DataCore Customer Conference 2012

If you are a DataCore distributor, channel partner or end user - or even none of the above but would like to take a closer look at what we do - you are cordially invited to our annual Customer Conference on 2nd February in London. Several of our most senior VPs will be in attendance and it promises to be a hugely rewarding day. We would love to see you there - please let me know if you intend to come.

Date: Thursday 2nd February, 2012
Venue: Andaz Hotel, right beside Liverpool Street station, London
Registration: http://tinyurl.com/dxedtgr
Agenda:

08.00 - Registration opens.

09.30 - Keynote 1 – Analyst perspective on the state of the industry.
10.15 - Keynote 2 – DataCore CTO's update on our vision of the industry.
11.15 - A year in the life of DataCore - CEO George Teixeira on 2011.
11.45 - Technical Roadmap – DataCore Chief Engineer's outline on what’s coming.
12.15 - Working alliances – News/updates from selected alliance partners.

14.00 - Technical track (End users and Channel partners). "How to..." sessions:

How to: Hot upgrade from SAN Melody and SAN Symphony to SAN Symphony-V.
How to: Understand and make use of storage allocation units in SAN Symphony-V.
How to: Use Powershell basics / host integration kits.
How to: Avoid the Top 10 support gotchas.

14:00 - Sales track (Channel Partners only). "Learn more..." sessions.

Learn more: Taking the market on and winning.
Learn more: Product positioning and sales strategies.
Learn more: Lead management and working with DataCore.

16.30 - Key strategic partnerships – who we like to work with and why.
17.00 - Customer case study.
17.30 - Panel and wrap-up.

18.00 - Drinks reception commences in Masonic Temple (no secret handshake required)
18.30 - Keynote 3: Futurologist David Smith and his crystal ball.
21.00 (ish...) Close

Registration: http://tinyurl.com/dxedtgr

HDD = heavy discounts disappearing

Whilst I, as a DataCore employee, certainly don't want to be seen to be taking advantage of other people's misfortune, the facts are that there is a shortage of hard disk supply at the moment due to recent flooding in Thailand. As has been widely reported, Western Digital, Toshiba, Intel and others have been directly affected and, with the current situation being as it is, the usual rules of supply and demand are taking over, i.e. costs of hard drives are going up. This is of course perfectly normal, just ask the hoteliers in Newmarket when there's a big weekend of horse-racing. Room prices double at least. And, just as punters need to be flexible as to where they stay to avoid being fleeced during Guineas weekend, IT consumers also need to find ways around paying through the nose for what are normally very inexpensive hard disks.

A storage hypervisor can provide the answer.

Firstly, what is a storage hypervisor? Well, it's a software layer that sits directly above the storage hardware and, amongst other things, turns whatever type of disk it finds beneath it - be it direct-attached, fibre-attached, iSCSI-attached, SAS, SATA, SSD, Flash, old, middle-aged, new, made by, sorry bought from HP, bought from IBM, bought from EMC, bought from HDS, bought from whomever - into one completely anonymous pool of resource for the application servers that need it. This of course isn't the official DataCore company description and there is a lot more that a hypervisor does than just unify heterogeneous storage resources, but, for the purposes of this blog entry, I think you get the point.

So how does this help avoid HDD price hikes? There are three main benefits (plus one handy side-effect):

1) Open up the whole HDD supplier market. With a virtualised storage infrastructure, you can buy whatever disk you like - from whomever you like. No longer are you tied in to one manufacturer; DataCore just sees a disk, not the vendor badge on the front. Independence = flexibility = choice = lower cost.

2) Consider SSD. Solid state disks are not as badly affected in terms of supply as "spinning rust" as I've heard HDD described. With previously inexpensive hard drives becoming expensive, the gulf in cost to SSD is rapidly decreasing. So why not try out some solid state memory and use DataCore's auto-tiering functionality to ensure it is not clogged up with "dead" data but hosts just the data your users are accessing most frequently.

3) Sweat the assets. Enabling customers to re-purpose existing or aging kit is one of the main reasons DataCore has done so well, particularly in sensitive financial times. Disk doesn't suddenly stop spinning after 3 years, despite what the tier 1 storage vendors may have you believe when they present you with the support quote for year 4. With a bit of thought, planning and the use of technologies like thin provisioning, existing storage or even server hardware can be re-purposed within your environment and you may not actually need to buy new disk.

And finally, the handy side-effect I mentioned is looking to the CLOUD. The current swear word in the IT industry. It means everything to some, nothing to others. In this scenario, I purely mean off-site storage resource that you can avail of, possibly temporarily, located in a huge data-centre that doesn't belong to you and you'll probably never see. I'll leave the whole security and data retrieval thing to someone else but the fact is, there are plenty of companies out there who will sell you a virtual hotel that your data can live in for a while, or even for ever, perfectly happily, perfectly comfortably and perfectly securely.

How to get it there? Storage virtualisation makes data mobile, dynamic and flexible. With DataCore (and TwinStrata, our cloud gateway partner), you can auto-tier workloads off to your chosen cloud or IAAS ("Infrastructure as a Service") provider at the click of a button. I'll cover this in more detail another time.

So you see, you don't necessarily have to wait another 6-12 months for prices to come back down again, you just have to re-think the way you view (and buy) your disk. We're all doing it with VMware on servers, what makes you think you can't do the very same thing with storage?

