For Matt Leib, backup is key to any business’s success, but only a part of it. Just as key for a business is the ability to recover data quickly and accurately. What’s caused secondary storage solutions, like Cohesity offers, to explode over the past few years is the ability to leverage backup data with analytics. At Storage Field Day, Cohesity showed a new wrinkle, now offering an App Store to easily link suites of applications together. This can greatly speed deployment across a variety of hardware. For Matt, it’s a sign of maturity for the secondary storage market, and a key differentiator for Cohesity.
96-Layer NAND in Perspective: WDC Video
After a briefing with Western Digital, Jim Handy gives some perspective on the significance of 96-layer NAND flash. By providing a scale model of the new NAND, it showed the terrific complexity and precision needed to operate at this level of density. For more of a technical deep dive into Western Digital’s 3D NAND, be sure to check out their recent presentation from Storage Field Day.
Voices in Data Storage – Episode 13: A Conversation With Liran Zvibel
In this episode of Voice in Data Storage, host Enrico Signoretti spoke with WekaIO CEO Liran Zvibel. They discussed the company’s high performance parallel file system as demoed at Storage Field Day this year, as well as Liran’s background working on IBM’s XIV Storage System.
EP21 – Discovering Weka.io, the World’s Fastest Filesystem With Barbara Murphy
On this latest episode of the Tech Unplugged Podcast, Max Mortillaro and Arjan Timmerman spoke with Barbara Murphy, VP of Marketing at Weka.io. Max saw the company present at Storage Field Day earlier this year. The two host have a conversation digging into the company’s claim of having the fastest, most scalable parallel file system.
Vast Data at Storage Field Day 18
In this post, Erik Ableson looks at what VAST Data presented at Storage Field Day earlier this year. The company came fully out of stealth at the event, and showed off their approach to Disaggregated Shared Everything storage. Built on a foundation of persistent high speed memory and modern networking, Erik looks at whether VAST can fulfill their goal of eliminating spinning disks entirely.
The Fast WekaIO File System Saves You Money!
Jon Klaus takes a look at what he saw from WekaIO at Storage Field Day. They claim to offer “the fastest and most scalable parallel file system for AI and technical compute workloads.” That’s an impressive claim, but at the event, Jon got to see an equally impressive demo, showing stunning performance for single client random read and random writes, which wasn’t disrupted by failing nodes. Overall Jon found WekaIO’s file system to be a solid offering with excellent performance, wrapped in a modern and intuitive GUI.
Western Digital : Innovation in 3D NAND and Low Latency Flash NAND
Western Digital has been a long time mainstay of the storage industry. Max Mortillaro heard from them at Storage Field Day earlier this year, and it fit into his larger considerations of the state of the solid state memory industry. In this post, he looks at how Western Digital has remained relevant as the industry transition from disk to flash. The company faces a similar transition as storage is starting to close the gap between DRAM and flash. Max looks at Western Digitals announcements around Low Latency Flash NAND and Storage Class Memory.
Voices in Data Storage – Episode 12: A Conversation With Bill Borsari
Enrico Signoretty recently published a new episode of the Voices in Data Storage podcast, talking to Datera’s Bill Borsari. They dig into a little background on the company, and how they bridge a gap between the traditional infrastructure requirements and the modern infrastructure requirements. It’s a great conversation with a fascinating approach to storage technology.
Modernizing Data Protection for a Digitally Driven World
IBM has now presented at a couple of Storage Field Day events. The company has a long legacy in IT, but a lot of delegates and viewers were wondering how they would position themselves in the modern data center. Alicia Blessing looks at what they presented with IBM Spectrum Protect Plus. This is built from the ground up to provide modern data protection.
A VAST-ly Different Storage Story
VAST Data made their first big public splash since coming out of stealth at Storage Field Day last month. At they event, they showed off their “disaggregated share everything architecture” meant to offer hyperscaler agility and scalability without the cost and data gravity of the public cloud. For Becky Elliott, their message of reducing complexity while allowing for scale really resonated.
Storage Field Day 18 – Wrap-Up and Link-O-Rama
It’s always a pleasure to have Dan Frith at an event, and the most recent Storage Field Day was no exception. As always Dan provides a comprehensive list of not just the posts he’s written, but those from all the other delegates as well. If you want to get caught up on all the delegates thoughts from the event, it’s a great place to start!
