Chuck's Blog

When Big Data Met Security: Is The New Era Beginning?

Two powerful IT mega-trends appear to be combining in an interesting and powerful way.

One highly visible trend is the rise of APTs: advanced persistent threats.  These newer attacks have routinely defeated traditional approaches to information security, and show no sign of abatement.

The other power trend is the amazing power of analytics-at-scale in the hands of data scientists.  I continue to be fascinated by the dazzling potential here.

Could the stunning power of big data be part of the answer to the new class of advanced threats?

Big Data And The Ever-Expanding EMC Petabyte Club

The term "big data" is starting to be used for newer applications that harness enormous quantities of information to do new things we couldn't consider in the past.

Whether it's the new world of analytics, enormous data and content repositories, or something else -- there's growing interest in this new realm.  Massive compute + massive storage = brave new world. 

Witness EMC's recent investments in Atmos, Greenplum, and -- most recently -- our proposed acquisition of Isilon.

But, in my mind, this is much too limiting a view.

I'd argue that perhaps we should extend our thinking even further --  and not only use the term "big data" to apply to these new and intriguing use cases, but also to refer to enormous information portfolios being created by more traditional applications: databases, files, etc.

Either way, I believe the conversation changes significantly when we start discussing petabytes vs. terabytes.  The sheer scale changes the problem, and your approach to mastering it.

Unlearning Storage

In a recent interview with Dave Vellante of Wikibon fame, I offered up the view that -- given the rapid rate of change in storage technology -- I've had to revisit just about each and every fundamental assumption I've ever had about storage.

An excellent example of this "unlearning storage" was buried in an Atmos announcement from EMC World.  In particular, Atmos storage now runs nicely in a VM.  Not just for eval, for production.

And there are some interesting implications as a result.

VPLEX: The Birth Of A New Storage Platform

One of the bigger news stories to come out of EMC World today is the announcement of VPLEX.

Like anything relatively new, it will take a while for people to fully understand the rationale and the strategy behind the product.  It took me a good while before I got a full grasp on the implications of this new technology. 

But I can be slow to understand new concepts ... maybe you'll do better!

This Changes Everything

For those of us in the IT business, we occasionally encounter a fundamental new enabling technology that forces us to reconsider some of our long-held notions around the way things work.

I'd put server and desktop virtualization into that category, as well as the ubiquitous web.  If you're a storage person, flash has that potential as well.  If backup is your thing, the combination of dedupe and low-cost disks has changed how you think about things.

In this post, I'd like to start to introduce a technology concept that -- yes -- has the potential to change a great deal of how we think about IT at scale. 

And, yes, this is going to be a long post ...

Beyond Private Cloud: Towards Information Governance

Yes, I know -- all of this talk about private clouds can seem very futuristic to some.

In essence, though, we're talking about nothing more than the industrialization of IT infrastructure.  If you're inside the IT business, it all can seem so complex.  But if you're outside of IT, you might wonder "what's the big deal?".

Assuming that -- yes -- we can get our IT infrastructure to behave like other forms of modern infrastructure: telecommunications, power, water, transportation, etc. -- what lies beyond?

In my mind, the answer is pretty clear -- it's information governance.

VMware Management Takes A Big Step Forward ...

The headlines reads: "VMware To Acquire Certain IT Management Products and Software Expertise from EMC Corporation".

People will perceive this story one of two ways, depending on their perspective.

The first (and most common) perspective will be "so what?"

The second (and less frequent) perspective will be "this might be a big deal ..."

And I'd like a chance to share why I think this is more of the latter, and less of the former.

Hard Data On The Backup Paradigm Shift

As technologists, we all sort of know that traditional tape-oriented backup is rapidly being supplanted by newer forms of disk-based backup, usually in conjunction with data deduplication.

But quantifiable data on the size and speed of this trend is notoriously hard to find.

This latest result from TheInfoPro helps to frame just how quickly this trend is moving.

Cloud Storage Evolves

At the end of 2008 when we introduced the Atmos storage platform, we realized we needed a new term to describe what was essentially a new category -- COS -- or cloud-optimized storage -- storage platforms and services that are designed expressly for cloud applications.

With today's announcement, the uniqueness of the category becomes more apparent.  We're now in a better position to make the case that -- for some use cases -- cloud-optimized storage solutions can be better than their traditional counterparts.

Better Tools ... Or Better Models?

I read with empathy recent posts on Wikibon regarding the general perception that storage management tools could be a whole lot better.

One excellent post spoke of managing storage performance.  Another speaks to large warehousing workloads meandering through the fabric, and the havoc that caused.  Good reading.

It'd be easy enough to say, "yes, darn it, we need better tools!".  And plenty of storage admins would agree with me wholeheartedly.

My argument, however, is that tools in isolation can only get you so far.  At some point, the model needs to change.  And that's a more difficult proposition.