VMware announced their plan to integrate container management into vSphere with Project Pacific at VMworld US 2019. Chris Evans got to hear more details about the thought behind the project during VMware’s Tech Field Day Extra presentations at the event. Be sure to check out his blog post with more thoughts on this ambitious effort.
Cohesity Looks to Exploit Secondary Data Value With MarketPlace
Since emerging as a secondary storage startup, Cohesity has continued to innovate in how to deliver the full value of data to their customers. In this post, Chris Evans looks at the latest implementation of that approach with Cohesity MarketPlace. This firmly moves the company into the data management sphere, with the ability to run AI/ML, analytics or other data-intensive applications on content stored in the Cohesity DataPlatform.
The HCI Definition Obsession
In this post, Chris Evans considers the latest ability of NetApp’s Cloud Volumes services to run on-premises with NetApp HCI. This struck him as storage coming full circle, with a cloud-native approach to storage coming back within the data center. For Chris, this sparked the thought that maybe people have misunderstood NetApp’s HCI strategy from the start. Instead of strictly adhering to a traditional definition of HCI, NetApp built a hybrid cloud solution that provides a consistent experience for customers. In the end, Chris thinks that’s more valuable.
Cloud-Native Data Protection
In this post, Chris Evans looks at cloud-native data protection. He breaks down why it makes sense for an organization, what some of the potential challenges are, and takes time to define what a cloud native solution should actually look like. He also looks the companies offering solutions in the space, including what Druva showed at Cloud Field Day last year, and solutions presented at Storage Field Day by NetApp.
Datrium Delivers Data Mobility With Automatrix
In this piece, Chris Evans looks at how Datrium is taking the data mobility problem with their Automatrix solution, which they talked about during their recent Cloud Field Day presentation. If Automatrix can deliver the same data movement flexibility for containers that are being achieved for virtual machines, he sees it being an all-encompassing solution for data mobility.
Thoughts on Transitioning to Dell EMC Midrange.NEXT
In this post, Chris Evans looks at the history of Dell EMC’s mid-range storage offerings, and how it might position the company’s offering going forward. This includes a look at XtremIO and Unity, which Chris got to see at Storage Field Day a few years ago. Ultimately, whether updating an existing line or building from the ground up, there isn’t an obvious solution for Dell EMC.
The Hidden Gem That Is StorPool
Chris Evans knows his storage. After seeing StorPool present at Storage Field Day, he considers them a hidden gem. They offer a high-performance scale-out block storage solution running on commodity hardware and Linux. Using their self-developed on disk-formats, inter-node protocols and cluster management, StorPool was able to offer the same performance as Microsoft’s HCI specification, without the need for a costly NVDIMM cache or RDMA. Chris thinks they have a very interesting solution for the right customer.
Rubrik, Cohesity and the Battle for NoSQL Backup
As always, Chris Evans has a keen insight into the backup market. He recently updated a post about Rubrik’s acquisition of Datos IO to add in some additional perspective on the NoSQL backup market. With Cohesity acquiring Imanis Data, Chris sees this as both companies trying to bridge the gap between traditional backup and data management, something always easier said than done.
You’re Wrong About Data Protection Policy
This episode of the On-Premise IT Roundtable was recorded at Tech Field Day Extra at Dell Technologies and looks at data protection policies. The group discusses why you’re probably doing it wrong. Essentially business and compliance needs are not top of mind when these policies are established. They further discuss how vendor defaults and application owners add to the confusion.
Can the WekaIO Matrix File System Be Faster Than DAS?
Direct Attached Storage (DAS), offers a lot of advantages in terms of speed and latency, but comes with a suite of problems. If nothing else, it forces applications to deal with data integrity and resiliency issues instead of having it as part of SAN. Chris Evans looks at how WekaIO addresses the shortcomings of DAS while keeping the high-performance and low latency. At Storage Field Day last month, they showed how their scale-out parallel file system can provide exceptional performance that’s only limited by the bandwidth of the network card. By rewritting at the file system layer and lower, WekaIO is able to offer distributed storage built to take full advantage of modern storage media.
