Storage

Analysis of storage technologies, especially in the context of database management. Related subjects include:

August 17, 2017

More notes on the transition to the cloud

Last year I posted observations about the transition to the cloud. Here are some further thoughts.

0. In case any doubt remained, the big questions about transitioning to the cloud are “When?” and “How?”. “Whether”, by way of contrast, is pretty much settled.

1. The answer to “When?” is generally “Over many years”. In particular, at most enterprises the cloud transition will span multiple CIO’s tenure in their positions.

Few enterprises will ever execute on simple, consistent, unchanging “cloud strategies”.

2. The SaaS (Software as a Service) vs. on-premises tradeoffs are being reargued, except that proponents now spell SaaS C-L-O-U-D. (Ali Ghodsi of Databricks made a particularly energetic version of that case in a recent meeting.)

3. In most countries (at least in the US and the rest of the West), the cloud vendors deemed to matter are Amazon, followed by Microsoft, followed by Google. And so, when it comes to the public cloud, Microsoft is much, much more enterprise-savvy than its key competitors.

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June 16, 2017

Generally available Kudu

I talked with Cloudera about Kudu in early May. Besides giving me a lot of information about Kudu, Cloudera also helped confirm some trends I’m seeing elsewhere, including:

Now let’s talk about Kudu itself. As I discussed at length in September 2015, Kudu is:

Kudu’s adoption and roll-out story starts: Read more

April 17, 2017

Interana

Interana has an interesting story, in technology and business model alike. For starters:

And to be clear — if we leave aside any questions of marketing-name sizzle, this really is business intelligence. The closest Interana comes to helping with predictive modeling is giving its ad-hoc users inspiration as to where they should focus their modeling attention.

Interana also has an interesting twist in its business model, which I hope can be used successfully by other enterprise software startups as well. Read more

October 3, 2016

Notes on the transition to the cloud

1. The cloud is super-hot. Duh. And so, like any hot buzzword, “cloud” means different things to different marketers. Four of the biggest things that have been called “cloud” are:

Further, there’s always the idea of hybrid cloud, in which a vendor peddles private cloud systems (usually appliances) running similar technology stacks to what they run in their proprietary public clouds. A number of vendors have backed away from such stories, but a few are still pushing it, including Oracle and Microsoft.

This is a good example of Monash’s Laws of Commercial Semantics.

2. Due to economies of scale, only a few companies should operate their own data centers, aka true on-prem(ises). The rest should use some combination of colo, SaaS, and public cloud.

This fact now seems to be widely understood.

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September 28, 2015

Cloudera Kudu deep dive

This is part of a three-post series on Kudu, a new data storage system from Cloudera.

Let’s talk in more detail about how Kudu stores data.

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September 28, 2015

Introduction to Cloudera Kudu

This is part of a three-post series on Kudu, a new data storage system from Cloudera.

Cloudera is introducing a new open source project, Kudu,* which from Cloudera’s standpoint is meant to eventually become the single best underpinning for analytics on the Hadoop stack. I’ve spent multiple hours discussing Kudu with Cloudera, mainly with Todd Lipcon. Any errors are of course entirely mine.

*Like the impala, the kudu is a kind of antelope. I knew that, because I enjoy word games. What I didn’t know — and which is germane to the naming choice — is that the kudu has stripes. 🙂

For starters:

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January 19, 2015

Where the innovation is

I hoped to write a reasonable overview of current- to medium-term future IT innovation. Yeah, right. 🙂 But if we abandon any hope that this post could be comprehensive, I can at least say:

1. Back in 2011, I ranted against the term Big Data, but expressed more fondness for the V words — Volume, Velocity, Variety and Variability. That said, when it comes to data management and movement, solutions to the V problems have generally been sketched out.

2. Even so, there’s much room for innovation around data movement and management. I’d start with:

3. As I suggested last year, data transformation is an important area for innovation.  Read more

August 31, 2014

Notes from a visit to Teradata

I spent a day with Teradata in Rancho Bernardo last week. Most of what we discussed is confidential, but I think the non-confidential parts and my general impressions add up to enough for a post.

First, let’s catch up with some personnel gossip. So far as I can tell:

The biggest change in my general impressions about Teradata is that they’re having smart thoughts about the cloud. At least, Oliver is. All details are confidential, and I wouldn’t necessarily expect them to become clear even in October (which once again is the month for Teradata’s user conference). My main concern about all that is whether Teradata’s engineering team can successfully execute on Oliver’s directives. I’m optimistic, but I don’t have a lot of detail to support my good feelings.

In some quick-and-dirty positioning and sales qualification notes, which crystallize what we already knew before:

Also: Read more

May 6, 2014

Notes and comments, May 6, 2014

After visiting California recently, I made a flurry of posts, several of which generated considerable discussion.

Here is a catch-all post to complete the set.  Read more

April 30, 2014

Hardware and storage notes

My California trip last week focused mainly on software — duh! — but I had some interesting hardware/storage/architecture discussions as well, especially in the areas of:

I also got updated as to typical Hadoop hardware.

If systems are designed at the whole-rack level or higher, then there can be much more flexibility and efficiency in terms of mixing and connecting CPU, RAM and storage. The Google/Facebook/Amazon cool kids are widely understood to be following this approach, so others are naturally considering it as well. My most interesting of several mentions of that point was when I got the chance to talk with Berkeley computer architecture guru Dave Patterson, who’s working on plans for 100-petabyte/terabit-networking kinds of systems, for usage after 2020 or so. (If you’re interested, you might want to contact him; I’m sure he’d love more commercial sponsorship.)

One of Dave’s design assumptions is that Moore’s Law really will end soon (or at least greatly slow down), if by Moore’s Law you mean that every 18 months or so one can get twice as many transistors onto a chip of the same area and cost than one could before. However, while he thinks that applies to CPU and RAM, Dave thinks flash is an exception. I gathered that he thinks the power/heat reasons for Moore’s Law to end will be much harder to defeat than the other ones; note that flash, because of what it’s used for, has vastly less power running through it than CPU or RAM do.

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