Last week we announced that Hitachi Data Systems, was integrated with two other companies, Hitachi Insight Group and Pentaho to form a new legal entity that is called Hitachi Vantara. Nothing was lost in this integration, in fact the benefits of this integration was greater than the sum of the parts. All the resources, the intellectual property, the experience and solutions capabilities of Hitachi Data Systems are now augmented by the IOT capabilities of Hitachi Insights and the analytics of Pentaho.
The response has been very positive as the industry is focusing on digital transformation and business outcomes. However, one of our competitors in the storage space published a blog speculating that this announcement indicated a move away from enterprise storage. This is nonsense, and would have been clear to them if they had read our announcement letter or any of the social media like the Register, which followed the announcement. In our announcement letter we stated:
“Hitachi Vantara will continue to develop the trusted data management and analytics technologies Hitachi is known for, including Hitachi’s popular data infrastructure, storage and compute solutions, and Pentaho software. It will also be driving the development of strategic software and services solutions, including Hitachi Smart Data Center software and services, Lumada, Hitachi’s IoT platform, now available as a standalone, commercial software offering, and Hitachi co-creation services”.
This storage competitor made the misleading claim that we didn’t release any new flash storage offerings and that we do not have NVMe support. This is obviously false based on our concurrent release of New Converged Infrastructure Systems which includes the UCP CI (built on Hitachi VSP flash systems), and the UCP HC, which includes next generation NVMe flash. Perhaps they missed this since they are only able to talk about storage and not about hyper converged solutions with NVMe acceleration, and end-to-end software which provides automated provisioning, simplified data management, orchestration, and improved operational efficiencies for a converged infrastructure including Storage, compute, and networking. While we have delivered NVMe support, this competitor’s NVMe is still months away.
Today a storage vendor that is tied to the hardware, will have a hard-time pivoting to software-defined offerings, moving up the stack to provide automation, analytics & higher-value solutions, and delivering value in cloud environments. Customers prefer dealing with vendors that can be outcome and business focused.
Hitachi Vantara is about solutions and business outcomes and not about boxes.
If you are one of those enthusiastic and adventurous entrepreneurs who are on the verge of launching your own online business, here’s an important question for you: have you secured your start-up enough so that it can battle the security threats of today? If you haven’t, now is the time to do so. In this […]… Read More
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Last year I wrote an article introducing the general concepts behind static site generators. This time around I’d like to dive into some specific (yet still basic) details about a popular static site generator called Hugo, comparing it to its most well-known “dynamic” ancestor, WordPress.
Before we get started, let me clarify that I won’t be getting into how to migrate from WordPress to Hugo. There is an export tool available, and numerous blog posts describing how others did it.
Instead, I’ll be focusing on the theme templates that each one uses, since that’s one of the biggest adjustments when diving into Hugo, whether you’ve migrated from WordPress or are starting from scratch.
The good news is that there is a lot of overlap between Hugo and WordPress in terms of how the templates work and the features they offer.
When I wrote about Hugo last year it lacked many of the features that make WordPress so popular. But it has evolved tremendously since then (while still remaining incredibly fast) and now offers “grown up” features like nested templates and related posts, with new features being added all the time.
The first thing to know about Hugo is that it is written in the Go programming language. Go is not as well-known as many other languages on the web, but it is gaining rapidly in popularity and Treehouse now offers a Go Language Overview course.
If the thought of learning a new programming language makes switching to a new content system a no-Go (pun intended ), don’t give up just yet! I don’t know how to program in Go and yet I’ve been able to write sophisticated Hugo templates for the Balsamiq documentation sites mostly just by knowing HTML and perusing the Hugo documentation.
Let me try to convince you by giving you the first few lessons in Hugo template creation.
In WordPress, when you want to display the content of a blog post or page, you write this line in a template
<!--?php the_content(); ?-->
In Hugo, it’s
Not too bad, right? You might even say it’s an improvement. (You’re going to have to get used to those double curly brackets and dots, but you get to give up those weird question marks, which always made me unsure of what I was doing.)
Let’s keep it going by mentioning that, like PHP, Hugo code can be used right alongside HTML, either next to it or inside it.
If you’ve customized a WordPress template before, you’ve probably written a mix of HTML and PHP like this before.
<a href="/"><?php bloginfo('name'); ?></a>
This code locates the name of the site and creates a link to the home page around it. WordPress has a function called bloginfo with a parameter of name to get it.
Hugo, on the other hand, uses a variable called .Site with a property called .Title. The same code in Hugo would be written like this.