#91 – Storage Field Day 18 in Review
In this episode of the Storage Unpacked podcast, Chris Evans and Martin Glassborow discuss what happened at Storage Field Day last month. The companies pretty cleanly divided between scale-out primary storage and data protection solutions. They touch on all the presenters, and where listeners can learn more about the event. Be sure to give it a listen as a preview before watching all of the event presentation video on our site.
VAST Data Launches With New Scale-Out Storage Platform
As one of the delegates at Storage Field Day, Chris Evans got to see VAST Data come out of stealth at the event. The company offers a new storage platform built on a disaggregated shared-everything architecture. Using a combination of QLC NAND flash and storage-class memory in an enclosure, linked across an NVMe fabric, any storage controller can talk to any NVMe device on the fabric. The result is a scalable architecture with no inherent pinch points, that could scale to thousands of storage nodes and tens of thousands of controllers.
Exploiting Secondary Data With NDAS From NetApp
Chris Evans got to hear about NetApp Data Availability Services at Storage Field Day last month. While the service is being pitched as a tool of IT generalists, Chris sees longer term value for it as a secondary option for data search and analytics. If this is a broader data management play, the company will need to expand beyond structured data, but Chris was impressed by what he saw.
Podcast #3 – Chris & Matt Review the SFD18 Presenters
In this podcast episode, Chris Evan and Matt Leib did an off the cuff rundown of the Storage Field Day presenters. The event was jam packed with interesting IT companies, and the two do a great job of running through what stood out from Cohesity, Datera, IBM, NetApp, StorPool, VAST Data WekaIO and Western Digital.
MAX Data: Optimising Application Performance With SCM
Chris Evans digs into NetApp’s MAX Data, a tiered storage solution that comes from the company’s acquisition of Plexistor back in 2017. Chris sees this as a must watch technology for 2019, even if he still needs to see some solid performance data before making a final judgement. To learn more about how MAX Data can “really exploit the potential of SCM and technologies like Intel Optane”, be sure to watch their presentation from Tech Field Day at NetApp Insight.
NetApp buys into Kubernetes Orchestration with StackPointCloud
Chris Evans breaks down the reasons behind NetApp’s recent acquisition of StackPointCloud. The company gained a management Kubernetes provider that works across clouds. Now they are using it to run their own NetApp Kubernetes service. This is another vital step for the company from transforming from selling storage hardware and software into a storage service provider.
Elastifile Cloud File Service Now Available on Google Cloud
Chris Evans looks at the significance of Elastifile now offering a managed scale-out file service for Google Cloud, calling it nothing less than a coup for the company. He goes into the background on Elastifile’s Cloud File Service, which he first saw at Storage Field Day in 2017. By being a native first-party service with GCP, Elastifile gets the benefits of using native APIs, have billing done through Google, and have Google manage their scaling. Having native integration on GCP makes Elastifile “a winner” for Chris.
Western Digital Redefines DRAM Caching
Chris Evans digis into Western Digital’s Ultrastar DC ME200. This is a solution to extend server DRAM using caching into byte-addressable NAND. Chris does a great job of giving this a technical overview, and considering if this will find a welcoming market, or simply cover up Western Digital’s lack of a true storage-class memory solution. He also highlights similar efforts to use NAND as a memory cache, specifically citing Diablo Technologies’ Memory1 solution, which he saw back in 2016 at a Tech Field Day event.
HDD Capacity Threshold Reaches 15TB
Chris Evans highlights the new king of HDD capacity, the 15TB Ultrastar DC HC620 from Western Digital. While only representing a 7% increase in capacity from 14TB drives, the real innovation here is these drives use host-managed Shingled Magnetic Recording, as opposed to being managed directly on the drives. This has big implications for hyperscalers, who can see greatly improved performance. Dropbox is one of the initial customers to use the drives, and Chris got a deep dive into their “Magic Pocket” architecture at Storage Field Day earlier this year.
Scality Zenko Product Brief
In this paper, Chris Evans outlines Scality’s Zenko platform. This acts as a storage controller across object stores, whether on-prem or in the cloud. This draws on much of what Chris saw from Scality at Storage Field Day last year.
