Cloud Blob Storage Race-to-Zero: Azure Reserved Pricing Is Here

If you thought Azure Blob Storage was inexpensive before, how would you like a further 38% discount just to be sure?

In November 2019, Microsoft announced that they would be introducing Reserved Price Discounting for 6 new services, including Blob Storage in GPv2 Accounts:

https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/save-more-on-azure-usage-announcing-reservations-for-six-more-services/

The pricing is also now available in the Azure Pricing Calculator:

What does this mean?

You can now reserve capacity in advance, the same way you can reserve VM Instances. The new model allows you to reserve capacity for either 1 or 3 years, with a 38% discount on your current costs for 3 years.

This is great for users who have a predictable consumption need.. such as Backup users 🙂

What to look out for:

1, Ensure that your subscription type is eligible for the pricing. These types are currently covered:

“Enterprise Agreement (offer numbers: MS-AZR-0017P or MS-AZR-0148P): For an Enterprise subscription, the charges are deducted from the enrollment’s monetary commitment balance or charged as overage.

Individual subscription with pay-as-you-go rates (offer numbers: MS-AZR-0003P or MS-AZR-0023P): For an individual subscription with pay-as-you-go rates, the charges are billed to the credit card or invoice payment method on the subscription.”

2, The pricing is available in minimum increments of 100TB (i.e. Do not bother if you have a couple of TBs in Azure).

Full details are available here. Please review this in order to understand your particular circumstances:

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-gb/azure/storage/blobs/storage-blob-reserved-capacity

Agile: It’s never too late? Or is it? Competing with Old and New.

Disclaimer: I work at Rubrik. Views are my own, etc.

I spent some time this weekend reading trade websites and watching video-streamed events to catch up on the competitive landscape for Rubrik. This is not something to which I pay a huge amount of attention, but it’s always worth understanding the key differences between your company’s and your competitors approaches to the problem you are solving.

What I found was as surprising as it was comforting and certainly solidified my belief that Rubrik is 100% the market leader in the new world of Data Management. This was equally true of new market entrants as it was of old guard vendors.

How Rubrik Does it

We are predominantly lead by a laser-focused vision. We came to market to fix the data protection problem and leverage the resulting platform to deliver a world-class data management solution.  This has always been the plan, we stuck to it and are delivering on it.

Rubrik’s software engineering function has the Agile Software Development methodology baked into it’s DNA. At its core our engineering team is made up of experienced developers, many of which were at the heart of the distributed systems revolution at Google, Facebook and other new wave companies. This means we can introduce capabilities quickly and iterate the cycle at a high frequency. We have absolutely nailed this approach and have consistently delivered significant payloads of functionality since v1.0 of the product.

New features are introduced as a MVPs (Minimum Viable Products) and additional iterations to mature those features are delivered in rapid cycles. We have delivered 4 Major CDM (Cloud Data Management) releases year-on-year and are positioned to accelerate this. Our Polaris SaaS platform is a living organic entity and delivers capability in terms of hours-to-days-to-weeks.

This is pro-active innovation aligned with a rapid and consistent timeline.

How The Old Guard Do It

When referring to the old guard, I’m referring to vendors who’ve been around for more than a decade. These organisations have grown up in the era of the Waterfall Software Development Model. This model is much more linear and follows these stages: Gather Requirements -> Design -> Implementation -> Verification -> Maintenance. The cycle is documentation and process heavy. This is why most traditional vendors are only able to release major software versions in 18-24month cycles.

These vendors are stuck between a rock and a hard place. They have revenue streams for ageing products to maintain and historical code baggage (technical debt) they have to contend with which wasn’t developed for the new world of cloud. More importantly the mindset change to move to Agile is a mountain to climb in itself and many long-tenured developers struggle to adapt to the change. In short the commercial pressure to retain revenue from existing products, technical debt, people and process challenges leave them hamstrung and struggling to keep up. One such vendor announced a major version two years ago and to date have failed to deliver the release.

A by-product of this challenge is that many will use sticking-plaster market-ecture to claim they can do the same things as Rubrik. This usually comes in the format of PowerPoint, vapourware and a new front-end UI to hide the legacy platform.

How The New Entrants Try To Do It

Rubrik has experienced significant success in our laser focused approach to addressing data management challenges. It is only natural in a fair competitive market that other newer companies will either launch or pivot their approach in an attempt to experience similar success.  These companies also use Agile software development, may also have distributed systems backgrounds and are able to iterate in a similar manner.

