ESG Blogs

That was fast! HPE only announced it planned to acquire hyperconverged software vendor SimpliVity on January 17, and it closed exactly one month later, on February 17. Why the hurry? Because they need to!

You can't let a market get away from you, and hyperconverged is a fast growing market. When ESG surveyed IT managers responsible for cloud infrastructure decisions, we learned that hyperconverged systems are playing a huge role in IT's plans. When ESG surveyed IT managers responsible for cloud infrastructure, we found that 85% of them are using or plan to adopt hyperconverged solutions. 

As you probably know by now, on February 16, the State of New York’s Department of Financial Services (DFS) finalized its new cybersecurity regulations which take effect on March 1, 2017. 

As the father of two girls, I have deep appreciation for a fascination with bubbles. They are easy to make, they're shiny, and they float carelessly with the breeze. That said, a big bubble is much harder to create and more fragile than dozens of little ones. The loss is felt more acutely.

While the cybersecurity industry was knee-deep in vision, rhetoric, and endless cocktail parties at the RSA Conference, the State of New York introduced new cybersecurity regulations for the financial services industry. The DFS regulations (23 NYCRR 500) go into effect next week on March 1, 2017. Here’s a link to a pdf document describing the regulations. 

Anyone who has reviewed similar cybersecurity regulations will find requirements in 23 NYCRR 500, so while the regulations are somewhat broader than other similar stipulations, there are obvious common threads. In reviewing the document, however, section 500.10 caught my eye. Here is the text from this section:

Despite the fact that most things in the big wide world of infrastructure actually change relatively slowly in the practical air of data centers, we nonetheless love to talk about actual and impending changes in far more hyperbolic and dramatic ways. I guess cataclysmic statements are more exciting than pragmatic progress!?

Anyhow, while I am certainly a believer in the value of many, varied types of cloud deployments, I am certainly not a believer in the meteor-hits-earth type of prognostications about the end of on-premises infrastructure, neither by type nor location! Traditional hardware is not going away - at least not for the foreseeable future.

As the RSA Conference continues to grow, I saw two ends of the spectrum related to solving security problems. At one end is a software provider, AutoDesk, which is figuring out how to provide security while they adopt cloud computing, SaaS, open source, and CI/CD methods. At the other end were the challenges of the US Federal government in delivering cybersecurity in an always connected world.

As the RSA Conference continues to grow, along with interest in cybersecurity, many solutions presented at the show strive to rise above the fray of similar messages and voices. Of interest in the last few years have been the application of AI, machine learning, and big data analytics to the problem of improving security.

That is a fine thing, provided it is not treated as a magic bullet. If it gets overhyped, there will be a danger of backlash.

As you may have guessed from my blogs, I was really excited about this year’s RSA Security Conference. At the end of January, I wrote a blog about my expectations for endpoint security at RSA. I followed up with another ditty about network security banter at this year’s show and concluded the series with a blog about security analytics and operations talk at RSA. 

Yup, I was all set to head to San Francisco at the end of last week when fate and personal issues jumped in. Alas, I had to cancel my plans.    

Despite my geographic separation, I continue to monitor RSA from afar. Here are a few stories that jumped out at me as of now:

Today’s message is brought to you by the letter “Y” and the numbers “1” and “7.”

Most data protection conversations are evolving from “backup” to “recovery” – and to do that, you need to evolve from simply using backup mechanisms to a combination of backups, snapshots, and replicas. And some vendors are there (YAY)!

But then, many vendors, and providers, and partners, and IT teams get stuck at a crossroads – where their data protection strategy must further evolve down one of two paths, with very few vendors able to offer journeys down both long and winding roads: Data Management & Data Availability.

Here is a short video on Y and how your data protection technologies must evolve.

Over the last couple of days, I've enjoyed meeting with business and technology leaders around Apache Spark. Hosted in Boston this time, the Spark Summits in general have become great forums to learn about what's new, what's working, and what's coming up next. Here are my quick takes if you weren't able to attend (and missed the thunder snowstorm, WHAT?!?) Highlights included:

In today's video, I extend upon a topic I covered in my 2017 prediction video, the challenges that enterprises face when trying to adopt DevOps. While it's a seemingly easy topic, it's actually deceptively deep. DevOps is really the big buzzword in IT today, like cloud and virtualization before it. And just like those other two topics, DevOps as a concept needs to mature from the idea to reality. That's the challenges that companies face today and I go into detail about actions that are needed to meet those challenges.

As always, please leave a comment here about the video and this time, what you think the challenges for adopting DevOps in 2017 are.

