Infrastructure, Cloud & DevOps

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.

Modern IT has a need for speed. In the digital era, data fuels decision making, enhances how businesses interact with their customers, and determines operational efficiency, plus in a growing number of cases, data is the product.

According to ESG research, 71% of IT organizations report that data storage technology is strategic to their organization’s IT and business operations. Additionally, nearly half (49%) of these organizations state that data is their business, with another 31% expecting to offer data-centric products and services within the next 24 months.

For these digital organizations, access latencies and bandwidth limitations have a direct cost to the business.

Traditionally for unstructured, or file, storage, there was an old saying (Yes, I said old) that only a small percentage of your data was going ever to be used at any given time, and the bulk of data was cold, something to be stored and not access, ideal for archiving. This idea was the basis behind many storage system designs.

Today, given the importance of analytics and the massive investment in machine learning, high performance access to large volumes of unstructured data is essential to business operations. In an ESG study of storage decision makers, 37% identified big data repositories for unstructured data as part of an AI or analytics initiative as a top growth area for on-premises data storage. This old idea of storing files but not needing to access them has quickly become irrelevant.

One storage innovator, Stellus, is helping to change things. Its Stellus Data Platform leverages an innovative Key-Value over Fabrics implementation to deliver high-performance and highly scalable storage for unstructured data.

And just last week, Stellus announced a record-breaking performance as the Stellus Data Platform was able to achieve a combined performance of up to 80GB/s aggregate bandwidth, and to a single Linux client Stellus achieved 33.2GB/s of sustained write throughput. I expect this level of performance to quickly become the expectation for digital businesses, especially in industries such as life sciences and media & entertainment.

If those record setting numbers aren’t enough to pique your interest, the ESG technical validation team was recently given the opportunity to take a look at the Stellus Data Platform. Needless to say, they too were impressed with what they saw. Some high-level takeaways include:

• The “read and write performance was particularly impressive, with the Stellus Data Platform exceeding the Stellus performance claims for the model under test, delivering 41.3 GB/sec write and 45.1 GB/sec read throughput, the fastest we have ever seen for a file storage system.”
• “The platform rebalanced data after loss of a 7.68TB drive in a 92TB data space in less than nine minutes with minimal impact to system performance.”
• “System upgrades were fast and simple to execute, enabling ESG to double storage capacity with a couple of clicks and less than 45 minutes processing time.”
• “The system also offers impressive density, scaling to 1.475 PB in just 17 RU.”

The way that businesses leverage data has changed. Now, the way that storage technology is architected must change with it. Stellus is helping lead the way.

Last week, Pure Storage announced some very impressive fourth quarter earnings results. Some highlights include:

• Q4 revenue $492.0 million, up 17% year-over-year.
• Full-year revenue $1.643 billion, up 21% year-over-year.
• Q4 GAAP gross margin 70.8%; Full-year GAAP gross margin 69.0%.
• Full-year free cash flow was $101.7 million, up 59% year-over-year.
• Pure added more than 500 new customers in the quarter, reaching over 7,500 total customers. (more…)

The edge, or the internet of things (IoT), is the next technology frontier. Though edge environments have existed for some time, it has recently become the wild west of technology, one defined by many harsh realities and a new ramp in investment, as businesses look for the next digital goldmine.

Nearly four out of ten (38%) storage decision makers believe IoT workloads will be a top driver of on-premises storage spending growth over the next 24 months, with one-third (33%) identifying IoT workloads for cloud storage spending over that same time period. IT is preparing for an onslaught of data growth resulting from these workloads, but how are IT vendors poised to address these needs of businesses at the edge?

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This week IBM announced an update to its FlashSystem storage portfolio. While new flash storage releases have become somewhat commonplace lately, thinking that IBM’s FlashSystems are just systems with flash does them a huge disservice. IBM has integrated some game-changing software innovation into its FlashSystems. While much of this technology has been in there for a while, the benefits extend far beyond the average storage system.

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