Dan Frith heard a presentation from StarWind at Storage Field Day last month. He likes the company because they look to innovate to solve everyday storage problems in the enterprise. In this presentation, they focused on NVMe over Fabrics, looking at their developments of NVMe SPDK for Windows Server, and a NVMe initiator for CentOS.
Intel’s Form Factor Is A Factor
Dan Frith got to see Intel’s Optane team present at Storage Field Day last month. At their presentation, the company explained why they are iterating on storage form factors, including their recently released “ruler” drives. These are designed to solve density and temperature issues, allowjng for more storage in a given rack size.
NGD Systems Are On The Edge Of Glory
Dan Frith got to see NGD Systems at Storage Field Day last month. In this post, he writes up his thoughts about how NGD is approaching the problem of edge computing. Their approach isn’t simply to move the compute layer to a remote location, but rather to move compute directly onto the storage layer. This provides a cheaper alternative than moving the data to a central location, with massive latency and parallelism benefits as well. You don’t have to be “Gaga” to see the benefits in that.
I Need Something Like Komprise For My Garage
At Storage Field Day, Dan Frith heard from Komprise, and how they are helping organizations manage the deluge of unstructured data. Using advanced policy-based management, Komprise is able to identify cold data and redirect it before it hit advanced data workflows or data protection schemes best used for hot data. Dan just wishes now he had something similar to deal with his storage problems in his garage at home.
Storage Field Day 17 – (Fairly) Full Disclosure
Having Dan Frith along as a delegate for a Field Day event means two things. He’s written a steady stream of posts giving detailed and insightful looks at the presenting companies. But he’s also written his regular disclosure/event journal about things he did outside of the event presentation themselves. We’ve come to expect this kind of rigor from Mr. Frith. He does not disappoint here.
Storage Field Day 17 – Day 0
Dan Frith is coming back out to Silicon Valley for another Storage Field Day experience. This is Dan’s eighth Storage Field Day, and we always appreciate him crossing an ocean to attend. Make sure to follow along with the presentation on our live stream, and engage with Dan and the other delegates using #SFD17.
Storage Field Day – I’ll Be At Storage Field Day 17
Later this month, Dan Frith once again will make the sojourn from Down Under to Silicon Valley for his eighth Storage Field Day. He’ll be hearing from StarWind, Komprise, NGD Systems, and get the latest from Intel’s Optane group. That’s a lot to cover in an event, but if it’s anything like Dan’s previous Storage Field Day experience, he’ll have a number of blog posts with plenty of alacrity and insight.
Pure Storage – You’ve Come A Long Way
With Pure Accelerate coming up next week, Dan Frith takes a look back at how Pure Storage has evolved, but stayed true to their core focus since debuting their first products in 2011. He’s looking forward to seeing what they have in store for this year’s event.
Storage Field Day 15 – Wrap-up and Link-o-rama
Dan Frith finishes up his posts from Storage Field Day with his usual “Link-o-rama”, containing his extensive series of posts, as well as sharing pieces from his fellow delegates. If you missed any of the event, make sure to checkout Dan’s reviews of the presentations.
Druva Announces Cloud Platform Enhancements | penguinpunk.net
Dan Frith takes a look at the Druva Cloud Platform. This provides data management as a service, allowing you to provide protection for all your assets within a single service and interface. Dan first saw the company at Tech Field Day Extra VMworld US in 2017, and is looking forward to getting reacquainted next week when they present at Cloud Field Day.
Hedvig’s Evolution
When he first saw Hedvig in 2016, Dan Frith already thought they had a good story around scalable, software-defined storage. After seeing them again at Storage Field Day this month, he found increased maturity around their interface and data protection features. Instead of having to drop into the CLI, all tasks during the presentation were easily handled in their GUI. He thinks the improvements shown demonstrate a company that listens to the needs of their customers.
Datrium Cloud DVX – Not Your Father’s Cloud Data Protection Solution
Datrium presented at their second Storage Field Day, providing details on their Cloud DVX solution. Dan Frith wrote up his thoughts on it, and whether it lives up to Datrium’s claim of being “Cloud Backup Done Right”. Compared to a lot of “cloud-ready” data protection solution, Dan found Cloud DVX to be an “elegant solution”, with a lot of efficiency that should be very appealing to Datrium customers.
Huawei – Probably Not What You Expected
Huawei opened a lot of eyes with their Storage Field Day presentation last week, including delegate Dan Frith’s. He wasn’t familiar with the company’s storage products prior to the presentation, but learned them make their own SSDs and storage controller chips, getting started in flash production in 2005. He found their storage arrays have all the features considered table stakes in a modern array, but ensuring that data integrity and protection options are really built out and robust. Dan was also impressed by the company’s 3:1 deduplication guarantee.
Come And Splash Around In NetApp’s Data Lake
Dan Frith heard from NetApp at Storage Field Day earlier this month. While no stranger to the company, Dan got to hear something relatively new from the company. Senior Technical Director Santosh Rao overviewed some of the big data platform challenges that the company is looking to address. Overall Dan thinks NetApp has a lot of tools at their disposal and a comprehensive vision to address the data market, seeing the company in a “good place”.
Western Digital – The A Is For Active, The S Is For Scale
At Storage Field Day, Western Digital presented. The delegates got to hear from both their Tegile and HGST divisions. Dan Frith highlights what he saw about ActiveScale, HGST’s scalable object system. Coupled with cloud management features, Dan thinks it’s a “solid platform”.
Cohesity Understands The Value Of What Lies Beneath
Cohesity presented at Storage Field Day earlier this month, and showed off their approach to unified secondary storage infrastructure. In this piece, Dan Frith looks at how the company doesn’t look at secondary storage as fragmented chaos, but rather an opportunity to modernize around this unstructured data. Dan reviews how they differentiate from their competitors, and how they are much more than a simple storage target for data protection.
WekaIO – Not The Matrix You’re Thinking Of
Dan Frith turns his gaze here to WekaIO a presenter at Storage Field Day earlier this month. While not the first time seeing their file system, Dan was nonetheless impressed with the purported performance and data services offering. While not a one size fits all solution, Dan thinks its a good option for those needing performance focused, massively parallel, scale-out storage solution with the ability to combine NVMe and S3.
StarWind VTL? What? Yes, And It’s Great!
At Storage Field Day, StarWind presented on using Virtual Tape Libraries to backup to object storage. For Dan Frith this makes a compelling case for SMBs who aren’t in a position to rearchitect their data protection, but want to modernize their backup targets.
Cohesity Basics – Auto Protect
There was a lot to digest from Cohesity’s Storage Field Day presentation. Dan Frith highlights their Auto Protect feature, which allows you to add a source and have Cohesity automatically protect all of the VMs in a folder or cluster, including any new VMs added to that source. Dan found it a great feature, although he wished it was turned on by default.
Dropbox – It’s Scale Jim, But Not As We Know It
Dropbox’s recent presentation at Storage Field Day certainly left an impression with the delegates, and Dan Frith is no exception. The company reviewed their Magic Pocket architecture, which enabled them to move infrastructure back on-premises from the public cloud. For Dan, the big takeaway here is that this was an innovative solution for Dropbox, but the level of investment and development is definitely not for every organization with massive scalable storage needs.