<a href="/"></a>
Hey, that’s also pretty intuitive, no?
I hope you’ve calmed back down by now.
Let’s keep going.
The last basic example is showing a list of posts or pages. The general structure is the same in both systems: loop through the posts and add a list item for each one, using a link to the post and its title.
In WordPress…
<ul>
<?php while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>
<li><a href="<?php the_permalink(); ?>"><?php the_title(); ?></a></li>
<?php endwhile; ?>
</ul>
WordPress uses a PHP while loop, which is common in many programming languages. Hugo uses a simple function called range for this same purpose.
In Hugo…
<ul>
<li><a href=""></a></li>
</ul>
The list items themselves look very similar between the two languages, but, again, the Hugo one looks a little neater. And it requires less text overall, making it easier to read.
So now that we’ve established some of the basic syntactical differences between WordPress and Hugo, let’s look at the different kinds of templates.
One of the main reasons to use a website generator over, say, writing straight HTML, is the ability to re-use code across pages. It would be silly in this day and age to copy and paste the same HTML for the header and footer, for example, into each page that you create.
The PHP include() function alone is one of the main reasons why it became so popular as a web language early on and why WordPress uses PHP.
You can use the include() function in WordPress, although they now have their own functions that make it easier to retrieve specific commonly-used parts of the page. To include the global page footer, you can write
<?php get_footer(); ?>
Hugo does not make assumptions about the structure of your page the way that WordPress does and uses a function like the original PHP include() called partial.
It works like this
(Don’t forget the dot (“.”), called the context, at the end.)
Note that the name of the partial file must be located in the “partials” directory, which is one of the default folders inside the “layouts” directory, where your template files live.
A typical “layouts” folder in Hugo.
This is a good time to introduce one of the main differences between WordPress and Hugo in terms of templates. The locations of things in WordPress are mostly obscured from view, with pretty much everything residing in a database (as shown in this image). But static sites are just copies of files on your computer, allowing you to preview and manipulate the structure of your site.
It is a lot like mobile vs. desktop operating systems. On desktop operating systems you can look into the file structure (via Finder, Explorer, etc.), but mobile operating systems try to hide this hierarchy and simply associate files with applications, freeing you up from having to worry about the internal structure.
In our case, Hugo behaves like the desktop operating system and WordPress is more like a mobile OS. This is not necessarily a bad thing, as it gives you more clarity into the navigation and structure of your website. But it does hand you the burden of making sure that you put things in the right place.
Luckily, Hugo does a good job of keeping its names consistent. It’s handy that the function is called partial, which is a good reminder to put your partial files in the “partials” folder.
Continuing this thread on the philosophical differences between Hugo and WordPress, Hugo is less prescriptive about the organization of your site. While WordPress uses a rigid model of posts and pages, Hugo is crafted in terms of generic “content” and folders.
Posts and Pages in WordPress (top) vs. content folders in Hugo (bottom)
The primary assumption that Hugo makes about your content is that you have organized it deliberately. One effect of this is that the top-level folder structure allows you to define different behavior for the content inside each folder.
The Hugo documentation says “[w]hile Hugo supports content nested at any level, the top levels are special.” To reinforce this idea, the top-level folders have their own name in Hugo, called a content section, or section for short. The closest analogy, in WordPress parlance, is to think of a Hugo section like a WordPress category.
What this means for you is that Hugo makes it easy to create different templates for each folder of your content (“section”).
In terms of file structure, we’re jumping from the “partials” folder in your Hugo “layouts” directory to one of its siblings, the “section” folder. And, again, names are important.
To make a section template create a template file whose name is the same as the folder it applies to. So, if you have a top-level folder called “features”, you would create a section template called “features.html”. That’s it.
The nice thing about section templates is that you don’t have do anything to get them to work (unlike partials, which have to be explicitly referenced in a template). If a file exists with the same name as a content folder, Hugo will automatically use that file as the template for that section. If not, it will just use a default template.
To see how this looks in practice, take a look at the structure of the Balsamiq support site, which has content folders called “plugins”, “tutorials”, “sales”, and others.
In the section directory, there are template files for some of these, named after the corresponding content folder (e.g., “plugins.html”).
Let’s end with a feature that Hugo and WordPress are in strong agreement on. Hugo has a familiar useful feature called shortcodes, known in WordPress as…shortcodes.
A shortcode is a text snippet that’s a kind of shorthand for a longer block of code.