Please release me, let me go...

After the announcement last week that the Govt are spending over the odds on IT due to what was termed an "oligopoly" of vendors and suppliers, infrastructure decision-makers may now feel obliged to look at their options. On the topic of hardware which, in many cases, is one of the most expensive parts of any project, virtualisation technologies have enabled choice. But not, it would seem, in the storage industry.

Storage seems to be one of the last remaining bastions of quasi-compulsory vendor lock-in – something  that is no longer the case with desktops or servers. If we take desktop virtualisation as an example, the main proponents provide the opportunity to access a hosted desktop with whatever device you like, whether that be a desktop, laptop, tablet, smartphone or whatever. In fact diversity is positively welcomed with Citrix being amongst the leaders in the “BYOD” (Bring Your Own Device) initiative and the embracing of what is often described as the consumerisation of IT.

Equally VMware revolutionised the server hardware industry and enabled customers to rationalise their antiquated server purchasing routines, which generally consisted of buying new boxes very cheaply and very often. This was neither green nor cost-efficient and the success of the hypervisor has provided choice of both manufacturer and technology. The old 3-year hardware lifecycle, in this economic climate, has all but disappeared in some verticals and IT admins are being increasingly forced to “sweat their assets” for longer. This is now possible because the hypervisor takes care of software advances during that time.

Storage appears to be different. Companies still seem to grudgingly accept they are locked in to one vendor, regardless of whether that vendor is right for them, both in terms of their products as well as their price. Need a second site for DR? Great – but you’ll pretty much need to buy the same, often very expensive, manufacturer as your primary site, despite the fact your DR site may never even be used! Had enough of vendor A and want to migrate to vendor B? Good luck!

DataCore is the “Switzerland” of storage if you will. We act as a hypervisor for the storage infrastructure, giving customers the choice, both of vendor and of technology. We can often provide zero-day ROI just on hardware savings alone, let alone all the soft cost-savings and increased performance and manageability we offer. When customers have a choice, they can buy what’s right for them, when it is right for them to do so. It also then gives them the option to take ruthless advantage of end of quarter deals throughout the year from whichever hardware vendor or distributor happens to be slightly shy of target.

Cisco recently announced what they see as the top 10 technology trends and number 2 on the list was the unstoppable tsunami of data. Apparently, we're creating a zettabyte of data globally every year and this will only accelerate. All this data needs to be stored and managed so surely performance and enablement of disk choice must be top of the list of critical factors? Not all of that data is needed all of the time but frequently accessed information requires fast disk. Fast disk is not cheap. Added to that, legislation and insurance companies are now demanding secure data archival with realistic accessibility timeframes (i.e. not tape).

With such disparity in data requirements, customers need flexibility to ascertain what’s right for them. There are plenty of smaller storage hardware companies out there that have fantastic solutions at a fraction of the cost of premium label kit. Surely this is therefore now the time for customers to embrace storage virtualisation as they did with server and are now doing with desktop and finally realise some of the cost-savings that can be achieved by avoiding vendor lock-in?

This piece formed the basis of an interview with CRN in the UK, the result of which you can read here.

And, for those of who still remember the title of this post and are partial to some cracking 80's mullets and moustaches, here's Engelbert for you. Nice.

I'm back...

I know, I know, it's been a while - almost a year in fact - since I last posted any thoughts on here. I never went away but a few things have certainly changed and, for a while, I had neither the time nor the inclination to continue writing this blog if I'm honest. All that is different now though, I have a new motivation and energy - a change is as good as a rest, as they say - and a new area of IT to get my teeth into.

In March, I moved on from my role at COMPUTERLINKS, where I was looking after the Citrix franchise for 5 years and, latterly, getting a newly-formed virtualisation division on its feet. COMPUTERLINKS and Citrix parted company at the end of 2010 and, for the few of you who have followed this blog since its inception (for which I am extremely grateful!), you may expect me, at this point, to go into great detail on my thoughts around that decision. I have though, for better or worse, changed my attitude slightly since then. The controversy that I have unleashed in the past (which occasionally got me into scrapes with various figures of authority!) is now all but gone. As a result, whilst continuing to try and air my views honestly and openly, I will refrain from making comments that might get me into trouble! Maybe I have just grown up and the angry little man has disappeared...

My new working life is quite different. I am now in the promised land of "vendor-dom". I work for DataCore Software - still virtualisation (so I can retain the title of this blog for now), just this time it's storage, rather than servers and desktops. Life as a vendor is very different from distribution. You feel you have a lot more control over your own destiny, rather than continually being crunched from both sides - the resellers and the vendors. Having said that, distribution gave me an invaluable grounding in what the channel needs and, more importantly, doesn't need and I hope I can bring some of my experience to bear now.

DataCore makes fantastic technology, the equal of which is pretty much non-existent. We are a hypervisor-type layer that sits above an organisation's storage infrastructure and virtualises their disk arrays, regardless of what type of disk it is and which hardware manufacturer made it. More on our company and technology in later blogs.

Anyway, I'll make some sort of attempt to keep this as up to date as I can. News comes thick and fast in the IT industry and Twitter just doesn't cut it sometimes. I would love to read the odd reaction from time to time too, so please do comment.