At Storage Field Day this month, Dr. Rachel Traylor heard from StarWind. They developed a prediction algorithm to proactively detect drive failures. This led Dr. Rachel to call for a dialogue with her fellow mathematicians and storage experts, what do we mean when we say predictive analytics?
Huawei – Probably Not What You Expected
Huawei opened a lot of eyes with their Storage Field Day presentation last week, including delegate Dan Frith’s. He wasn’t familiar with the company’s storage products prior to the presentation, but learned them make their own SSDs and storage controller chips, getting started in flash production in 2005. He found their storage arrays have all the features considered table stakes in a modern array, but ensuring that data integrity and protection options are really built out and robust. Dan was also impressed by the company’s 3:1 deduplication guarantee.
Come And Splash Around In NetApp’s Data Lake
Dan Frith heard from NetApp at Storage Field Day earlier this month. While no stranger to the company, Dan got to hear something relatively new from the company. Senior Technical Director Santosh Rao overviewed some of the big data platform challenges that the company is looking to address. Overall Dan thinks NetApp has a lot of tools at their disposal and a comprehensive vision to address the data market, seeing the company in a “good place”.
Western Digital – The A Is For Active, The S Is For Scale
At Storage Field Day, Western Digital presented. The delegates got to hear from both their Tegile and HGST divisions. Dan Frith highlights what he saw about ActiveScale, HGST’s scalable object system. Coupled with cloud management features, Dan thinks it’s a “solid platform”.
Cohesity Understands The Value Of What Lies Beneath
Cohesity presented at Storage Field Day earlier this month, and showed off their approach to unified secondary storage infrastructure. In this piece, Dan Frith looks at how the company doesn’t look at secondary storage as fragmented chaos, but rather an opportunity to modernize around this unstructured data. Dan reviews how they differentiate from their competitors, and how they are much more than a simple storage target for data protection.
WekaIO – Not The Matrix You’re Thinking Of
Dan Frith turns his gaze here to WekaIO a presenter at Storage Field Day earlier this month. While not the first time seeing their file system, Dan was nonetheless impressed with the purported performance and data services offering. While not a one size fits all solution, Dan thinks its a good option for those needing performance focused, massively parallel, scale-out storage solution with the ability to combine NVMe and S3.
Storage Field Day 15: Dropbox the high availability in a “pocket”
At Storage Field Day, Lino Telera got to hear from Dropbox. They presented about their Magic Pocket architecture, which allowed them to transition from depending on AWS, saved them $75 million over two years, and increased performance. Lino gives a great overview of the architecture here. Perhaps most surprising to him was the work Dropbox put into optimizing their networking across their entire platform.
Cohesity: A secondary storage solution for the Hybrid Cloud?
Chan Ekanayake has followed Cohesity since 2015, but got to drink from the secondary storage firehose during their presentation at Storage Field Day. Chan likes their solution and company direction, but thinks the key to their success ultimately depends on pricing.
Tech ONTAP Podcast: NetApp at Storage Field Day 15
On the most recent episode of NetApp’s Tech ONTAP Podcast, Tech Field Day founder Stephen Foskett and Storage Field Day delegate Glenn Dekhayser discuss what they saw from the company at their most recent Field Day presentation.
Cloud Field Day 3 Preview: NetApp
Chris Evans is hearing out to Silicon Valley next month to take part in Cloud Field Day. In this piece, he previews what to expect from NetApp. He’s looking forward to hearing more about the company’s transition from a storage company to data management. This is based around Data Fabric, which Chris calls “an under-told stor[y]”.
StarWind VTL? What? Yes, And It’s Great!
At Storage Field Day, StarWind presented on using Virtual Tape Libraries to backup to object storage. For Dan Frith this makes a compelling case for SMBs who aren’t in a position to rearchitect their data protection, but want to modernize their backup targets.
The Challenge of Scale
Josh De Jong go his idea of scale adjusted after hearing Dropbox present at Storage Field Day. In his previous SMB experience, 20-30TB had been a large amount of storage. Moving into the enterprise, multiple petabytes became more of the norm. But at Dropbox, they referred to 30PB as a “toy system.” Josh overviews many of the problems and solutions Dropbox showed to operate at such scale.
Cohesity Basics – Auto Protect
There was a lot to digest from Cohesity’s Storage Field Day presentation. Dan Frith highlights their Auto Protect feature, which allows you to add a source and have Cohesity automatically protect all of the VMs in a folder or cluster, including any new VMs added to that source. Dan found it a great feature, although he wished it was turned on by default.
Datrium @ Storage TechFieldDay
Datrium’s Andre Leibovici posted about their recent Storage Field Day presentation on his blog. The company presented on the latest updates to their DVX solution. Andre shares some delegate coverage and full video from the event.
The Risk of Shared Service Level Agreements
While watching Storage Field Day, Chris Evans heard IBM present about their SLA policy within their backup software. In this post, he clarifies how a service-level agreement differs from service-level objective, and why the distinction matters in the enterprise.
Dropbox – It’s Scale Jim, But Not As We Know It
Dropbox’s recent presentation at Storage Field Day certainly left an impression with the delegates, and Dan Frith is no exception. The company reviewed their Magic Pocket architecture, which enabled them to move infrastructure back on-premises from the public cloud. For Dan, the big takeaway here is that this was an innovative solution for Dropbox, but the level of investment and development is definitely not for every organization with massive scalable storage needs.
#SFD15: Datrium impresses
Glenn Dekhayser saw a lot of interesting technology at Storage Field Day, but Datrium stood out to him with their focus on end user experience and value extraction from technology. Using a looser definition of HCI with discretely scalable compute and storage nodes, Datrium’s solution offers all the table stakes features expected in an HCI system. What distinguishes it is a robust GUI with lots of telemetry and easy provisioning options, as well as tight cloud integration with AWS.
Commentary: White Papers Don’t Impress Me Much
In this post, Dr. Rachel Traylor looks at the current state of industry white papers. After surveying some recent papers promising architectural overviews and technical details, she mostly found them more akin to marketing materials due to the lack of citations and substance. She expresses this frustration with a little help from Shania Twain.
IBM Spectrum Protect Plus Has A Nice Focus On Modern Data Protection
At Storage Field Day, IBM presented on their SpectrumProtect Plus, their “SLA-based data protection”. Dan Frith breaks down what this means, essentially it’s software that supports the ability to meet SLAs through configuration-level service level objectives. While Dan may take issue that this isn’t really “SLA-based”, he thinks it shows that IBM is working to provide modern data protection solutions for their customers.
NetApp and IBM gotta take risks
At Storage Field Day, Chin-Fah Heoh heard from two companies with a considerable legacy in IT: NetApp and IBM. The former presented on their Data Pipeline, ONTAP 9.3 updates, and ONTAP Select. IBM meanwhile highlighted their data protection offerings with SpectrumProtect Plus.
