Chris Evans published another post in his ongoing series about data mobility in hybrid cloud. In this post, he looks at Global NAS and other distributed storage solutions, and includes a consideration of how to deal with data consistency. Solutions from NooBaa, Qumulo, Weka, Elastifile, Hedvig and Datera are included in this overview.
Rubrik Acquires Datos IO – Backup Wars Looming?
In this piece, Chris Evans shares his thoughts on Rubrik’s recent acquisition of Datos IO. This makes sense as a way for the company to grab an early leader in the NoSQL backup market, and increases their overall backup capability surface area. Overall he sees this down the line of providing another way for Rubrik to transition from backup into an overall data management company.
What are Storage Class Memory and Persistent Memory?
In this post, Chris Evans breaks down the differences between Persistent Memory and Storage Class Memory. The former puts non-volatile media directly in the DIMM slot, providing storage with extremely low latency, but requiring changes to BIOS and OS to address properly. The latter uses NAND and DRAM in a tiered system to effectively increase the addressable memory to the system. An example being Storage Field Day presenter Diablo Technologies. Of course, thanks to marketing, these terms are often interchangeable, but the article does a good job making the technical distinction clear.
What Next for XtremIO?
Chris Evans heard from Dell EMC’s XtremIO team at Storage Field Day late last year. In this post, he digs into the history of the platform, discussing how their X2 release addressed customer concerns and added better compression from the initial XtremIO X1 solution. Dell EMC is committed to supporting XtremIO long term, but Chris discusses where exactly the solution fits in the modern enterprise.
Kaminario Goes Software-Defined
Kaminario, a presenter at the first Storage Field Day in 2012, recently announced they were getting out of providing hardware for their AFA solution. Instead they will provide the software to run on top of certified storage from Tech Data. Chris Evans looks at the implications for the greater trend of the software-defined data center. He particularly focuses comments from Kaminario’s CEO on trying to undercut AWS storage on pricing per gigabyte.
Data Mobility – Caching Technologies
As part of his series looking at data mobility for the hybrid cloud, Chris Evans digs into the four main options for hybrid cloud caching. He reviews NAS, VM, database, and storage gateway caching, looking at the challenges involved for each.
Object Storage Critical Capabilities #3 – Searching, Indexing and Metadata
Chris Evans has been looking at object storage requirements in a series of posts. In this edition, he looks at how to handle object naming, the importance of user and system metadata, and the importance of search. For this last item, Chris highlights the Zenko multi-cloud object storage controller from Scality, which he saw at Storage Field Day in November.
Avere Systems is Acquired by Microsoft
A new year, a new acquisition by Microsoft. The Redmond software company acquired Avere Systems, with plans to integrate their hybrid cloud solutions into Azure. Chris Evans shares his thoughts on how this acquisition might effect the competitive landscape.
Performance Analysis of SAS/SATA and NVMe SSDs
Chris Evans reviews a performance analysis paper, breaking down the performance gains of NVMe vs SATA NAND disks in databases. This includes a look at real world applications. It shows the benefit of the reduced complexity and overhead of NVMe compared to SATA on otherwise identical storage media. As Chris notes, the lower CPU utlization and wait times have led to companies like E8 Storage and Excelero to develop new storage architectures. And in the HCI space, Scale Computing and X-IO are finding new ways to use the compute.
Has NVMe Killed off NVDIMM?
Chris Evans looks at the impact here of NVMe on the nascent NVDIMM market. Without needing to reorganize architectures and with OS support already in place, Chris sees NVMe has having a number of advantages. He still sees a place for NVDIMMs in the data center, but perhaps its place is much smaller than previously assumed.
Four Platforms When One Will Do?
After getting a review of their mid-range storage offerings at Storage Field Day last month, Chris Evans tries to makes sense of Dell EMC’s portfolio. This includes the SC-series, Unity, VNX and EqualLogic. The last two will be phased out as the result of the Dell EMC merger. Chris breaks down the rationale behind keeping two distinct mid-range lines, highlighting major differentiation like file protocols and deduplication support.
Is NetApp Becoming A Service Provider?
In this post, Chris Evans makes the argument that NetApp has fundamentally changed as a company, from a single product and platform to full on data management. As an example, he points to their Cloud Orchestrator service.
HPE Brings Nimble Skynet to 3PAR Arrays
Chris Evans considers how HPE will integrate Nimble Storage’s InfoSight into its 3PAR lineup after the former company’s acquisition. The challenge he sees is that Nimble Storage had a vast catalog of data points to pull from, having collected 4000 different metrics every five minutes from their arrays since 2010. If 3PAR doesn’t have that deep bench of data to pull from, it may take a while for InfoSight to derive valuable insights.
Accelerating Workloads with NetApp Plexistor
Chris Evans was surprised to learn that NetApp had acquired Plexistor, a company he had first seen at Storage Field Day in 2016. He thinks NetApp got a bargain in the acquisition, getting a storage class memory solution in their Plexistor SCM. Chris gives a quick overview how this could fit into NetApp’s portfolio.
VMAX – The Mainframe of Storage
In this piece, Chris Evans compares Dell EMC’s VMAX storage array to classic mainframe computing. This may sound like a backhanded compliment, but is actually astute praise. Like the mainframe, VMAX caters to legacy applications that need industry leading high availability and performance. In that niche, the new All-Flash VMAX array performs excellent, and Chris would recommend for the right legacy workloads.
Storage Field Day 14 Preview: E8 Storage
Chris Evans gives a preview of what he saw from E8 Storage at Storage Field Day last month. They use a disaggregated approach, combining the impressive parallelism of NVMe with RoCE to offer extremely low latency and high throughput on commodity storage hardware. Make sure to check out their full presentation from Storage Field Day to get a full overview.
Storage Field Day 14 Preview: Scality
Scality returns for their second Storage Field Day experience this week. Chris Evans will be there and wrote up a preview of the company ahead of the event. In the post, he provides a quick overview of what exactly is object storage, and how Scality differentiates within the category.
Storage Field Day 14 Preview: EMC
Chris Evans will be at Storage Field Day next month and he has a preview up looking at what to expect from Dell EMC. He takes a look at the company’s diverse portfolio of storage options, and hopes to get some clarity on how Dell EMC will better unify their midrange offerings at the event.
Can Violin Systems Successfully Rise from the Ashes of Violin Memory?
On his Storage Unpacked podcast, Chris Evans spoke to the CEO of Violin Systems, Ebrahim Abbasi. They discuss the future of the company coming out of their legacy with Violin Memory, and discussed focusing on tiering, scale-out and software-defined offerings for new product. Chris breaks down how he sees Violin Systems leveaging each of these in the competitive all-flash market.
It’s Time for Hard Drives to Join Tape In The Archive Tier
Mechanical hard drives are wonders of engineering. Despite proclamations of potential capacity limits, we’ve seen companies innovate to produce increasingly dense drives. But Chris Evans makes a compelling case here why spinning disks should be relegated to archiving going forward. This is because while throughput has increased much more slowly than capacity, we’ve actually seen latency get 50% worse in the last ten years. Combined with increased viability of cloud storage, Chris sees hard drives as viable for archive only.