In WordPress you can write a shortcode by surrounding its name with square brackets and passing in parameters, like this
Hugo works nearly the same way, but uses a slightly different syntax. The same shortcode would be written in Hugo as
In Hugo, each shortcode is an HTML template file. And where do you put those files? You guessed it, in a folder called “shortcodes”.
Writing your own custom shortcodes can be tricky – you’ll probably be writing something like to grab the parameters – but it’s not like writing shortcodes in WordPress is a piece of cake either.
In practice, you’ll probably use (or maybe customize) an existing shortcode, just like you do in WordPress. Hugo comes with some handy shortcodes out of the box for YouTube, Instagram, Twitter, and others.
One way we use shortcodes for the Balsamiq documentation site is for alert and information messages, as shown here.
Info and Alert messages in the Balsamiq Docs.
This Hugo template also has some nice examples of these types of shortcodes in use.
In this post I’ve covered the highlights of the differences and similarities between WordPress and Hugo, which is hopefully enough to help you make the paradigm shift from one to the other.
But, of course, there’s a lot I didn’t cover. Hugo also supports tags (like WordPress) through something called “taxonomies” and default content templates with something called “archetypes”, but most of these features you don’t need to understand right away (or even at all).
One thing I’ve observed about the evolution of Hugo is that it is becoming less esoteric and more practical and functional in response to the features that people are asking for. I see this as a good thing, and probably one of the big reasons that Hugo is rapidly gaining in popularity.
I remember spending days trying to understand this explanation of taxonomies early on, for example. Whereas a newer feature like sections is a lot more straight-forward.
Lastly, here’s a list of excellent Hugo resources to help you on your journey. If you’ve made it this far you must be at least a little curious to learn more.
Thanks for reading. Happy site-building!
Leon Barnard is a writer and designer at Balsamiq. He writes for the Balsamiq blog and manages their Hugo-based documentation and support sites.
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Security researchers discovered approximately 18,000 variants of 2,500 different malware families on ICS computers in the first half of 2017. That’s just one of the findings from Kaspersky Lab’s Threat Landscape for Industrial Automation Systems in H1 2017 report. For its study, the Russian security firm analyzed data collected from members of the Kaspersky Security […]… Read More
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The evolution of the HDX display capabilities and quality is something, as a Citrix employee, I’m really proud of. There is almost no XenApp & XenDesktop release without further improvements relative to user experience, performance, stabilization, and utilization of computer …
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Users with higher security clearance or access to sensitive information are most at risk to highly targeted attacks against their computer’s firmware ANN ARBOR, MI–(Marketwired – Sep 29, 2017) – Duo Security, the leading Trusted Access provider and one of…
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It’s been a busy year for Citrix Service Providers! We’ve introduced ShareFile Cloud Storage, NetScaler SD-WAN, and Citrix Cloud. Get ready for more innovation with NetScaler Secure Web Gateway (SWG), coming soon to Citrix CSP! October is the perfect time …
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By David Fletcher Please contact us for more information on how to license our comics for your next presentation, event, newsletter or website blog post.
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Ransomware attackers demanded $19,000 from a California school district for a decryption key that would unlock its encrypted data. Over the weekend of 16 September 2017, an unknown group of actors gave a $19,000 ultimatum to the San Ysidro School District, a public school district located in San Diego County, California. The demand followed a […]… Read More
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By Gregory Pings
“Technology removes a number of low-value tasks, which allows me to make the most out of every moment at work.” – Sean Gallagher, President, Xerox France.
“Wasted time drives me crazy,” which is why Sean Gallagher loves his technology. “It makes me more efficient and gives me amazing access to richer, visual information. Technology allows me to extract higher levels of intelligence from data.”
Gallagher, originally from Ireland, has spent the last 22 years living and working in France for various companies. In that time, he has held responsibilities for multi-country operations. When he joined Xerox France in January 2017 to become its president, he fulfilled his desire to run an operation in a single country for the first time in his career, and spend more time on the ground with customers and partners.
His job description isn’t the only thing that changed.
“Our organizational culture is being redefined.” Gallagher believes this is where the impact of technology is most positive. “Technology improves innovation, the way we work together, make decisions, create and empower. It has a massive impact on our business functions.”
Link to more information
Xerox ConnectKey Technology transforms the experience of how employees work, giving them the freedom to solve problems, be more productive and take on new challenges.
Success in the workplace – now and in the future – is so highly dependent on communication & collaboration.
“We have so much data and intelligence to run our business. It’s all around us. But a big part of it comes from collaboration internally and externally. It must also be communicated efficiently or else the value is lost,” Gallagher explained.