Developing Data Protection Solutions in the Era of Data Management
IBM returned to Storage Field Day this year, providing an update to the delegates on IBM Spectrum Protect Plus. In this context, Max Mortillaro provides some historical perspective on data protection and management, emphasizing that every organization is on a different path on the journey toward better data management. In this, IBM Spectrum Protect Plus is a laudable effort build from scratch to address modern data protection needs. While it may not be as feature rich as competing solutions, for those organizations with a strong history with IBM, it should serve them well as they navigate their own data management journey.
Datera and the Rise of Enterprise Software-Defined Storage
In this post, Dan Frith takes a look at what Datera presented at Storage Field Day earlier this year. This isn’t the first time Dan has looked at their “Enterprise Software-Defined Storage” solutions, and he remains impressed how the company blends continuous optimization with high availability. This positions them as a unique value proposition in an otherwise crowded software-defined datacenter world. They seem to have the right blend of product and messaging to bridge the glacial inertia typical of enterprise storage with top-down management trying to move to the cloud.
Voices in Data Storage – Episode 11: A Conversation With Renen Hallak
This episode of Voices in Data Storage features an interview with VAST Data founder and CEO Renen Hallak. Host Enrico Signoretti saw VAST Data during their Storage Field Day presentation last month, and was impressed by what he saw. The company set out to “redo” storage, offering Tier 1 performance without the accompanying price tag. They discuss how emerging technologies like QLC flash and storage class memory are at the core of their new architecture.
WekaIO Continues to Evolve
WekaIO definitely made an impression on the Storage Field Day delegates last month, and Dan Frith is no exception. In this post, he looks at WekaIO Matrix. This is a feature rich software-defined storage solution that can run across a breadth of environments, offering performance faster than a local system. The do this with a storage architecture built to take advantage of the native capabilities of flash, without worrying about legacy HDD. Dan thinks they made a compelling case to move people who need the performance of DAS with the benefits of distributed storage.
VAST Data – No More Tiers Means No More Tears?
Dan Frith is shedding no tears for tiers after seeing VAST Data come out of stealth at Storage Field Day last month. Leveraging a greenfield architecture built around NVMe over fabric and Storage Class Memory, they claim to offer Tier 1 performance at scale without the actual cost of Tier 1 storage. Dan was definitely impressed by the ambition of their approach, and thinks their disaggregated share-everything approach to storage is impressive.
How To: Clone Windows 10 From SATA SSD to M.2 SSD (& Fix Inaccessible Boot Device)
Jon Klaus received a Western Digital Black SN750 M.2 SSD for testing at Storage Field Day. Naturally, he wanted to use this fast little NVMe drive as his Windows Boot disk. What he thought was going to be a simply clone and swap from an older SSD turned into anything but. If you’re considering swapping out a drive on an old Windows install, it’s a good idea to read Jon’s post to understand the UEFI vs BIOS when it comes to setting up boot drives. Who knew it could get so complicated?
Can the WekaIO Matrix File System Be Faster Than DAS?
Direct Attached Storage (DAS), offers a lot of advantages in terms of speed and latency, but comes with a suite of problems. If nothing else, it forces applications to deal with data integrity and resiliency issues instead of having it as part of SAN. Chris Evans looks at how WekaIO addresses the shortcomings of DAS while keeping the high-performance and low latency. At Storage Field Day last month, they showed how their scale-out parallel file system can provide exceptional performance that’s only limited by the bandwidth of the network card. By rewritting at the file system layer and lower, WekaIO is able to offer distributed storage built to take full advantage of modern storage media.
The Full Force of Western Digital
Chin-Fah Heoh saw Western Digital present at Storage Field Day over three weeks ago, and he’s still wrapping his head around everything he saw. That’s because the company offers an incredible breadth of solutions, being one of the rare “silicon to system” companies in IT. From updates to NAND flash to storage subsystems, what stood out was the shift in Western Digital from a company that just provides drives and storage, to one that’s thinking about how to solve customer’s big data and fast data problems.
IBM Spectrum Protect Plus – More Than Meets the Eye
Dan Frith attended Storage Field Day in February and got an update on IBM’s Spectrum Protect Plus software. After learning about it at Storage Field Day 15, Dan recognized the importance of their approach to data protection. With this update, he sees that the company is working to enable their customers to modernize data protection with new use cases and analytics.
