Ray Lucchesi had been aware of Hitachi Vantara’s Content Platform, aka on-premises object store, for a while. But it wasn’t until their Tech Field Day Exclusive event that he realized how successful it was. HCP currently has over two thousand customers and is the #1 on-premises, object storage solution in the world. There’s even more information available on HCP in our extensive video series from the event, be sure to check it out.
Western Digital at SFD15: ActiveScale object storage
Western Digital and Ray Lucchesi are both names synonymous with storage. We had them both attending Storage Field Day earlier this year. Ray was particularly interested in the companies ActiveScale object storage, a result of the company’s Amplidata acquisition in 2015. Ray runs through how ActiveScale could be well suited for data analytics.
54: GreyBeards talk scale-out secondary storage with Jonathan Howard, Dir. Tech. Alliances at Commvault
Ray Lucchesi and Howard Marks talked to Jonathan Howard on the most recent GreyBeards on Storage podcast. Jonathan is the Director of Technical Alliances at Commvault, and they discuss the company’s move into the secondary storage market with Hyperscale, and how that combines with their data management solutions.
A tale of two storage companies – NetApp and Vantara (HDS-Insight Grp-Pentahoo)
Ray Lucchesi heard competing visions from storage companies in transitions recently. At Insight, NetApp presented themselves as the data service provider for IT and a willingness to embrace the cloud. The newly created Hitachi Vantara’s philosophy is based around the move to IoT. Ray lays out each company’s goals, it’s problem with customers, and who is ultimately right in with these divergent approaches.
Axellio, next gen, IO intensive server for RT analytics by X-IO Technologies
At Storage Field Day, the delegates saw a technical deep dive on X-IO Technologies new edge computing platform, Axellio. Ray Lucchesi runs down some the notable components of the platform. This includes support for up to 460TB of raw NVMe in a 2U appliance, the ability to add two off-load modules for parallel computing or machine learning, and over 12 Million IO/sec with at 35µsec latencies.
There’s a new cluster filesystem on the block, Elastifile
Elastifile debuted their new file system at Storage Field Day last month, and Ray Lucchesi wrote up his thoughts. It’s designed to support thousands of nodes, exabytes of capacity, and infinite numbers of files, in an effort to make a better cluster file system. It was in development since 2013, and offers some impressive features, including compression, deduplication, and cloud storage tiering. It only caches metadata, and maintains consistency thanks to key-value consensus based algorithm called Bizur. Ray’s not sure how it’ll perform in terms of marketshare going forward, but thinks it shows a lot of great backend engineering to offer a competitive file system right out of the gate.
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.
4.5M IO/sec@227µsec 4KB Read on 100GBE with 24 NVMe cards
Excelero Storage launched at Storage Field Day last week. Ray Lucchesi was in the audience, and got to see some interesting performance numbers from their NVMesh, their software defined block storage for Linux. Ray is definitely enthusiastic about what he saw, with good reason. Excelero showed off getting 4.5 million 4K random reads and 2.5 million 4K random writes on $13,000 worth of hardware, all with 0% target CPU usage. Check out the rest of Ray’s piece for the details.
Dreaming of SCM but living with NVDIMMs…
Ray Lucchesi give a look into a rather unique and developing part of enterprise storage: NonVolatile RAM. He walks through the history of the format, and how it has evolved to its current iteration. He finds that the current state has fairly developed hardware, but the software to take advantage of it is still developing. In some ways, it parallels where flash storage was when it first emerged as an affordable option.
Hedvig storage system, Docker support & data protection that spans data centers
Hedvig storage system, Docker support & data protection that spans data centers
GreyBeards talk Copy Data Management with Ash Ashutosh, CEO Actifio
GreyBeards talk Copy Data Management with Ash Ashutosh, CEO Actifio
Pure Storage FlashBlade well positioned for next generation storage
Pure Storage FlashBlade well positioned for next generation storage
33: GreyBeards talk HPC storage with Frederic Van Haren, founder HighFens & formerly Sr. Director of HPC at Nuance
33: GreyBeards talk HPC storage with Frederic Van Haren, founder HighFens & formerly Sr. Director of HPC at Nuance
Surprises in flash storage IO distributions from 1 month of Nimble Storage customer base
Surprises in flash storage IO distributions from 1 month of Nimble Storage customer base
