Almost a year ago I started the process with a group of my peers focused on identifying the infrastructure challenges that organizations are facing today. This process morphed itself over time into a detailed thesis on how we got here and the actions required to close the “Infrastructure Chasm”.

We started the process by identifying how we got to where we are today. The evolution of the modern infrastructure was broken down into six distinct eras:

• ERA 1
  • Monolithic Computing
  • Single Vendor Infrastructure
    • i.e. – IBM UNIVAC I
• ERA 2
  • Distributed Computing
  • Single Vendor Infrastructure
    • i.e. – DEC PDP-8
• ERA 3
  • Dawn of the Multi-Vendor Infrastructure
  • Micro computers begin to arrive
    • i.e. – Commodore, Apple, Atari, Tandy, IBM, etc…
• ERA 4
  • Technology specialization
  • Focused companies build more specialized devices and software
    • Gives way to companies like Cisco, SUN, Microsoft, Oracle
  • Technology interoperability and integration become paramount
• ERA 5
  • Technology Sprawl
  • Infrastructure Segmentation
    • Complexity and required skill sets forces organizations to segment infrastructure and management
      • i.e. – Server, Storage and Network
• ERA 6
  • Convergence
    • The whole is grater than the sum the parts
    • The ability to leverage knowledge capital across disciplines
    • Increased ROA (Return on Asset)
    • Holist Strategy

During this exercise we realized that while the potential technology capabilities have increased exponentially it has become more difficult to extract the maximum potential. Many technologies exceed market requirements and complexity forces the need for segmentation making it nearly impossible to develop a holistic strategy. While we continue to increase technology potential our ability to realize the value is diminishing.

This gap between the relative realized potential and potential technology value is what I refer to as the “Infrastructure Chasm”.

The term infrastructure is defined as the set of interconnected structural elements that provide the framework for supporting the entire structure. I propose that information technology infrastructure is more appropriately defined as an umbrella term commonly used to define segmented, heterogeneous, disparate technology components.

Our need to solve tactical information technology infrastructure issues causes us to further propagate a lack of organizational strategic relevance. In order to begin to address this in todays’ mature information technology infrastructure organizations must begin to add strategic relevance to their information technology infrastructure, remove management segmentation and drive convergence.

To begin this process each element of the information technology infrastructure must be dissected and optimized to the fullest extent possible. Once element level optimization is complete we can begin to map the discrete information technology elements into a true converged infrastructure. Once the the convergence process is complete optimization must once again be performed on the infrastructure as a single entity.

At this point you we have forged the “Ultra-Structure”, a paradigm where segmentation and tactical behavior cease to exist, all behavior within the “Ultra-Structure” has strategic relevance and elicits positive business impact.

The ?Ultra-Structure? is best defined as a paradigm that shifts conventional technology thinking from reactive point solutions to a holistic strategic foundation.

Why is a paradigm shift so critical? For years organization have been implementing and maintaining tactical infrastructure solutions. The “Ultra-Structure” paradigm provides a model to optimize, architect, design, implement and maintain superior solutions by applying strategic relevance to tactical infrastructure.

The ?Ultra-Structure? cannot be compartmentalized or segmented, the intrinsic “Ultra-Structure” value is far greater than the sum of its discrete elements.

I am very interested in your thoughts.

-RJB

How many organizations are struggling with data classification and building an ILM (Information Lifecycle Management) strategy? In the storage industry today we often talk about the differences between ILM and HSM (Hierarchical Storage Management) but does taxonomy actually provide enough to realize true ILM? Rather than taxonomy we should be addressing ontology. Ontology as defined in the realm of computer science is a data model that represents a domain and is used to reason about the objects in that domain and the relations between them. Known categorization systems used today were designed to optimize linear seek time not to optimize or categorize the intellectual aspects of information. Classification and categorization techniques used today while presented as organizing information are actually categorizing the physical objects that contain ideas or information. The industry is attempting to leverage traditional categorization methods by using tags which create meta data to try to depict the ideas and information inside the containers, more intelligent categorization methods today are applying lexicons to attempt to automate the generation of meta data. Again, I find it odd that we as an industry obsessed with data classification and life cycle management do not address ontology and our approach to ontology on a daily basis.

Ontology would need to consider owners, users, participant, openness of the domain and the potential for the control set to be altered and signal loss. The storage industry has avoided true ontology because the undertaking is massive. Until an ontological method for classification and categorization is developed can we ever really achieve true ILM?

