When Ray Lucchesi heard Qumulo at Storage Field Day claim they could provide 100% performance even at 99% storage capacity, he was doubtful. After all, most storage systems drop significantly in performance while being at much lower storage usage. However, as he details in his latest post, Qumolo pulls it off! Ray writes that by stopping the “garbage collection” Qumulo is able to reach incredible performance even while at high storage capacity.
Can We Back Up a PB?
In this post, Ray Lucchesi considers the conundrum of backing up a petabyte, something that conventional IT would say isn’t feasible. This would require scanning the numerous file systems within that PB, daily scanning the hundred of TB changes, then transferring all of that to the backup storage. Instead, organizations rely on costly replication to protect against outages. At Cloud Field Day, Ray heard how Igenous is doing this scale of backup today, using a unique engine to scan and index PB scale data repositories, while still providing admins visibility into what is backed up. Be sure to check out Ray’s post and Igneous’ entire presentation on our YouTube channel.
097: GreyBeards Talk Open Source S3 Object Store With AB Periasamy, CEO MinIO
Keith Townsend and Ray Lucchesi published an interview with MinIO CEO Anand Babu Periasamy. Ray got to hear from him and the rest of the MinIO team recently at Storage Field Day. MinIO offers a fully open source AWS S3 compatible object store that you can run anywhere, something particularly timely as more organizations turn to them. This allows customers to turn away from costly cloud object stores, and deploy in their own data centers for better economics at scale. They discuss how the company is developing features to match Amazon S3, and dig into the tech in the interview.
Gaming Is Driving Storage Innovation at WDC
Western Digital has long been a stalwart in the storage industry, designing storage media and innovating in that space for decades. At Storage Field Day, the provided updates on how a lot of their designs are catering toward hyperscale companies, or how the emergence of 5G will ramp up the need for faster performance with streaming video. But for Ray Lucchesi, what stood out in the session was how gaming was increasingly driving innovation with Western Digital. As a result of high performance needs, both of gamers to play games and for services that host them, WD detailed innovations with their WD Black line, which includes HDD, but is increasingly featuring SSDs. The showed how they are catering these drives to the unique requirements and environment found in gaming PCs.
Pure Storage Announces New DirectMemory (SCM), FlashArray//C, & Other Enhancements at //Accelerate
At Pure Accelerate, Pure Storage announced the DirectMemory was coming to FlashArray//X, as well as the general availability of Cloud Block Store. In this post, Ray Lucchesi breaks down the details and the importance of these two announcements.
BONUS: The Origins of Tech Field Day – the On-Premise IT Roundtable
In this bonus episode of the On-Premise IT Roundtable, we’re joining Stephen Foskett as he talks with some of the original delegates and inspirations for the Tech Field Day event series. They discuss the event that gave Stephen the initial idea, a fortuitous plane ride, how the first Tech Field Day event went, where the idea for the live stream started and more.
91: Keith and Ray Show at CommvaultGO 2019
In this podcast, Ray Lucchesi and Keith Townsend give their impressions of Tech Field Day Exclusive at Commvault GO 2019. The event was their first chance to talk to Commvault’s new CEO Sanjay Mirchandani. They also got to hear about Commvault Metallic, get details about what the company will do with the Hedvig acquisition, and more.
89: Keith & Ray Show at Pure//Accelerate 2019
On this episode of the GreyBeardsOnStorage Podcast, Keith Townsend and Ray Lucchesi look at the major announcements from Pure Accelerate. They got a lot of in-depth technical presentations as part of the Storage Field Day Exclusive at the event, and they dig into the implications of DirectMemory, FlashArray//C, CloudBlockStore, and more.
Need Memory, Intel’s Optane DC PM to the Rescue
Intel’s Optane DC PM was one of the highlight announcements from Tech Field Day Exclusive at Intel Data Centric Innovation Day. In this post, Ray Lucchesi breaks down how Optane works in memory on a server. This allows for up to to 3TB of Optane memory per socket, with latency roughly between DRAM and traditional NAND Flash. He breaks down the different modes the storage-class memory can operate in, what the durability looks like, and how it will impact enterprise applications.
82: GreyBeards Talk Composable Infrastructure With Sumit Puri, CEO & Co-Founder, Liqid Inc.
Greg Schulz and Ray Lucchesi got to speak with Liqid CEO Sumit Puri on this episode of the Greybeards on Storage podcast. They discussed how Liqid composable infrastructure approach differs from competitors with more of a storage focus. They then discuss the newly announced multi-fabric composability solution, which the delegates at Tech Field Day Extra at Dell Technologies World got a deep dive on. They discuss how Liqid’s solution works, and where it is being used.
Intel’s New DL Boost for DL AI Inferencing
As a delegate attending the Tech Field Day Exclusive at Intel’s Data-Centric Innovation Day, Ray Lucchesi heard a lot of major announcements from Intel. In this post, he’s focusing on one announcement that didn’t get the most press after the event: DL Boost. This provides a new 8-bit integer instruction that accelerate DL inferencing. This is a major step to stay relevant in the data center, because Intel estimates that more than 50% of AI workloads will involve inferencing before too long. Ray breaks down the technical implementation and where it may run into some potential issues. It’s a great overview.
