated data center. Better yet, IT needs the automated hybrid cloud, and it needs it now.