In this edition of Gina Rosenthal’s Monday Hot Takes, she breaks down the acquisition of Datrium by VMware. She discusses how VMware will integrate this acquisition into their overall cloud disaster recovery plans. To get up to date on all that Datrium offers, she went to the Tech Field Day presentation archives to get up to speed on their tech stack. What stuck her was how much of Datrium was built to be a competitor to VSAN, and how deliberate VMware was in their announcement to stick to a DRaaS play with the acquisition.
Commvault Big Bet
In this piece, Chin-Fah Heoh considers what the recent acquisition of Hedvig means for Commvault. As a not infrequent Field Day delegate, and well familiar with the world of enterprise storage in general, Chin-Fah breaks down what Commvault is getting in this acquisition, if it was a good exit for Hedvig, and what the future might hold. Be sure to dig into the details.
Catch Up (Fast) – IBM Spectrum Protect Plus
It’s been almost a full calendar year since Chin-Fah Heoh last heard from IBM at Storage Field Day. They returned again last month to give an update on IBM Spectrum Protect Plus. While still a relatively nascent offering, SPP is starting to gain industry recognition, and adding must-have features for the backup and recovery market. For Chin-Fah, the pricing is there to appeal to the SMB/SME market, and he sees potential in it with regional cloud service providers as well.
Is Pure Play Storage good?
Chin-Fah Heoh has seen a number of pure play storage companies present at Storage Field Day over the years. In this post, he looks at the Gartner Magic Quadrants from 2010 and 2017, looking how the Big 5 storage companies have fared in that time. NetApp remains the only company in the leaders quadrant, with Pure Storage as the notable new kid on the block. But for Chin-Fah, this doesn’t represent the death of pure play storage, rather representative of a changing of the guard.
HDD Capacity Threshold Reaches 15TB
Chris Evans highlights the new king of HDD capacity, the 15TB Ultrastar DC HC620 from Western Digital. While only representing a 7% increase in capacity from 14TB drives, the real innovation here is these drives use host-managed Shingled Magnetic Recording, as opposed to being managed directly on the drives. This has big implications for hyperscalers, who can see greatly improved performance. Dropbox is one of the initial customers to use the drives, and Chris got a deep dive into their “Magic Pocket” architecture at Storage Field Day earlier this year.
Storage Field Day 15: The open convergence by Datrium
Datrium presented at Storage Field Day last month. Lino Telera got to hear about their concept of Open Convergence. This bucks the trend of traditional HCI, offering a different model for delivering tier-1 and secondary data in a scalable solution. They do this with an architecture build around stateless compute nodes and stateful storage nodes. This provides less cross talk between nodes, and allows for truly remarkable scale, as Lino saw during their presentation.
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.
3D XPoint Is At A Crossroads – Can Intel and Micron Deliver?
With the announcement that Intel and Micron are dissolving their partnership, Stephen Foskett says that their joint 3D XPoint technology is at a crossroads. So far 3D XPoint has been over-promised and underperforming, but Stephen says the product shows some promise in the enterprise, citing NetApp’s Storage Field Day 16 presentation and discussions at Dell Technologies World.
Storage Field Day 15: Weka.io
In this post, Lino Telera looks at Weka.io’s presentation from Storage Field Day in March. They presented on their Matrix file system, which is designed for a scale-out and based on commodity hardware.
IBM Spectrum Protect and Modern Data Protection
IBM is no stranger to data protection, but many don’t consider them a viable company in the space. Paul Stringfellow looks at what the company showed at Storage Field Day in March and looks at how it stacks up against insurgent competitors.
Storage Field Day 15: Cohesity the solution for secondary data
Lino Telera was at Storage Field Day earlier this year, and got a look at Cohesity’s secondary storage solution. He looks at how their hybrid filesystem, SpanFS, is designed to provide visibility via a global file index of backed up virtual machines.
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.
NetApp’s & Next Generation Storage Technologies
In this piece, Chan Ekanayake takes a look at what he saw from NetApp at Storage Field Day back in March. He begins by reviewing the place of NVMe in the enterprise market, then expanding into how NetApp plans to incorporate NVMe and storage class memory into their storage offerings. This would provide an extremely fast and low latency storage environment perfect for demanding workloads like AI.
Convergence Without Compromise
Josh De Jong takes a look at an interesting approach to hyperconverged infrastructure from Datrium with DVX. Their approach separates compute nodes from storage. Each compute node has a SSD used for cachining, which results in increased performance when adding nodes. Josh looks of Datrium is now developing how to move their HCI stack to the cloud.
Little’s Law: For Estimation Only
Dr. Rachel Traylor heard Datrium reference Little’s Law during their presentation at Storage Field Day last month. Little’s Law provides a way to smooth out some of the random variables in queuing theory into something more deterministic. As Dr. Traylor explains, this makes it idea for quick estimations, but it’s not a silver bullet for such a complex field of mathematics.
Huawei Dorado – All about Speed
At Storage Field Day last month, Chin-Fah Heoh and the other delegates got to hear Huawei present for the first time. The presentation went into an architectural deep dive on Dorado V3, their premiere all-flash storage array. Chin-Fah was impressed with the speed the array is capable of, even with triple parity RAID. He’s looking forward to seeing more from the company going forward.
Storage Field Day 15 – Wrap-up and Link-o-rama
Dan Frith finishes up his posts from Storage Field Day with his usual “Link-o-rama”, containing his extensive series of posts, as well as sharing pieces from his fellow delegates. If you missed any of the event, make sure to checkout Dan’s reviews of the presentations.
Own the Data Pipeline
In this post, Chin-Fah Heoh takes a look at NetApp’s Data Pipeline, which they outlined during their Storage Field Day presentation earlier this month. Chin-Fah puts the idea of a data pipeline into historical context, and looks at how NetApp is using it for AI workloads.
Hedvig’s Evolution
When he first saw Hedvig in 2016, Dan Frith already thought they had a good story around scalable, software-defined storage. After seeing them again at Storage Field Day this month, he found increased maturity around their interface and data protection features. Instead of having to drop into the CLI, all tasks during the presentation were easily handled in their GUI. He thinks the improvements shown demonstrate a company that listens to the needs of their customers.
Datrium Cloud DVX – Not Your Father’s Cloud Data Protection Solution
Datrium presented at their second Storage Field Day, providing details on their Cloud DVX solution. Dan Frith wrote up his thoughts on it, and whether it lives up to Datrium’s claim of being “Cloud Backup Done Right”. Compared to a lot of “cloud-ready” data protection solution, Dan found Cloud DVX to be an “elegant solution”, with a lot of efficiency that should be very appealing to Datrium customers.
