James Green saw Avere Systems at Storage Field Day a few years ago, and has since done a great job reviewing the company’s Edge Filer portfolio. Now that the company has been acquired by Microsoft, James shares his thought how the company’s assets will fit into the Redmond giant’s overall offerings.
Data Mobility – Caching Technologies
As part of his series looking at data mobility for the hybrid cloud, Chris Evans digs into the four main options for hybrid cloud caching. He reviews NAS, VM, database, and storage gateway caching, looking at the challenges involved for each.
Avere Systems is Acquired by Microsoft
A new year, a new acquisition by Microsoft. The Redmond software company acquired Avere Systems, with plans to integrate their hybrid cloud solutions into Azure. Chris Evans shares his thoughts on how this acquisition might effect the competitive landscape.
Avere Systems’ Latest Edge Filer Handles the Most Demanding Hybrid Cloud Workloads
James Green was first introduced to Avere Systems at Storage Field Day last year. In this piece, he looks at the company’s FXT 5850 edge filer. The FXT-series allows organizations to separate performance from capacity for hybrid and on-site workloads.
I Like Big Files and I Cannot Lie
The inimitable Alex Galbraith uses the poetry of Sir Mix-a-Lot to ponder Dell EMC’s presentation from Tech Field Day this past November, when they reviewed their Isilon storage solution. The most important consideration from Alex’s piece, who is this for? Isilon is meant for organization with tremendous storage needs, into petabyte scale. Alex reviews how Isilon addresses these into “data lakes”, and keeps performance at a high level.
Building Data Storage With Containers
The state of containers in enterprise IT continues to expand. As it does, the importance of addressing storage for these stateless constructs becomes more important. Chris Evans reviews why addressing container storage is essential, and some of the solutions out there. This includes offerings from StorageOS, Portworx, and Scality. Ethan sees containers continuing the trend started with hyperconverged infrastructure, the blurring of storage and application.
Future Storage, Flash, and Cloud?
As someone who would have bet good money that Zip disks were going to take over storage in the late 90s, my own ability to predict the future of storage is dubious at best. Alastair Cooke is under no such scrutiny. He reviews what some are seeing as the future of storage: a combination of flash and object cloud storage. He sees two potential solutions for this from ClearSky Data and Avere Systems. ClearSky uses a geographically tiered flash system to quickly represent your data, and Avere uses local flash to focus on file share performance. Alastair might question if flash + cloud will be the correct formulation, but he liked what he saw from Avere and ClearSky.
Is a Cloud Gateway Enough?
For W. Curtis Preston, simply having the ability for a storage system to store data in the cloud isn’t news anymore. It’s to be expected. What’s more useful is a way to address multiple cloud site. Amazon might be the current market leader, but a storage solution shouldn’t assume you’re only going to use a single source for cloud storage. A good cloud gateway should address that, as well as letting you compute where your storage is at. It’s an interesting way to reevaluate how we judge cloud gateways going forward.
Getting Object Storage Ready for the Enterprise – Scality Briefing Note
W. Curtis Preston was at Storage Field Day in October with Scality to hear about their latest and greatest. In this blog post, he reviews what Scality is offering in their Ring 6.4 release. It offers built in encryption with a third-party key management system included. Curtis thinks this is a much better solution for an object storage company, instead of trying to invent their own key management. It also includes a number of AWS integrations, as well as chargebacks and health checks. Additionally Scality also released an open-source S3 server that runs in a Docker container. This can be used to test how well apps can write to S3 storage. Object storage in the data center has always required some hoops to jump through, and Scality looks to have some offerings to smooth this out quite a bit.
Building a hybrid cloud with Avere
Jon Klaus takes a look at what Avere is offering with their hybrid cloud solution. He has a long history with the company, going back to when they were focused on NAS optimization via a caching layer between storage and compute resources. Avere then moved into object storage translation, and is now entering into making cloud storage gateways. He gives some thoughts about what applications their gateway would benefit, weights in on caching vs tiering, and where he thinks these kind of products fit into IT. He doesn’t see the cloud ever killing the tangible benefits of on-prem, but hybrid solutions could certainly benefit both.
Avere Systems – is it a cache, is it a tier, does it even matter?
Tier file system with caching, or a cached file system with tiers? Such is the dilemma for Ed Morgan. He took a look at Avere Systems’ Hybrid Cloud overlay for storage backends. With the so-called Tiered File System, Avere is able to increase performance across devices, as well as dynamically move data between mediums based on heat mapping. Hot data lives in RAM, warm data lives on SSDs, and old data is put on nearline NAS, as well as the ability to offload to the cloud. This allows for quick access to frequently used data, while being able to use more efficient storage to hold the bulk of cold data. Ed was impressed by how well this pairs with Avere’s C2N, which serves as the NAS/object storage device that can easily integrate to the public cloud.
Creating Private Cloud Storage that you can Actually use
Curtis Preston discusses the problem with object-based storage: applications still need NFS or SMB access. He goes on to discuss the need for cloud gateways, and the added benefits they have for hybrid cloud solutions.
What’s The Deal With Containers, Anyway?
In this keynote from Deltaware Data Solutions’ 2016 Emerging Technology Summit, Stephen Foskett gives essential background on the emerging trend of containerization of enterprise applications. What are containers and how will they affect enterprise IT? Why is Docker so important? Foskett addresses both the technical and architectural questions, discussing which applications will be containerized, the benefits and costs, and what it means for IT operations.
Hardware has set the pace for latency, time for software to catch up
Jon Klaus thinks software needs to catch up to SSDs for reducing application latency. Initially, SSDs were limited by storage processors and buses build with spinning disks in mind. This has largely been remedied, so where’s the next big performance bottleneck? Latency.
Jon looks at how Intel’s Storage Performance Development Kit, presented at Storage Field Day in October, effects latency by replacing the traditional Linux kernel in storage controllers.
Intel SPDK – A foundation block for new generation storage
Max Mortillaro tackles the topic of storage latency in his latest post. Inspired by the Intel Storage presentation at Storage Field Day, he discusses the history of storage latency and presents the need for faster software. He then discusses Intel’s Storage Performance Development Kit (SPDK), which might allow software latency to approach the performance of modern solid-state storage.
Open-Source Hardware Designs – One step beyond commodity?
Open-Source Hardware Designs – One step beyond commodity?
Scality RING – Object Storage? Yes, but Software-Defined please!
Scality RING – Object Storage? Yes, but Software-Defined please!