These are the keys to the work environment, be it the office, home or in a taxi on the way to work. Technology knits everything together. The task at hand and your particular environment defines the most useful technology.
“The office offers high energy and buzz,” Gallagher said, “especially with sales teams where our people are in constant collaboration.” Not all team members are onsite, so video conferences are effective. “For me, simple audio connections are not enough. Listen, watch, talk; you must strike the right balance to get the best out of communication. Look for non-verbal signals. Body language lets you know if your message is getting across. Communication is a two-way process.”
Xerox exec: “Work must not be depersonalized. Real human interactions must be preserved.”
Technology sets the page free, as the saying goes at Xerox. Used well, technology makes us more efficient. It allows effective communication that enhances our work and allows us to get the most out of our day.
“My downtime is more effective,” Gallagher pointed out, “Technology removes a number of low-value tasks, which allows me to make the most out of every moment at work.”
He points to the ConnectKey-enabled VersaLink and AltaLink printers that Xerox launched in March; the apps on these printers reduce low-value tasks and help improve efficiency.
The Modern Workplace series is published each Friday on Xerox Connect. Subscribe to this blog so you won’t miss a thing, or retrieve your favorite Modern Workplace articles here.
Where are we headed in the workplaces of the future? “Virtual assistants, fueled by artificial intelligence, are better at data mining than we are. You’ll see more and more emerging to provide us with insights that provoke our thinking and analysis,” Gallagher noted. “Augmented reality will help us communicate and collaborate more effectively, and make our interactions richer.”
But he cautions that technology must not take over.
“AI virtual assistants, video and 3D holograms certainly cannot replace all face-to-face encounters,” he said. “Work must not be depersonalized. Real human interactions must be preserved, and we have to be vigilant to maintain the right balance.”
A recent analyst report makes the following claim
“Solid-state arrays have reached a level of maturity, reliability and cost-effectiveness that they now exceed hybrid disk arrays in all characteristics except raw capacity, providing I&O leaders with agility and service improvements.”
Most solid-state arrays are architected as midrange systems which lack enterprise capabilities, like virtualisation of external storage, remote replication, and active/active controllers. An Industry analyst chooses to define Solid State Arrays as “All Flash Arrays” (AFA) which means that they cannot attach hard disks either directly or through virtualization and must have a separate product number. They fail to recognize that a hybrid disk array like the enterprise Hitachi VSP G series can do everything and more that an “AFA” can do. The VSP G series can contain just flash modules if the customer decides to use it as an all flash array but it does not qualify as an AFA according to this definition. Customers who follow this definition often do not consider the VSP G series as an AFA. For this reason, we have created the VSP F Series which can only attach Hitachi Flash Modules (FMD). The F series cannot virtualize external storage arrays.
The logic behind the AFA definition has been questioned by other industry analysts like Howard Marks, but it is what it is.
As far as the analyst statement goes, our VSP F series AFA has the same level of maturity and reliability of our hybrid VSP G series since they have the same basic architecture. However, since the F series is restricted from virtualizing external storage, this restricts its ability to match the G series in cost effectiveness and raw capacity. Other AFA vendors cannot match either the VSP G or F series in enterprise scalability, availability, and functionality and many cannot match the raw performance. Both the G and F series offer the industries only 100% availability guarantee.
Why is virtualization of external storage arrays so important? In that same report the analyst says:
“By 2020, the percentage of data centers that will use only SSAs for primary data, instead of hybrid arrays, will increase from less than 1% in 2015 to 25%”. That means there will still be a lot of disk storage systems around that could gain the performance and operational benefits of flash storage if they were virtualized behind a front-end hybrid flash system like the VSP G series.
Most of our customers still choose the hybrid VSP G series over the F series due to the flexibility that the hybrid approach provides in implementing flash. An example today is the current supply constraints around SSD’s brought about by NAND technology transitions, factory yields, and competing memory demands by smart phones and PCs. Hybrid storage array customers can fill their storage demand needs with available disk storage as a tier behind their existing flash.
The future is certainly all flash, but during the transition, a hybrid storage system, can help by providing the benefits of flash through virtualization before the before the disk systems are fully displaced. In the future, when new technology replaces NAND flash, a hybrid storage system will again help in the transition as it does today.
The UK is teetering on the edge of a tech skills shortage that could explode at any moment. The scale of the problem is vast: at any one time, there is a shortfall of around 40,000 people, which is …