Dell EMC’s Isilon has a long history in the scale-out NAS market. Dan Frith writes up his thoughts on their latest all-flash offering. He sees this as useful in the media/entertainment vertical that Isilon already serves, where the trasition to higher resolution 4K media dramatically increases requirements. It may never be a solution for organization on a budget, but Dan sees it as well positioned for demanding workloads.
X-IO Technologies Are Living On The Edge
Dan Frith looks at X-IO’s Axellio platform, their new entry into edge computing. The platform was designed to enable processing of streaming data as close to ingest as possible, with the resulting analytics sent back to a data center. Dan thinks Axellio is well designed for that purpose, even if it might not be applicable to the legacy systems he often works with.
Dell EMC’s in the Midst of a Midrange Resurrection
Dan Frith got an update on Dell EMC’s midrange Unity portfolio at Storage Field Day earlier this month. He found the line significantly more refined compared to its rather rough launch, now merging file, block or VMware Virtual Volume storage sharing in the same storage pool. The included data services also show that Dell EMC is listening to their customers. It’s a sign to Dan that midrange, while not the most exciting, is still receiving the attention it deserves.
NetApp Doesn’t Want You To Be Special (This Is A Good Thing)
At Storage Field Day, NetApp’s Andy Banta spoke about the death of the specialized admin in enterprise IT. As infrastructures become automated and easier to managed, and as hardware shifts increasingly toward commodity, there becomes less of a need for these admins in an organization. Dan found it a fascinating discussion, in that it showed some of that context and consequences of the new technical solutions generally presented at Tech Field Day events.
Storage Field Day Exclusive at Pure//Accelerate 2017 – FlashBlade 2.0
Pure Storage’s FlashBlade 2.0 has been getting a lot of coverage coming out of Pure Accelerate, and Dan Frith is no exception. In their Storage Field Day Exclusive presentation, Pure Storage went over how FlashBlade is designed now to scale beyond fifteen blades, and went into detail on other architectural features and refinements.
Storage Field Day Exclusive at Pure//Accelerate 2017 – Purity Update
Dan Frith shares his notes from “Day 0” of Pure Accelerate. There, he saw Pure Storage talk about their new ActiveCluster, which Dan seems pretty excited about. He also gives his initial thoughts on Pure Storage’s announcements regarding VVols support and DirectFlash Shelf.
Storage Field Day 13 – (Fairly) Full Disclosure
It’s always a pleasure to have Dan Frith at a Storage Field Day event. He attended last week in Denver, and made sure to write up a full disclosure surrounding the event. If you want to see the same presentations Dan did, make sure to checkout our comprehensive video coverage!
Storage Field Day Exclusive at Pure//Accelerate 2017 – General Session Notes
Dan Frith wrote up his initial notes from Pure Storage’s general sessions at Pure Accelerate. He reviews each of the speakers during the presentation, along with some general notes about each speaker. The session focused on the role Pure Storage sees for itself as storage needs across the enterprise rapidly expand in the coming years and how the company has positioned themselves to the data platform for the cloud era. There was also a lot of talk about updates to Pure Storage’s Purity for both FlashBlade and FlashArray. Dan does a really good job of pulling out the relevant points from each speaker, while still maintaining a bit of stream of consciousness.
Storage Field Day 13 – Day 0
Dan Frith is on the ground in Denver for Storage Field Day. In this post, he shares the schedule of presenting companies he’ll be seeing over the next few days. Make sure to follow along on our live stream to watch with Dan!
Storage Field Day – I’ll Be At Storage Field Day 13 and Pure Accelerate
Dan Frith will be joining the other luminary delegates at Storage Field Day later this month. It’ll be a pleasure to have Dan joining us in Denver. Make sure to follow all the presentations on the live stream, and send in questions over Twitter using #SFD13!
Storage Field Day 12 – Wrap-up and Link-o-rama
Dan Frith has done extensive writing about all the presenters and happenings at Storage Field Day earlier this month. He’s compiled a list of all of the posts for easy reference. Make sure to check them all out for Dan’s usual excellent analysis and commentary.
SNIA Know What Time It Is
Dan Frith looks at what SNIA presented at Storage Field Day earlier this month. He found it an intriguing presentations, detailing the world of storage in the hyperscaler world. He makes the case for why SNIA has carved themselves out as a valuable asset and standards body in the enterprise storage world.
Datera – Hybrid Is The New Black
Dan Frith wrote up his impressions of Datera’s presentation from Storage Field Day earlier this month. He reviews how the company has progressed in their aim to provide a self-optimizing invisible cloud infrastructure, highlighting their already excellent policy driven autonomous feature. New to this presentation, they are now focusing on delivering the experience while maintaining high performance and lower latencies. Dan further looks at how Datera is able to do this in a hybrid cloud environment.
There’s A Whole Lot More To StarWind Than Free Stuff
StarWind presented at Storage Field Day earlier this month in Silicon Valley. Dan Frith thought they made a compelling case for their storage appliance in the 20 – 40TB hybrid or all-flash space, where high performance is needed cost effectively. Though the HCI space is crowded, he thinks StarWind can differentiate on broad protocol support and practical management features.
Intel Are Putting Technology To Good Use
Intel’s Storage Performance Development Kit made quite an impression on the Storage Field Day delegates. Dan Frith is no exception. He’s written up his thoughts on how it impact the emerging NVMe storage space. SPDK is able to offer much lower latency and better scaling IOPS than the standard Linux kernel, mainly by replacing its kernel-based interrupt-driven driver. This centers storage CPU needs on dedicated cores, and frees up overall system resources. In use cases, early customers have seen a roughly 300% improvement in latency and IOPS. The presentation left Dan “mighty excited”!
NetApp Aren’t Just a Pretty FAS
Aside from some prime seating for the presentation, Dan Frith really enjoyed what he saw from NetApp’s Storage Field Day presentation last week. He was particularly impressed by their Cloud Control for Office 365, which is targeted for people who’ve done a migration over to Microsoft’s SaaS platform, but haven’t done anything to protect or retain that info. He’s also looking forward to digging into their Data Fabric solution, which he got an overview of during the event.
Nimble Storage Gets Cloudy
Nimble Storage presented at Storage Field Day last week and talked about their block storage as a service called Nimble Cloud Volumes. Dan Frith wrote up his thoughts. Nimble Storage presented this as a compelling alternative to other block storage options, offering 6-9s of availability, and using a variety of public cloud partners for compute to avoid vendor lock-in. Dan likes what he saw, but wonders if this will be appealing to their existing customer base, or if this will be used to draw in new business.
Excelero are doing what? For how much?
Dan Frith got a look at Excelero’s NVMesh at Storage Field Day last week. NVMesh is a virtual SAN specifically designed for the particular capabilities of NMVe drives. Dan was impressed by the speeds attainable by the solution, which scale almost linearly as additional drives are added. More impressively, this is done with no load on the target CPU, with data being interacted directly with drives via RDDA. He isn’t quite as sure if it’s ready for mass adoption yet, Excelero isn’t ready to wrap in a bunch of data services in version 1.1. But if speed is your primary concern, Dan thinks Excelero has a compelling offering.
Ryussi – Or Why Another SMB Stack Is Handy
First time Storage Field Day company Ryussi presented at last week’s event, showing off MoSMB, their SMB3 stack. Dan Frith wrote up his thoughts on the solution. Dan thinks it could be an interesting solution for companies not comfortable with the terms of open source alternatives, like Samba.
Storage Field Day 12 – (Fairly) Full Disclosure
Dan Frith gives his disclosure of how he traveled, ate, and any swag received at the presentations from last week’s Storage Field Day.