I've been ranting recently about how if you knew then what you know now about all things infrastructure, you would never ever do things the way you're doing them. I don't care if it's about taking 8,000 copies of the same never-changing data in a backup operation, or replicating the same information from box to box to box across the globe to support some S.L.A. or business outcome that originated with a request from 1985. We spend way too much time doing things the way we know how to do, and not doing things the way they should be. For example's sake and because I'm lazy, I'll stick with storage. 

Watch the video for my thoughts on hybrid data management.

Like many of ESG’s clients, I have had the good fortune to observe and work with Citrix for over 10 years. Over these years, I have seen Citrix continue on its journey of innovation for cost-effective and secure solutions that drive workplace efficiency and value. Along the way, Citrix has amassed an impressive ecosystem of Alliance Partners that have globally extended the value to IT professionals.   

Today, Kaminario, all-flash storage vendor, announced general availability for the next generation, sixth actually, of its K2 all-flash storage systems. With generation six, or Gen 6, K2 systems received a boost to both speed and scale. I took the time to quickly list some of the key highlight below:

OK, we’re back… If you are just joining this series, you can check out the previous post and award winners here! If you are back for more, here we go...

One of the really cool parts about my job is that I get to see, meet, and hear from lots of experienced, focused channel leaders who are constantly trying to pull all the levers at their disposal: technology and product sets, program elements and options, resources and teams… in order to earn and receive more than their fair share of time and attention from IT partners of all types. And that’s not just any old IT partners, but the same ones who all the other b channel leaders are trying to gain time and attention from. It’s a tough job, but someone’s got to do it.

There's an assumption in this blog post that I should start with - it is simply that I am assuming a time horizon in which we haven't completely reinvented IT and in which there is still both an on-premises component (or use cases) and a public cloud component (or use cases).

So, assumption accepted, what is it that will go on the public cloud for the imaginable future; sure, we are flexing that list a little as the pros and cons of both on-premises and cloud ebb and flow somewhat - based sometimes on technological shifts and/or variations based upon experience.

But what "stuff" sits out on the cloud come-what-may? I take a swing at an answer in this video. I would love to know what you think....  

In today's video, John McKnight and I extend upon a topic I covered in my 2017 prediction video, the impact that cloud, especially public cloud, will have on systems management vendors. John and I discuss the pressure that cloud has put on these vendors, especially those traditional, infrastructure up companies that are reaching into public cloud. We discuss the technical challenges for both infrastructure and cloud-born companies, as they struggle to differentiate themselves in a crowded market. And finally, we discuss which vendors are rising to the challenge and what the future systems management landscape looks like.

As always, please leave a comment here on about the video and this time, what you think the challenges for systems management companies in 2017 are.

So far, I’ve written two blogs about my expectations for the upcoming RSA Security Conference next week. The first blog was about my outlook for endpoint security while the second focused on network security. 

I am also in the middle of a big research project on security analytics and operations right now and believe that many independent technologies will be integrated into a comprehensive architecture that ESG calls SOAPA (i.e., security operations and analytics platform architecture). Here’s another blog where I define the SOAPA architecture and all the consolidating piece parts.

Earlier this week, I posted a blog about my expectations for endpoint security at the upcoming RSA Conference.  Similarly, here’s what I anticipate hearing about network security:

We saw strong adoption of both converged and hyerconverged systems in 2016—and we expect that to continue into 2017. While converged systems have been out for a while and have strong market penetration, expect hyperconverged to come on strong this year as these systems continue to mature for tier-1 workload support. The strong performance of the Nutanix IPO certainly drove some attention on the hyperconverged side, as did the recent HPE buyout of SimpliVity. 

One of the best parts of my job is that I get to work with very smart people, providing me with the opportunity to learn something new or look at things from new angles, every single day! Recently, I had the pleasure of hosting the anchor leg in the 2017 cloud computing predictions video roundtable, in which I asked cloud and networking analyst Dan Conde and systems management analyst Edwin Yuen about their thoughts on cloud trends in 2017 as they apply to converged and hyperconverged systems.

What's coming down the pipe in 2017? The pipe itself. Expect even more gains around streaming data pipelines, not merely for analytics but for processing too. Market conditions are right and offerings are hitting the needs of more enterprise use cases. Watch the video below to learn more:

Recently my colleagues and I were embroiled in an intricate discussion with some of the Dell EMC/VMware team about the status, applicability, and positioning of the various SDS manifestations that behemoth now offers. And suddenly I had one of those “the penny dropped” moments…not of the “epiphany/eureka” type, but more of the “yeah, I knew that but all-too-often overlook it” type. And one more thing before I say what it was: it’s also somewhat ironic when you consider the tangled semantic machinations we have all gone through as an industry to actually define software-defined storage that we have – dropping penny time – overlooked the fact that it is an approach (or concept), and not a specific thing (or singular manifestation).