Dell EMC was one of the presenters at a busy Storage Field Day event. In this post, Becky Elliott writes up her thoughts on the presentation, one that was dominated by Dell EMC’s approach to DevOps. The company hit on the increasing imperative of automation in the enterprise and how IT silos are breaking down. Dell EMC also discussed their Ansible Playbooks for platforms like Isilon and PowerMax to help unify configuration, deployment, and orchestration. For Becky, this kind of practical focus of the presentation proved to be the most valuable.
DellEMC Project Nautilus Re-Imagine Storage for Streams
Chin-Fah Heoh got to hear about Dell EMC’s Project Nautilus at Storage Field Day. This is their composite software platform for both streaming real-time data and historical batch data. A key component of this is Pravega, an open source storage framework for streaming data. This allows for storage streams to be treated as a new class of storage primitives, which can use protocols like Fibre Channel, SMB or NFS. Data streams can then further be fed into analytics frameworks like Flink and Apache Spark. With the increasing importance of edge computing, Chin-Fah sees Project Nautilus as an very timely framework.
Project Nautilus Emerged as Dell’s Streaming Data Platform
At Storage Field Day, Gina Rosenthal got to hear from Dell EMC’s Project Nautilus, which uses open source tools to offer real time and historical analytics and storage. This essentially serves as a framework for those tool, with ingested data streams being tiered to long term storage, connected to analytics tools like Spark and Flink, then joined by Project Nautilus’ engine to provide for scale. This is all part of Dell EMC’s larger efforts to help blunt the impact of unstructured data growth. The open source streaming data platform with Project Nautilus is definitely a key addition to that toolkit.
Taming Unstructured Data With Dell EMC Isilon
Dell EMC presented an update on Isilon at Storage Field Day. Gina Rosenthal was a delegate at the event and wrote up what they showed about how Isilon is helping organizations solve the growing problem of unstructured data. It’s hard to follow any IT analysis these days without hearing a terrifying statement about how the rapid growth of unstructured data is going to eat through existing storage options. This Emmy award winning scale-out NAS has a long history and runs Dell’s OneFS. One interesting thing they showed during Storage Field Day was the ability to run OneFS with its full policy support in the cloud. This allows organizations to put data close to their cloud compute using the tools their familiar with, something critical with Isilon’s long time customers. Gina thought this kind of extension shows how traditional storage teams can augment cloud offerings.
Dell EMC PowerOne – Not V(x)block 2.0
Dell EMC is a familiar face at Storage Field Day. As an iconic company in the storage industry, it’s always good to get an update on their latest and greatest. Dan Frith got to hear from them with an update on PowerOne, its converged “all-in-one autonomous infrastructure.” Converged infrastructure isn’t the newest idea on the block, but Dan thinks that PowerOne offers a substantially different experience than solutions of the past. In this post, Dan outlines a lot of the important automation features that help it stand out, which takes away the need to constantly consult documentation and other support documents to get the system up and running. While a lot of enterprise interest is taken by HCI solutions, Dan makes the case that Dell EMC is truly innovating with converged infrastructure to meet real enterprise need and keep it relevant.
Dell EMC Isilon – Cloudy With a Chance of Scale Out
Dell EMC’s Isilon storage solution has been in the industry for a while, providing capacity and performance scaling to meet the needs of petabyte scale organizations. In this piece, Dan Frith digs into the platforms latest updates, which he heard at Storage Field Day earlier this year. In the post, he looks at how Isilon’s OneFS file system is designed to provide non-disruptive scaling for organizations, and can run either in your data center or directly on a public cloud. The latter is a key new addition for Dan, who sees this having major implications for organizations looking to shift workloads to the cloud, providing features those customers depend on that aren’t available natively on public cloud platforms. Isilon is particularly popular for media and entertainment workloads, which often aren’t optimized for the cloud. This capability opens up whole new possibilities without having to abandon existing workflows and tools.
Dell EMC PowerOne Is Next-Gen Converged Infrastructure
Enrico Signoretti saw two sessions from Dell EMC at Storage Field Day that really piqued his interest, touching on DevOps and infrastructure automation. Enrico was really surprised by their presentation on PowerOne, a next-generation converged infrastructure. He’s admittedly not a fan on converged infrastructure in general, but in Dell EMC’s PowerOne Controller, Enrico sees something that could be an automation hub for automating all the storage infrastructure, simplifying the configuration management of large scale infrastructures. This kind of potential really stood out during the presentation.
