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.


Docker presents at Cloud Field Day 1 (CFD1)

Docker presents at Cloud Field Day 1 (CFD1)


Scality’s Open Source S3 Driver

Scality’s Open Source S3 Driver


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


Exablox, bring your own disk storage

Exablox, bring your own disk storage


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


Has triple parity Raid time come?

Has triple parity Raid time come?


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


Intel Cloud Day 2016 News And Views

Intel Cloud Day 2016 News And Views


Rubrik has a better idea for VMware backup

Rubrik has a better idea for VMware backup


Platform9, a whole new way to run OpenStack

Platform9, a whole new way to run OpenStack


Speaking in Tech: How good is the UK’s broadband? Really awful

Speaking in Tech: How good is the UK’s broadband? Really awful


Mobile devices as a cache for cloud data

Mobile devices as a cache for cloud data