Chris Evans takes a look at what “enterprise-class” cloud computing would look like, which he heard about extensively from Oracle at Cloud Field Day earlier this year. Oracle’s Cloud Infrastructure provides a more managed environment than other public clouds, making it well suited for enterprises that can’t completely rewrite applications. For Chris, there is definitely a market for a cloud provider that doesn’t strictly take a hyperscaler approach.
What Next for Violin Systems?
Chris Evans takes a look at the current state of Violin Systems, a company he got to see at Storage Field Day back in 2016 when it was known as Violin Memory. The company has gone through more than just a name change since that time, having significant financial and management shakeups. Chris overviews what made them an early all-flash storage leader, and where he sees their technology taking the company going forward.
Pure Storage AIRI – CI for AI
Pure Storage’s AIRI platform provides a converged infrastructure approach for ML and AI workloads, combining FlashBlade and NVIDIA DGX-1 servers. After looking at the Storage Field Day Exclusive videos from Pure Accelerate in 2017, Chris Evans sees this as an important step for FlashBlade, what he hopes is a first in a series of reference architecture solutions for specific applications.
Why Deterministic Storage Performance is Important
Chris Evans looks at why deterministic performance is important in storage. This effects everyone from hyperscalers, to smaller enterprises using HCI. Chris recalls SNIA’s Storage Field Day presentation from last year discuss how the organization is addressing tail latencies as part of this issue. Regardless of the size of an organization, consistent average performance is good, but significant poor performing outliers can be a significant challenge.
The Britpop Battle of Rubrik and Cohesity
The rivalries between data protection companies remind Chris Evans of the glory days of 90s Britpop. Instead of Blur and Oasis, for him the rivals of this new vanguard are Rubrik and Cohesity. He sees both as working to centralize data protection to offer it as a service, with the ultimate goal of fending off cloud-based solutions.
PowerMax, VMAX, XtremIO – the Agony of Choice
Chris Evans looks at Dell EMC’s newly announced PowerMax, an all-NVMe storage array. When fully configured, PowerMax can hit up to 10 million IOPS at under 300 microseconds of latency, while still being able to access the mature data service of their VMAX line. Chris raises a similar to point to Dell EMC’s XtremeIO presentation at Storage Field Day last year, that with many families of storage arrays, Dell EMC needs to be very clear which line is best for prospective customers.
NetApp embraces cloud for future business growth
A few years ago it might have been surprising to see NetApp at an event like Cloud Field Day, but after seeing them at an event earlier this month, Chris Evans thinks its consistent with the companies recent embrace of the public cloud. Eiki Hrafnsson presented for two hours, focusing on what the Cloud Data Services business unit will be focusing on going forward. Chris thinks these moves could help fill the gap between the enterprise data center and the cloud.
Droplet Computing delivers universal app virtualization
Chris Evans shares his thoughts on Droplet Computing, who debuted their browser-based application containers at the event. Chris sees this as a way to free applications from any OS or architecture dependency. If Droplet can make the delivery seamless, he sees a bright future ahead for the company.
The Three Facets of Backup
At Cloud Field Day last month, Chris Evans got to see three companies showing different facets of how to deliver backup. Veritas, Rubrik, and Druva all have different visions of how organizations should handle data management and protection. Chris takes a look at how some are transforming to handle new workloads, while others are expanding to add new functionality, scale, and scope.
Cloud Field Day 3 Preview: Delphix
In this post, Chris Evan previews what to expect from Cloud Field Day presenter Delphix.
Cloud Field Day 3 Preview: Riverbed
Chris Evans previews another of the Cloud Field Day presenters, this time focusing on Riverbed. For Chris, he’s looking forward to learning more about the company, which he generally associates them with their WAN optimization portfolio. Seeing how they are extending into the cloud should make for an interesting presentation.
Cloud Field Day 3 Preview: Veritas
Chris Evans gives a preview of Veritas ahead of their presentation at Cloud Field Day this week. The company is traditionally associated with storage, so Chris is interested in hearing their cloud story, particularly around CloudMobility and CloudPoint. He’s interested to hear how they differentiate these offerings from competing companies in their space.
Cloud Field Day 3 Preview: Druva
Chris Evans continues his previews of Cloud Field Day presenters, ahead of next week’s event. In this post, he turns his eye toward Druva. He outlines how the company began in endpoint protection, but now with their Druva Cloud Platform protects Iaas, PaaS and SaaS applications. He thinks the company’s direction has promise, and he’s looking forward to seeing them at Cloud Field Day.
Cloud Field Day 3 Preview: Morpheus Data
Chris Evans will be joining our delegates at Cloud Field Day next week. Morpheus Data will be presenting, and Chris is looking forward to digging into their platform. They offer an end-to-end management and deployment of applications in a DevOps model, including component discovery, templates and policy. He’s interested in learning how the company will overcome some of the inherent issues that come up when adding in another abstraction layer to applications.
Cloud Field Day 3 Preview: Oracle
Chris Evans is previewing the companies presenting at Cloud Field Day next month. Oracle will be there, and Chris is interested to learn more about what they are offering. Of particular interest is their Ravello acquisition, which enables easily porting applications running in vSphere to Oracle’s cloud platform.
Dude, Here’s Your 100TB Flash Drive!
Nimbus Data released a 100TB 3.5″ SATA SSD, and Chris Evans gives it a look here. The device falls within their existing Exadrive DC series, but features imporved performance at 500MB/s throughput and 100,000 IOPS read and write. All of this fits within a low thermal envelope, which Chris speculates is due to their patent-pending multi-controller architecture. Add in a claim of “unlimited endurance” over the drives 5-year warranty, and standard SSD functions like garbage collection and wear levelling, and Chris sees this as an interesting option.
Cloud Field Day 3 Preview: Rubrik
Ahead of attending Cloud Field Day next month, Chris Evans wrote up a preview of one presenter, Rubrik. Chris thinks the company has succeeded in making data protection more interesting by integrating it with other secondary storage requirements in a single platform, via their Cloud Data Management platform. Chris is interested to learn more about their evolving cloud strategy, especially after their recent acquisition of Datos IO.
Cloud Field Day 3 Preview: NetApp
Chris Evans is hearing out to Silicon Valley next month to take part in Cloud Field Day. In this piece, he previews what to expect from NetApp. He’s looking forward to hearing more about the company’s transition from a storage company to data management. This is based around Data Fabric, which Chris calls “an under-told stor[y]”.
The Risk of Shared Service Level Agreements
While watching Storage Field Day, Chris Evans heard IBM present about their SLA policy within their backup software. In this post, he clarifies how a service-level agreement differs from service-level objective, and why the distinction matters in the enterprise.
ScaleIO Becomes Software Defined on Hardware
Chris Evans got to see a bit from Dell EMC’s ScaleIO division last year. But the company has decided to shake up the offering by taking the former software product, and tying it directly to VxRack hardware. This comes after a reorganization for the company, that seems to show them focusing more strictly on hardware sales.
