Category: Yearend wrap-up

It’s the end of the year, so time for our regular year end wrap up discussion with the GreyBeards. 2020 has been an interesting year to say the least. It started out just fine, then COVID19 showed up and threw a wrench in everyone’s plans and as the year closes, we were just starting to see some semblance of the new normal, when one of the largest security breaches in years shows up. Whew, almost glad that’s over and onto 2021.

As always the GreyBeards had a great discussion on these and other topics to highlight the year just past. The talk was wide ranging and hard to characterize but I did my best below. Listen to the podcast to learn more.

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COVID19s impact on the enterprise

It will probably take some time before we learn the true, long term impacts of COVID19 on IT but one major change has to be the massive Work From Home (WFH) transition that took place overnight.

While WFH can be more productive for some, the lack of face2face interaction can be challenging for others. The fact that many of the GreyBeards have been working from home for decades now, left us a bit oblivious to how jarring this transition can be for newcomers.

There’s definitely some psychological changes that need to occur to be productive at WFH. Organization skills become even more important. Structured interactions (read conference calls, zoom/webex and other forms of communication become much more important. And then there’s security.

Turns out VMware and others have been touting VDI solutions for the past decade or so to better support remote work and at the same time providing corporate levels of security for remote work. While occasionally this doesn’t work quite as well as expected, it’s certainly much much better than having end users access corporate data without any security around that data or worse yet, the “bring your own device”. All these VDI solutions had a field day when WFH happened.

Many workers found they could be more productive at WFH, due the less distractions, no commute time and more flexible hours. What happens when COVID19 is vanquished to all these current WFHers is anyone’s guess.

We thought there might be less need for large office campuses/buildings. But there’s something to be said for more collaboration and random interactions through face2face meetings that can only occur in an office setting with workers present at the same time. Some organizations will take to this new way of work while others will try to dial WFH back to non-existent. Where your organization fits on this spectrum and why, will be telling across a number of dimensions.

The rise of ARM

There’s been a slow but steady improvement in ARM processors over the last almost half century. Nowadays it’s starting to make a place for itself in the enterprise. ARH has always been the goto microprocessor for low power solutions (like smartphones) but nowadays they are being deployed in the cloud and even the enterprise. These can be used as server processors but even outside servers, ARM cores are showing up in hardware accelerators as the brains behind SmartNICs, DPUs, SPUs, etc.

Keith made mention AWS 2nd generation Graviton 64-bit ARM processor EC2 instances. And yes there’s significant cost ( & power) savings that can be had using AWS Graviton ARM instances. So the cloud is starting to adopt them. Somewhere over the past couple of years I heard that VMware was porting ESX to work on ARM cores.

But apparently, it’s not just as simple as dropping an ARM multi-core processor into a server and recompiling your code and away you go. Applications need a certain amount of optimization to run effectively on ARM processors. And the speed up between non-optimized and optimized versions of an application running on ARM cores is significant.

As for SmartNICs and DPUs, these are data networking hardware accelerators that provide real time processing capabilities needed to keep up with higher speed networking, 100GbE and beyond. These DPUs perform deep packet inspection, data compression, encryption and other services all at wire speeds.. Yes you could devote 1 or more X86 cores to do this, but it’s much cheaper (and more effective) to do this outside the CPU core. Moreover, performing this activity at the network entry point to the server means that much of this data doesn’t have to be transferred back and forth through server memory. So not only does it save CPU core cycles but also memory size and memory & PCIe bus bandwidth. We published a recent podcast with Kevin Deierling, NVIDIA Networking discussing DPUs if you want to learn more.

Pat made mention at (virtual) VMworld their plans to port ESX to the DPU. Keith followed up on this and asked some other exec’s at VMware about this and they said VMware will more likely support DPUs as just another hardware accelerator in their cluster. In either case, CPU cycles should be freed up and this should help VMware use X86 cores more efficiently. And perhaps this will help them engage in more CPU constrained environments such as Telcom.

Then there’s computational storage. We have been watching this technology for a couple of years now and it’s seeing some success in being deployed to public cloud environments. They seem to be being used to provide outboard data compression. It’s unclear whether these systems depend on ARM processing or not but my bet is that they do. To learn more about computational storage check out these podcasts, FMS2020 wrap up with Jim Handy and our talk with Scott Shadley on NGD’s computational storage.

System security

At yearend, we are learning of a massive security breach throughout US government IT facilities. All based on what is believed to be a Russian hack to a software package that is embedded in a popular networking tool software solution, SolarWinds. They are calling this a software supply chain hack. Although we are mainly hearing about government agencies being hacked, SolarWinds is also pervasive in the enterprise as well.

There have been many hardware supply chain hacks in the past, where a board supplier used chips or logic that weren’t properly vetted. Over time, hardware suppliers have started to scrutinize their supply chains better and have reduced this risk.

And the US government have been lobbying for the industry to use a security chip with a backdoor or to supply back doors to smartphone encryption capabilities. Luckily, so far, none of these have been implemented by industry.

What Russia has shown us is that this particular hack is not limited to the hardware sphere. Software supply chain risk can’t be ignored anymore.

This means that any software application supplier will need to secure their supply chain or bring it all in house. Which may mean that costs for these packages will go up. It’s possible that using a pure open source supply chain may reduce this risk as well. At least that’s the promise of open source.

We said 2020 was an interesting year and it’s going out with a bang.

Matt Leib (@MBLeib), one of our co-hosts, has been blogging in the storage space for over 10 years, with work experience both on the engineering and presales/product marketing.. His blog is at Virtually Tied to My Desktop and he’s on LinkedIN.

Keith Townsend (@CTOAdvisor) is a IT thought leader who has written articles for many industry publications, interviewed many industry heavyweights, worked with Silicon Valley startups, and engineered cloud infrastructure for large government organizations. Keith is the co-founder of The CTO Advisor, blogs at Virtualized Geek, and can be found on LinkedIN.