It’s not often that I get to travel to the opposite side of the world for leisure, but when I do it’s a case of go big or go home, and since I just left home the only option is to go big! I’m currently in the UK with my wife for our friend’s wedding, but came in early so that I could also catch up with these industry legends: Julius Clayton, Kevin Jones and Simon Stevens.
I’ve worked with these gents now for the best part of 6 years; we’ve caught up face to face a couple of times before at various company events, but this was the first time that it was purely for personal reasons. Of course though we talked for about 9 hours on various PowerFlex related nonsense, and boy was it fantastic!
What brought us together though in the first place all those years ago? For me, I believe it was that kind moment when something just clicks for you. For us it was PowerFlex and how novel, how revolutionary, transformational, how capable, how disruptive, how performant, how reliable this product is and the difference that it was going to make in the block storage world.
Before that we’d seen the pain and suffering that other traditional storage systems created for their operators and end users – and we knew there had to be a better way; so when we each stumbled across ScaleIO (PowerFlex) it was love at first sight.
But like all love, there can be difficult and challenging times. Decisions that were made that whilst you can understand where it’s coming from; you still don’t necessarily agree with, but simultaneously do agree that change was necessary. It’s impossible to please everyone, so I do sympathise with those that have ever had to make difficult decisions.
One analogy that I’ve been working on is about Lego. Lego is fantastic if you enjoy building things. You can go off track and come up with your own designs, you can back track easily and fix your mistakes quite quickly when something is wrong. You can also evolve your design as you see fit – your small car that started with four wheels eventually became an 18 wheel hauler!
The problem of course with building things is that not everyone is a master builder. It takes a lot of time, it’s not always perfectly repeatable so errors creep in – and it can be very difficult to maintain custom designs over a long period of time.
And this is where automation comes into play. The challenge with automation however is that certain choices have to be made up front – standardisation is the key to success. But what if you need something that doesn’t fit into a pre-defined template? We’re all different and so are our IT requirements.
Automation is also hard to get right even when the conditions are next to perfect. The error handling has to be spot on, along with detailed messaging if something does go wrong. It’s often the case with automation that it takes you longer to troubleshoot it than it wound have taken you to deploy it manually!
However, once the automation is right this is where the real time saving comes in – Day 2 operations. Keeping it patched and updated is a huge task without automation and this is where PowerFlex Manager really shines.
Ultimately this is a case of you can’t have everything – either you can have full flexibility with manual deployments, but have to take on the responsibility of keeping it patched and updated, or you can have the automation but with less flexibility. It’s a tough one, but the good news is that the flexibility with automation is increasing every day.
On another more personal note, today is my last day at Dell after thirteen years. It’s been one heck of a journey for me, and I wouldn’t trade the experience for anything. The learning, the projects I’ve worked on and the friendships forged with like minded souls will last me a lifetime.
As for what’s next – I am yet to decide! I have a few ideas, although my wife is asking me to relax for a while. I like the idea of starting my own business, and I’ve also discovered that I need to be doing something that gives me real face time with people. Zoom simply does not cut it!
I’ll continue to maintain this site for now, I look forward to seeing updates from the guys, and I’ll probably add a few more thoughts from time to time as well.
As for today though, today is the first day of the rest of my life. Travel well my friends!
I’ve no doubt your fellow PowerFlex experts above treated you to plenty of deserved pints !
This is a great site and it has come to my rescue many a time.
Safe travels Matt.
Thanks Gearoid. We may have had one or two civilised pints. I lost count after that and it became a little more uncivilised 😂. Had some great curry too!
Wow, enjoy your trip Matt, I am still waiting for you to come back to work to clear my inquiries about how Powerflex manages to have low latency hahaha but turned out you are out now
Thanks Thang – maybe this one will answer your question: https://powerflex.me/2022/08/03/why-powerflex-for-databases/
Ultimately the simplicity of mesh mirroring across many devices and nodes allows for extremely low queuing – therefore achieving low-latency. Imagine a train without any doors or walls, and how fast it wound be to board passengers. That’s what a PowerFlex train would look like.
That’s just one of the factors that contribute to the low latency, along with in-memory metadata so that each SDC knows exactly which node to ask for or write data to.
Going back to the train analogy – each passenger has their ticket printed and in their hand – they know which carriage and seat number to jump straight into.
The opposite of all this, which is most storage systems in the world, would be a train with only one or two doors, and each passenger has to query the conductor to find their seat number!
super answer ! liked your train analogy. How is about latency at LAN switches, when other vendor said they used SAN switches which has very low latency by nature of SAN, many thanks
The switching layer is insignificant in the scheme of things. With PowerFlex being able to do ~200usec end to end latency (0.2 milliseconds) on NVMe media these days, the switching part of that latency is only ~15usec.
Matt, was great catching up with you in Adelaide, you’re a cracking operator and the most passionate PowerFlexer I’ve ever met. Congrats on the move, looking forward to seeing what’s next 👍
Thanks Josh, just got back from the big trip and back on home turf here in the Wimmera.
Hope to catch up with you and the guys again at some stage, will enlist Pollard to make it happen!