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The Register – 2015: The year storage was rocked to its foundations

Storage year in review, part 1 The storage market in 2015 went through strategic foundation-shaking turmoil as the external shared disk array storage playbook was torn to shreds.

It was a bewildering year, with rampaging and revolutionary activity at all levels of the industry. It’s best looked at from the ground up, starting with the technology vision, moving on to raw media, and then systems (arrays), applications such as Big Data, and finally suppliers.

We look at technology visions and galloping media development here. Part two of this review of storage events in 2015 will cover systems, applications and suppliers.

Technology visions
There were six technology visions that exercised the industry’s mental sinews in 2015.

First, the all-flash data centre idea has definitely taken off as a vision that could be achieved. Pioneered by troubled Violin Memory it has been expanded on by Kaminario and HDS, and is related to the flash and trash concept.

Primary data is stored in flash with the rest being held in cheap and deep storage. When that cheap and deep is in the cloud you have an all-flash, on-premises data centre. When some/all of it is held in less-expensive flash, think 3D QLC (4 bits/cell or quad level cell), with the rest in the cloud, then you have an all-flash data centre too.

More of The Register article by Chris Mellor

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23
Dec 15

MentalFloss – The McGurk Effect

The McGurk effect is mind-blowing. It involves showing a person’s lips making the shape of one sound—like “bah”—while the audio is actually the person saying “fah.” What’s interesting is that your brain changes what you “hear” based on what you see. It’s “bah” all the way through, but when we see “bah” our minds transform “bah” into “fah.”

The effect is named for researcher Harry McGurk, who published a 1976 paper with John MacDonald entitled “Hearing lips and seeing voices.” McGurk and MacDonald described how speech perception isn’t just about sound—it’s also affected by vision, and the integration of the two.

More of the MentalFloss post from Chris Higgins

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22
Dec 15

Business Insider – How to train your brain to make better decisions

Overcoming obstacles is synonymous with entrepreneurship. The ability to engage with difficulties and stress in an empowering way is described as the biggest factor for success in life — more significant than your IQ, social networks, physical health, or socio-economic background.

When you encounter stressful situations, there are two basic ways your brain will respond: fight or flight. Whether you fight or flee can be boiled down to how you’ve been conditioned from past experiences. This negative pattern of responses is known as “learned helplessness.” If you’ve given a terrible presentation at a business meeting, you’ll have a stress-induced flight response in similar future scenarios.

If left unchecked, this pattern of “learned” avoidance behaviors will lead to passive and poor decisions. You cannot dominate in entrepreneurship and leadership if you have a pattern of unhealthy risk-averse decisions — always fleeing from challenges.

More of the Business Insider article from Thai Nguyen

CIO Strategy / Cloud Computing / IT Security / IT Strategy — Comments Off
21
Dec 15

JaxEnter – Finance IT: The future of microservices, DevOps and the cloud in banking systems

JAXenter: What sort of changes are you witnessing in finance IT right now – and do you see buzzwords like cloud, microservices and DevOps playing a large role in this area in future?

Peter Lawrey: The buzz in fintech is still around performance and efficiency. In particular, IT developers are interested in cool new technologies but are looking to find way to justify their use to their managers. Many would like to migrate from Java 6 or 7 to Java 8 and see this as a big enough challenge.

While I don’t see financial institutions using external clouds like AWS as much as other industries, I believe they should be making more use of private clouds. Deploying services to new systems and even downsizing legacy systems is staggeringly harder than it should be. Clouds would be really helpful. A Bank can run their own cloud and still control the machines in use.

More of the JaxEnter post from Coman Hamilton

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15
Dec 15

CIOInsight – Why CIOs Are Losing Control of Technology

CIOs give themselves and their employees high marks for delivering upon needed business outcomes, but they also admit that they’re losing control over significant tech purchase decisions to the business side, according to a recent survey from Logicalis US. More than ever, finding reveal, line-of-business (LOB) managers circumvent CIOs and tech employees in acquiring tech apps and solutions, thus cultivating a shadow IT culture. This creates issues with respect to both tech governance and security assurance, and CIOs now feel pressured to transform their roles from that of technologist to what’s emerging as “internal service provider” to counter shadow IT.

More of the CIOInsight slideshow from Dennis McCafferty

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14
Dec 15

ZDNet – Here’s how Intel plans to thread the cloud vs. enterprise data center needle

Plenty of interesting graphics in this article about the changes in cloud services.

For Intel, being an arms dealer for both the cloud and enterprise data center has its privileges.

At its annual investor meeting, Intel outlined its outlook and walked through how it’s going to grow in the years ahead. For Intel to hit its targets, it’ll need its data center unit to deliver enough growth to offset sketchy prospects for PCS.

Luckily for Intel, its processors are used in enterprise data centers as well as public cloud providers and other key as-a-service players. Either way, Intel wins. Toss in how networking is being virtualized via commodity servers and Intel may gain there too.

More of the ZDNet post from Larry Dignan

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11
Dec 15

Data Center Knowledge – Forget Hardware, Forget Software, Forget the Infrastructure

Enterprise IT has to forget about hardware, forget about the infrastructure, forget about software, and think more about getting their job done, which is delivering services or applications.

That’s according to David Cappuccio, a VP at Gartner who oversees research in enterprise data center strategies and trends. In the opening keynote at Gartner’s annual data center management summit here Monday, Cappuccio together with colleague Thomas Bittman outlined Gartner’s vision for the new role the IT organization has to play in the enterprise.

That new role has less to do with managing disparate bits of infrastructure and more to do with selecting the best infrastructure strategy to provide a specific service. The toolbox they can select from includes on-premise or colocation data centers and cloud – private, public, or hybrid, on-prem or outsourced.

More of the Data Center Knowledge article from Yevgeny Sverdlik

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10
Dec 15

IT Business Edge – IT’s Role in an Automated, Software-Driven Enterprise

“Forget about hardware, forget about software, forget about infrastructure in general and start thinking about achieving key tasks that help your business grow.”

It’s been said that in the near future the enterprise won’t need to worry about hardware – data productivity will be driven by software-defined architectures sitting atop dumb, commodity boxes.

It’s also been said that before too long the enterprise won’t have to worry about architectures or middleware either – just push everything into the cloud and let someone else deal with service provisioning.

And now we have knowledge workers accessing enterprise resources through their own preferred client devices, easing up on the requirement to supply everyone with a PC.

So if these trends continue, what exactly will the enterprise be responsible for when all is said and done?

More of the IT Business Edge post from Arthur Cole

CIO Strategy / Cloud Computing — Comments Off
09
Dec 15

Computing.co.uk – Amazon Web Services and its mammoth-sized inferiority complex

Are scale and price the only concerns of your business?

We’re great! Not just great, really really great! Honestly, let me tell you again how truly great we are!’

If, like me, you were at the Amazon Web Services Enterprise Summit recently, these words might clang a horribly dissonent bell for you.

It’s inevitable that these sorts of events will feature some back-slapping and self-aggrandisment, but this took the biscuit, cake, and most of the rest of the bakery too.

You expect some shiny toothed VP to stand up and go on at great length about why they feel that their products and services are at the top of the tree, and then exhort everyone present to hand over oodles of cash at the earliest opportunity. You expect it because it’s just what tends to happen at these things, but is it at all productive?

I don’t believe these keynote speeches are useful for anyone. Why? Because ‘company says that its products are great’ doesn’t make for particularly interesting listening, and it’s certainly not something many journalists will want to cover.

More of the computing.co.uk post by Stuart Sumner

Doug Theis Leave your comfort zone.