StorPool, Fast Storage for Fast Times
Ray Lucchesi wasn’t sure what to make of StorPool when they started their presentation at Storage Field Day. But as they went on, Ray saw the light after a particularly impressive demo. The company was trying to match a Windows Server 2019 Hyper V benchmark which hit 13.8 M IOPS, which they were able to do without 1.5TB of Optane memory, 25Gbps RDMA Ethernet, and without having the VMs and its storage running on same nodes. To say Ray was impressed would be an understatement.
NetApp Insight 2018 Product Announcements
In this post, Ray Lucchesi runs down the major announcements from NetApp Insight 2018. NetApp Kubernetes Service allows for running managed Kubernetes on the public cloud or on NetApp HCI hardware. MAX Data comes out of NetApp’s Plexistor acquisition and offers a two-tier, local file system that can make use of DRAM, NVDIMMs, or 3D Xpoint memory as an ultra-fast Persistent Memory Tier and ONTAP storage as the Storage Tier. Ray thinks NetApp has been on a high lately, and these announcements show the company has no signs of slowing down.
76: GreyBeards talk backup content, GDPR and cyber security with Jim McGann, VP Mkt & Bus. Dev., Index Engines
In this episode of the Greybeards on Storage podcast, Ray Lucchesi and Howard Marks talked with Jim McGann, VP Marketing and Business Development at Index Engines. Jim presented at Dell EMC’s session at Tech Field Day last month. They discussed the company’s CyberSense solution, along with GDPR and indexing backups.
71: GreyBeards talk DP appliances with Sharad Rastogi, Sr. VP & Ranga Rajagopalan, Sr. Dir., Dell EMC DPD
In this episode of the Greybeards on Storage podcast, Ray Lucchesi and Howard Marks spoke to Sharad Rastogi & Ranga Rajagopalan from Dell EMC’s Data Protection division. They discuss the company’s new IDPA DP4400, which was also detailed at their Tech Field Day Extra presentation from VMworld US 2018. This provides up to 96TB of usable capacity for secondary storage and backups, while also providing up to 192TB of a native Cloud Tier.
72: GreyBeards talk Computational Storage with Scott Shadley, VP Marketing NGD Systems
This episode of the Greybeards on Storage podcast features a conversation with NGD Systems’ VP of Marketing, Scott Shadley, who presented at Storage Field Day earlier this year. They talk about their smart SDDs, which will become generally available by the end of 2018. These SSDs each have a 4-core ARM processor running Ubuntu. This allows any workload that can run on Ubuntu to be performed directly on the storage layer. They look at what these drives are capable of, and how they could be deployed by organization in the near future.
73: GreyBeards talk HCI with Gabriel Chapman, Sr. Mgr. Cloud Infrastructure NetApp
This episode of the Greybeards on Storage podcast features a conversation with NetApp’s Senior Manager, Cloud Infrastructure, Gabriel Chapman. Andy presented to hosts Ray Lucchesi and Howard Marks at Tech Field Day Extra at NetApp Insight 2018. They discuss NetApp’s approach to HCI. Their architecture pairs NetApp Solidfire storage nodes with dedicated compute nodes. Their overall approach is less focused with a strict definition of HCI, and more based around being relevant for hybrid cloud infrastructure.
75: GreyBeards talk persistent memory IO with Andy Grimes, Principal Technologist, NetApp
This episode of the Greybeards on Storage podcast features a conversation with NetApp’s Principal Technologist, Andy Grimes. Andy presented to hosts Ray Lucchesi and Howard Marks at Tech Field Day Extra at NetApp Insight 2018, where he presented on MAX Data. This software-defined persistent memory solution comes out of the assets from NetApp’s Plexistor acquisition. They discuss some of the technical details, how it is designed to use emerging persistent memory, and use cases for the enterprise.
Screaming IOP performance with StarWind’s new NVMeoF software & Optane SSDs
It’s pretty impressive when a Storage Field Day presentation can get Ray Lucchesi thinking about building a super computer. But that’s just what happened after seeing the impressive performance from StarWind NVMeoF initiator on CentOS and Windows Server. Using just 2-core in a Hyper-V environment, StarWind was able to achieve bare metal storage performance on Optane, getting ~551K 4K random write IOP performance at the 0.6msec RT and 2.26 GB/sec level. Not surprising that Ray called StarWind an “amazing company.”
Huawei presents OceanStor architecture at SFD15
Ray Lucchesi goes in depth on Huawei’s new OceanStor Dorado storage system presented at Storage Field Day 15. This new system can scale up to 16 controllers, supporting all flash storage configurations, and supports inline compression and deduplication for data reduction. Overall, Ray was impressed by Huawei’s ability to reduce serialization bottlenecks and looks forward to hearing more from them in the future.
