Dan Frith heard from E8 Storage at Storage Field Day last year. The company recently announced an exciting new feature, the launch of E8 Storage Software that can run across a range of qualified commodity hardware. This lets you connect up to 96 host servers to a single E8 Storage Controller. While E8 has no plans to exit the hardware market, Dan thinks the shift to embrace a more software centric approach is indicative of larger industry trends.
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.
Storage Field Day 14
If you missed last month’s Storage Field Day, Barry Coombs has a post to get you caught up on most of the presentations. He includes his morning videos recorded at the event, going over his thoughts on what he saw the day prior. He also includes his excellent doodles for each presentations. These include notes on each company, as well as photos and screen shots. For a full audio-visual catch up on Storage Field Day, Barry has you covered.
E8 Storage: The Mercedes-Maybach 6 of NVMe Flash Arrays
Max Mortillaro heard from E8 Storage at Storage Field Day last month. In his blog post, he’s pretty clear: (f)rom a performance perspective, E8 Storage will just blow your mind away. Their radical approach to storage proved very exciting for Max, and he sees their solution as ideal for Tier-0 applications requiring high throughput, high IOPS and low latency.
The power of E8
Chin-Fah Heoh does not mince words when it comes to what he saw from E8 Storage at Storage Field Day. In his view, it’s the most complete solution of all the next gen NVMe storage technologies. Their solution offers high throughput, low latency storage, via RDMA fabric. With this they can offer 10 million IOPS, with 100µsecs for reads and 40µsecs for writes.
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 coming up
Storage Field Day is coming up later this week, and Erik Ableson has a full preview. He’ll be attending Commvault Go before the event, hearing about their latest data management solutions. Then at Storage Field Day, he’ll get updates from Dell EMC across their vast portfolio, E8 Storage, and Scality. It should be a busy week, with many fascinating solutions on tap.
Back to SFO for Storage Field Day 14! – FastStorage
Storage Field Day is coming up next month, and we’re happy to have the inimitable Jon Klaus returning! Returning for his seventh Storage Field Day, expect plenty of probing questions, quality analysis and stroopwafels from Jon as he sees presentations from Dell EMC, E8 Storage, and Scality.
I will be at Commvault Go and Storage Field Day 14!
Max Mortillaro will be back for a pair of events in November. He’s excited to attend Tech Field Day Exclusive at Commvault GO as well as attending Storage Field Day. He’s looking forward to a deep dives from Commvault, various Dell EMC divisions, comparing storage approaches from E8 Storage and Infinidat, and getting deep into object storage from Scality. It’ll be a busy month for Max!
What Next for the new Tier 0 Storage?
Chris Evans takes a look at the state of tier 0 storage, the custom hardware platforms that can deliver millions of IOPS. This was given a shake up recently with Dell EMC’s announcement that they aren’t moving forward with DSSD. Chris thinks the problem with these custom platforms is they can’t keep up with the rapid pace of flash storage development. He sees the future of tier 0 high performance storage with software defined solutions on commodity hardware, like what we’ve seen recently out of Excelero and E8 Storage.
Hardware vs. software innovation – round 4
Ray Lucchesi considers Dell EMC’s decision to kill their DSSD NVMe storage device, and frames it in the continuing debate over hardware vs software innovation. Ray thinks it’s further evidence that we are in a software innovation cycle. As further evidence, recent releases by both Excelero and E8 Storage. Both are using commodity hardware to achieve high level performance, over 4 million IO/sec with ~120 to ~230µsec response times. It’s an interesting discussion, and Ray gives both sides their due.