However, these organisations face a different set of challenges. If they did not build their base platform with the same vision, goal and focus, it will essentially be equally as hamstrung by similar underlying challenges as the old guard experience. Common sense tells us that if you design a product to do one thing and then adapt it to do another, it is not purpose-built and won’t do the same job without significant trade-offs or difficulties.

A second and more important challenge is that they don’t have the same mature understanding of the vision and consequently will be late to release new features. They will always have a time lag behind the market leader, waiting for the market leader to deliver a feature and then starting the process of developing that same feature. I’m seeing some competitors announcing and demoing Beta versions of functionality that Rubrik formally released 1-2 years ago. This is not pro-active innovation, it’s re-active mimicking.

Having experienced (in previous roles) those situations where your company hypes up a new “game-changing” proposition, only to feel massively deflated when it’s announced and you’re aware that the market leader has been providing it for over a year, I can tell you that it is not an awesome experience for employees.

This approach forces them to commoditize their solution, position it as “good enough” and command a significantly lower price as the value is ultimately not being delivered. It’s simply not sustainable in the medium or long term. When the funding begins to diminish, these companies become easy acquisitions for industry giants.

Conclusion

I have previously worked in both traditional vendors (e.g. Veeam) and new entrant vendors such as SimpliVity who pivoted to challenge Nutanix in the HCI (Hyper-Converged Infrastructure) space. SimpliVity did not win that competition, were subsequently acquired by HPE and the solution now receives much less focus as part of HPEs large portfolio of products.

Whether new or old, with adapted or re-purposed solutions, competing with Rubrik on price is frequently the only option available. This creates a situation which is not optimal for customer or vendor. The customer doesn’t get the outcome they wanted and the vendor suffers in terms of available finance for ongoing operations as well as investing in the development of their solution. If a company is offering 80% of the functionality for 60% of the price, then you will only get 50% of the result planned. Furthermore, that company’s financials will most likely look like a cash haemorrhaging horror story.

Rubrik is without a doubt the market leader in the Cloud Data Management space. The Old Guard are re-badging their solutions as their “Rubrik-Killer” and the new entrants are pivoting to follow while burning through their funding.  It’s going to be an interesting couple of years. Ancient giant trees will fall and new saplings will be plucked by the behemoths. Exciting times in the industry, watch this space!

Whitepaper: Virtual Backup Strategies: Using Storage Snapshots for Backups

Introduction
Effective data protection is a mandatory element in the modern IT environment. Historically, backup strategies were confined to the last few chapters in an administrator’s manual and treated like an afterthought. Now they sit firmly at the forefront of every CIO’s mind. The ability to continue business operations after a system failure and the need to fulfil stringent compliance requirements have made backup a necessity—not only for business continuity, but also for
business survival. The question organizations need to ask about data protection is not whether to backup their data, but how to backup their data.

IT systems are prone to rapid evolution and present a constantly shifting landscape and the techniques used to protect those systems need to evolve as well. Perhaps one of the most significant changes in recent years has been the advent of virtualization. In the virtual world, legacy backup systems have become unfit for their purpose, causing backup windows to increase beyond a manageable scope. While this paradigm presents new challenges, new opportunities to improve efficiency, cut costs and reduce risks are also created.

This paper will examine the use of storage snapshots as backups for virtual environments. We will evaluate the relative benefits and limitations while also considering where they fit into a holistic backup strategy when compared to a virtual disk-to-disk backup solution such as Veeam® Backup & Replication™

Background
Pre-virtualization backup strategies were underpinned by operating system (OS) and application-level features. The typical implementation would involve installing a backup agent into an OS and the agent would be responsible for putting applications into a consistent state for backup; copying backup data across the network to a backup server and subsequently monitoring any ongoing changes.

While this worked well in the physical world, virtualization changed everything as operating systems began to share the same physical hardware. Instead of having one backup agent consuming resources from a physical host, there was an agent for each virtual machine (VM) on that host. This meant that ten agents (based on a 10:1 consolidation ratio) or even more could be contending for the host’s CPU, RAM and disk resources. This contention was not only with each other, but also with the applications they were installed to protect. In addition, volumes of data increased to a level where it was no longer feasible to use standard transports to move it across the production network to the backup server. This situation clearly could not continue as virtualization has become the standard practice of datacenters worldwide.

Virtualized Layers

Where virtualization presented new challenges, it also presented new opportunities. The physical world consisted solely of the application/OS layer. The virtual world, Continue reading