RAINing Appliances in the Clouds

Appliances always had a soft-corner in Data center and cloud strategy. My Brush with appliances started in early 2000. We were looking at soultions for traffic management and billing for small ISP. the solutions with software and hardware were quite complicated. We came across small company out of Israel called Allot Networks (www.allot.com). they did a good job in a simple way.

Later at NVIDIA, I was exposed Netapp for NAS storage which quickly pivoted into block storage with iscsi. they literally gave away the iscsi protocol license for free with the box for a long time.

On the network side, my Exposure was with F5 networks while managing nvidia.com. We were facing scalability issues during product launhces and driver release announcements. We tried newer players such as Array Networks and Netscaler while they were in Beta. We ended up assisting and supporting Netscaler with our feedback to evolve the product to have in-memory caching.

In VMworld 2013, I have seen a emergence and dominance of purpose built integrated Server + Storage Solutions as appliances. Companies such as Nutanix, Simplivity and V3 systems are hogging the limelight.

What is more encouraging is the they are meeting Enterprise deployment criteria in a very short time. I am seeing several large companies willing to bet on these appliance farms.

The Appliance clusters behave as Redundant array of Independent Nodes(RAIN). While I do like the direction, what is very discouraging is DE-emphasizing  of SAN and High Performance Networking  Stack. This  is worry-some trend as we may end up building in-compatible and often convoluted ways of operations between old stack and new stack.

In some ways the emergence of Software defined networking(a.k.a VMware NSX) may ease the situation a little, however the challenge remains the seamless orchestration of Traditional Network and storage layers with same level of ease as it happens in Appliance Stacks to enable easier migrations and bursting.

 Companies like ServiceMesh and Rightscale are working on this from completely different vantage points. the adoption curves involve severe change management penalties.

The Big Payers are doing thier bit add to list of cloud management product lines - HP(CSM),Cisco(Tidal/Cloupia),EMC(VCE-IONIX-vBlock),VMware(vCAC) for Hybrid/Omni cloud management.

Cloud managment tools/platforms are good but they tend to complicate the life of a IT manager. Skill building on tools takes time. It is important to test, validate and integrate solution in to enterprise environment in a phased manner to reduce the risk and avoid downtime.