Hello and welcome to the February 2017 issue of the Server StorageIO update newsletter.

With world backup (and recovery) day coming up on March 31, it makes sense to plan, review, assess, remediate, test and prepare in advance, to avoid or prevent a disaster later. Some of the themes in this months newsletter thus have a data protection angle which includes availability, resiliency, security, and backup/restore along with associated topics. Keep in mind that there are many aspects to data protection, along with various tools, technologies, techniques along with tradecraft skills (experience).

Speaking of tradecraft, the tips section has been expanded with more content to help refresh, or expand your fundamental data infrastructure skills and experiences. Watch for more about trade craft in future newsletters as well as elsewhere.

Speaking of data protection, if you had not heard or forgot, some recent events included the Australian Tax Office (ATO) whose resiliency solution appears to not have been configured for, well, availability, resiliency along with durability. You can read more about the ATO, lessons learned as well as fall out doing a Google search such as "australian tax office disaster". Another recent disaster or disruption was Gitlab (not to be confused with Github) that lost around 300GB of data. Google something like "gitlab disaster" to see more. In the case of Gitlab, it seems that a DevOp admin accidentally did something like a rm -rf (e.g. recursive and force) that if you know what that means, you know it might not be good.

As is the case with many disasters or near disasters and disruptions, they are usually the result of a chain of events, thus the mantra or isolate, contain faults to prevent snowballing into something worse. What's concerning about Gitlab is that there are decades of lessons to be learned, known and preventable.

Hopefully Gitlabs experiences will prompt others in or moving to so-called platform 3 or new DevOps environment to use things in new ways, as well as prevent old problems using known tradecraft skills, lessons, experiences. Also keep in mind that while technology can and will fail, hardware and software including clouds are defined by people, and when people are involved, human error is also present.

In This Issue

Enjoy this edition of the Server StorageIO update newsletter.

Cheers GS

Data Infrastructure and IT Industry Activity Trends

Some recent Industry Activities, Trends Announcements

Cloud and object storage vendor Cloudian announced a new appliance (e.g. tin-wrapped software) that they claim give high density low (cloud service like) pricing.

Check out iosafe who has a line of fire (and water) proof NAS and Windows Servers as part of availability data protection that can compliment clouds. For those of you who are also Synology fans (or users) take a look at what iosafe is doing for consumer, SOHO, ROBO, workgroup, SMB among other environments.

Speaking of data protection, how are you going about wiping or digital bleaching your storage including nand flash SSDs? Particularly are you doing deep cleaning including those hard to reach persistent non-volatile memory (NVM) cell locations in SSDs? Check out what Blancco is doing for deep cleaning to wipe or digital bleach your storage including SSDs. Another aspect of data protection includes after your physical assets have been wiped clean (e.g. digital bleach), how will you safely dispose of the items? That's where various vendors such as OceanTech among others come into play.

Server StorageIOblog Posts

Recent and popular Server StorageIOblog posts include:

• Six (or more) data center and software defined management dashboards
• Did you want a side of SLBS (server less BS) with your software or ...
• Some popular viewed storageioblog posts during 2016
• Congratulations and welcome to all new and returning fellow vExpert...
• What Does Converged (CI) and Hyperconverged (HCI) Mean to Storage I/O?
• If the Answer is NVMe, then what were and are the questions?
• January 2017 Server StorageIO Update Newsletter

View other recent as well as past StorageIOblog posts here

Server StorageIO Commentary in the news

Recent Server StorageIO industry trends perspectives commentary in the news.

Via SearchDataCenter: New options to evolve your data backup and recovery plan
Via SmallBusinessComputing: Easy Storage for the Little Guy: Has the Time Come?
Via InfoStor: 10 More Top Data Storage Applications
Via Infostor: 10 Top Data Storage Applications

View more Server, Storage and I/O trends and perspectives comments here

Various Tips, Tools, Technology and Tradecraft Topics

Recent Data Infrastructure Tradecraft Articles, Tips, Tools, Tricks and related topics.

Via IDG/NetworkWorld:  Whats a data infrastructure?
Via Computerweekly:  NVMe: What to use, PCIe card vs U.2 and M.2
Via InfoStor:  Cloud Storage Concerns, Considerations and Trends
Via InfoStor:  SSD Trends, Tips and Topics

Check out Neil Anderson(@flackboxtv) flackbox.com site to view various video and tutorials about NetApp, Cisco along with VMware among others. Sharpen your data infrastructure server storage I/O tradecraft skills with the various labs and simulators that Neil has covered.

Speaking of tradecraft skills and experience development, check out VMware Staff Architect William Lam (@lamw) virtuallyghetto.com site for a news software defined data center (SDDC) lab. This new lab focuses on automated deployment for vSphere 6.0u2 along with vSphere 6.5. In other related news, VMware has made generally available (GA) vSphere 6.0 Update 3 including enhancements to vSAN and vCenter. View more details here at Duncan Epping (@DuncanYB) of VMware Yellow Bricks site.

If you are interested in Microsoft Azure, check out this piece on SQL Server failover clustering, along with other Windows Server, Hyper-V, Nano, Powershell and related topics here. Want to build a software defined data center (SDDC) or software-defined data infrastructure (SDDI) based on Microsoft Windows Server, Hyper-V and related technologies, check out this Github lab as well as this one for S2D among others.

View more tips and articles here

Events and Activities

Recent and upcoming event activities.

April 3-7, 2017 - Seminars - Dutch workshop seminar series - Nijkerk Netherlands

March 15, 2017 - Webinar - SNIA/BrightTalk - HyperConverged and Storage - 10AM PT

January 26 2017 - Seminar - Presenting at Wipro SDx Summit London UK

January 11, 2017 Webinar - Redmond Magazine
Dell Software - Presenting - Tailor Your Backup Data Repositories to Fit Your Needs

See more webinars and activities on the Server StorageIO Events page here.

Server StorageIO Industry Resources and Links

Useful links and pages:
Microsoft TechNet - Various Microsoft related from Azure to Docker to Windows
storageio.com/links - Various industry links (over 1,000 with more to be added soon)
objectstoragecenter.com - Cloud and object storage topics, tips and news items
OpenStack.org - Various OpenStack related items
storageio.com/protect - Various data protection items and topics
thenvmeplace.com - Focus on NVMe trends and technologies
thessdplace.com - NVM and Solid State Disk topics, tips and techniques
storageio.com/performance - Various server, storage and I/O benchmark and tools
VMware Technical Network - Various VMware related items