The need for a thesaurus of terms, words or tags is an absolute requirement to enable true ILM. A canonical example of this would be imagine someone searches the web (largest know corpus of data) for “Movie” and another user searches a repository for “Cinema” would the return be the same? Most likely if the search is of a full text index the answer would be no, the reliance on tags to categorize a document using multiple words of terms makes it difficult to enforce and deliver true plug-and-play categorization and ILM. Now we also have to consider the signal loss, imagine a search of the web for “… Politics” and “… Agenda” while they might appear to be synonymous they may or may not be.

This is a complex problem that is not easily addressed but I believe there is a definite long term requirement for a transition to ontological approach.

-RJB

So I am sitting on the plane on my way from east coast to the west coast listening to a speech by Dave DeWalt that he gave in April 2006 at the Software 2006 Conference in Santa Clara, California. Dave DeWalt is discussing decisions to embrace or disrupt the stack (software stack). He referenced a statistic that I found very interesting; 75% of the profit in the software marketplace comes from three companies and 50% of that number is generated by Microsoft, sounds crazy but I have no doubt that it is true. Some organization have embraced the Microsoft model and identified areas they can play or specific market segments where they can specialize. For instance Google has decided to leverage their lead over Microsoft’s MSN division to disrupt and hopefully capture the desktop space. Google is attacking the desktop market with applications like gmail, google spreadsheets, and the most recent application Writely (online word processor). There is also talk that Google will release a Linux distribution based on the Debian distro Ubuntu, the rumor is that this distro will be called Gubuntu.

I found Dave’s talk interesting because he referenced a couple of my favorite books “The World Is Flat” by Thomas Friedman and “The Only Sustainable Edge” by John Hagell III and John Seely Brown. Dave also hits on many of the topics that Clayton M. Christensen discusses in another one of my favorite books “The Innovator’s Dilemma”.

-RJB

For years customer have been facing problems with backup windows, Recovery Point Objectives (RPO) and Recovery Time Objectives (RTO). The falling cost cost of storage has fueled the use of disk to increase the speed of backups and provide a potential solution to backup window, RPO and RTO issues. Customer today are leveraging the disk based backup solutions to augment their existing tape solutions in an effort to decrease backup time and recovery time as well as prolong investments in aging tape technology. Disk based backup solutions have taken numerous forms, leveraging ATA or LC-FC (low cost fibre channel) is a popular low cost solution that can normally be implemented in conjunction with an enterprise storage consolidation or integrated into an existing storage strategy.

The use of ATA or LC-FC can be a very economical introduction into the world of B2D. Often larger organizations shy away from traditional backup to disk because of the associated process change required and the potential increase in operational complexity. Organizations looking to benefit from the speed of disk without the need for process change may consider a VTL (virtual tape library) strategy. Virtual Tape also offers operational simplicity, in many cased native IP based replication, compression and/or data de-duplication. VTL devices are purpose built and optimized for backup this makes VTL a compelling choice. The caveat with VTL devices is that the simplicity of an emulated tape device also offers the many of the limitations and licensing costs associated with physical tape.

Organizations should also consider SLA requirements that typically encompass backup windows, RPO and RTO. What will the backup data flow be once a B2D solution is implemented? Will the architected B2D solution meet all the requirements of the SLA? In most cases the current state may look like D2T (production disk to tape), D2T2T (production disk to onsite tape copy to offsite tape copy) or D2Clone/Snap2Tape (disk 2 array based clone/snap 2 tape). Once a B2D strategy is employed the flow may look like any one of the following D2D2T, D2VT2T, or D2Clone/Snap2D2T, etc… The point here is that there are more ways than ever to implement backup solutions today, the pros and cons of each solution should be considered relative to the desired and/or required SLA, RPO and RTO.

-RJB

The storage or should I say security market is really interesting right now. It appears that storage and security are converging as fast if not faster than IP and storage. The trend was initiated by Symantec’s acquisition of Veritas for 13 billion and now EMC’s acquisition of RSA Security for 2.1 billion. It’s not just the big boys making the crossing over security company SonicWall is dabbling in the storage space. SonicWall is breaking into the storage market with a solution focused on backup and recovery. The SonicWall appliance is targeted at the SMB space and provides features like CDP, file versioning, SQL support, exchange support and bare metal recovery at an extremely affordable price.

It remains to be seen what EMC will do with RSA Security but I can see key management and products like Reporting and Compliance Manager being leveraged very quickly. With all eyes on data security and compliance the acquisition of RSA puts EMC in the role of innovator in a sector that is very hot.

The the RSA technology should provide EMC a huge advantage to begin to architect end-to-end solutions where data security and chain of custody can be guaranteed. Combining key authentication with logging tools like Network Intelligence or SenSage for security event management could provide a level of data security that the data security market desperately needs.

Finally one has to wonder what this will mean for data security appliance makers who rely on EMC as a significant source of revenue. How long will it be before EMC leverages the RSA technology to embedded data encryption.

-RJB