Storage Management and DevOps
At a recent Storage Field Day event, Chris Evans got to hear from Audrius Stripeikis of Dell EMC discussing findings from their latest research on storage management automation. Their findings saw that organizations with ten or more platforms depended upon automation for service delivery. This meant dealing with three challenges, consistency, scale, and automating self-service. Dell EMC showed how their API framework is designed to meet those challenges , giving developers access to APIs to directly provision resources. Resources aren’t infinite, so Dell EMC built in additional systems to keep things manageable, but this approach simplified a lot of traditional bottlenecks in the pipeline.
Storage Field Day 19 RoundUp
Storage Field Day is our first event of 2020, and we’ve got a packed roster of companies to present. It’s exciting to have a mix of familiar faces like NetApp and Dell EMC presenting with companies new to the event like Tiger Technology and Minio. Enrico Signoretti will be around the delegate table, asking questions and creating dialogue to help make Storage Field the unique event that it is. If that isn’t enough to get you excited, there is the always provocative “secret company” presenting at the event. Be sure to mark your calendar and unravel the mystery with us on the live stream.
Storage Field Day 19 – Vendor Previews
Chris Evans is no stranger to storage. His voice and experience is always welcome around the delegate table, and in this post, he brings both in previewing the presenting companies. He’s looking forward to the second day and hearing about Dell EMC doing deep dives into Isilon, DevOps and PowerOne. There are also a number of new presenters that Chris doesn’t have much background with. These include the DRaaS company Infrascale, the open-source enterprise-class object storage platform from MinIO, and Tiger Technologies. Tiger is competing in the crowded software-defined storage market, so Chris is interested to see how they will differentiate themselves. Western Digital will also be an interesting presentation, as the company has shifted it’s enterprise storage vision. Overall, it sounds like there’s not much Chris isn’t looking forward to at the event.
Storage Field Day 19: Getting Back to My Roots
Gina Rosenthal has extensive history in the storage industry, and we’re thrilled to now have her in the delegate ranks. In this post, she highlights what she’s looking forward to at the event. This includes a debut presentations from Tiger Technology, Infrascale, and Minio, as well as Gina’s second presentation from NetApp. There are many other presenters on tap, so be sure to mark your calendar for the event. We’ll have videos posted soon after the event, so even if you don’t catch the live stream, you can still watch all the storage goodness.
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.
Objects Stores and Load Balancers
We were fortunate enough to have Enrico Signoretti as a delegate at Tech Field Day Extra at Dell Technologies World this year. At the event, he got to hear from Kemp Technologies. They presented on their validated load balancing solution for ECS allowing the end user to get the most out of an object storage infrastructure while being assured end to end support. For Enrico, getting the most out of your object storage is a key consideration and load balancers are essential in this regard.
Power to the Max
Arjan Timmerman reviews what he saw from Dell EMC at Storage Field Day this summer. They focused on their highly available tier zero PowerMax storage array. Arjan outlines that even though this product comes from a long lineage, it’s able to offer cutting edge performance.
3D XPoint Is At A Crossroads – Can Intel and Micron Deliver?
With the announcement that Intel and Micron are dissolving their partnership, Stephen Foskett says that their joint 3D XPoint technology is at a crossroads. So far 3D XPoint has been over-promised and underperforming, but Stephen says the product shows some promise in the enterprise, citing NetApp’s Storage Field Day 16 presentation and discussions at Dell Technologies World.
CloudIQ is looking out for your storage system’s health
Jon Klaus writes about Dell EMC’s CloudIQ presented at Storage Field Day 16. CloudIQ’s purpose is to keep track of your storage system performance, health, capacity and notify you in case of any anomalies. Jon was impressed by CloudIQ’s functionality, but also by it being free to use for those with a Dell EMC Unity storage system and having a responsive and active development team.
Cloud Proximate Data Storage
Matt Leib talks about what he calls Cloud Proximate Data Storage, where major storage vendors leverage locationally close datacenters to mitigate the cost of moving data. Matt goes on to discuss the solutions presented at Storage Field Day 16 as well as PureAccelerate such as Infinidat’s Neutrix, products from PureStorage, and HPE’s Cloud Volumes/CloudBank.
