Although they presented a broad set of technology and products at Storage Field Day in February, Dan Frith focused on Western Digital’s composable infrastructure offerings. He likes their story and sees composability as a technology to “free the average enterprise IT shop from the shackles of resource management ineptitude”. It’s not magic, but it’s certainly cool!
NetApp, Cloudier Than Ever
While attending Storage Field Day in February, Enrico Signoretti learned more about NetApp’s NDAS data protection software. It takes advantage of NetApp’s snapshot and mirroring technology to convert file data to objects stored in the cloud. He sees great potential for this approach, disrupting their own status quo.
Weka.IO and My First Official Briefing
Before hearing WekaIO’s presentation at Storage Field Day last month, Matt Leib was well aware of the company. After hearing them on numerous podcasts and researching them independently, he’d been impressed. Parallel file systems can be perilous, but Matt found that WekaIO offers the resiliency, scalability, and ease of deployment that so many ersatz competitors lack. After seeing an architectural deep dive and demo at the event, Matt is now even more convinced about their solution.
WekaIO Controls Their Performance Destiny
Chin-Fah Heoh first heard from WekaIO last year at Storage Field Day and has been following the company ever since. After seeing them again at Storage Field Day last month, it proved to be an exclamation point on an already momentous 2018. Chin-Fah finds their architectural approach of complete control of the I/O subsystem and the NVMe devices and drivers provides them with incredible scale. They combine excellent throughput performance with very low latency using this approach. The piece further breaks down what makes WekaIO stand out, but Chin-Fah thinks this approach will lead to many more years of impressive growth ahead for the company.
#91 – Storage Field Day 18 in Review
In this episode of the Storage Unpacked podcast, Chris Evans and Martin Glassborow discuss what happened at Storage Field Day last month. The companies pretty cleanly divided between scale-out primary storage and data protection solutions. They touch on all the presenters, and where listeners can learn more about the event. Be sure to give it a listen as a preview before watching all of the event presentation video on our site.
Western Digital Develops Low-Latency Flash to Compete With Intel Optane
Anton Shilov of Anandtech wrote about what Western Digital presented at Storage Field Day last month. The company showed off their Low Latency Flash NAND. This potential Optane competitor would offer speeds and access latencies between current 3D NAND and DRAM. While stopping short of calling LLF NAND Storage Class Memory, Western Digital sees it having a similar role in the data center.
WD Keeps Fast Flash Optane Substitute in the Wings
Chris Mellor was not a delegate at Storage Field Day last month, but he covered Western Digital for Blocks and Files. The company presented on their new low-latency flash, offering microsecond access times pitched squarely between current 3D NAND and DRAM, with a price to match. For Chris, this puts in squarely in competition with Intel’s Optane SCM.
Bridges to the Clouds and More – NetApp NDAS
NetApp presented on their NetApp Data Availability Services at Storage Field Day. Chin-Fah Heoh thinks this generalist IT solution is interesting, enabling ONTAP primary systems to be backed up to an AWS bucket in as little as five clicks. He’s looking forward to seeing support for more public cloud storage providers, but thinks this is the right step for NetApp to start providing more value to customers for secondary storage.
VAST Data Launches With New Scale-Out Storage Platform
As one of the delegates at Storage Field Day, Chris Evans got to see VAST Data come out of stealth at the event. The company offers a new storage platform built on a disaggregated shared-everything architecture. Using a combination of QLC NAND flash and storage-class memory in an enclosure, linked across an NVMe fabric, any storage controller can talk to any NVMe device on the fabric. The result is a scalable architecture with no inherent pinch points, that could scale to thousands of storage nodes and tens of thousands of controllers.
EP17 – Storpool: Being the Best in Block Based Storage – With Boyan Ivanov
In this episode of the Tech Unplugged podcast, Max Mortillaro and Arjan Timmerman spoke with StorPool CEO Boyan Ivanov. They discussed a lot of what StorPool presented at Storage Field Day including the company’s product offering, how the product has evolved, and what to expect in the future.
StorPool – Block Storage Managed Well
Chin-Fah Heoh summarizes what StorPool offers pretty succinctly, they offer scale-out block storage technology, capable of delivering 1 million+ IOPS with sub-milliseconds response times. That’s a lot of lofty claims in one sentence. But Chin-Fah and the rest of the Storage Field Day delegates saw a demo at the event that left them believers. Just as impressive as their technology was their market focus. The company really sees themselves as a storage solution for cloud service providers, and Chin-Fah thinks that’s a perfect fit.
Voices in Data Storage – Episode 10: A Conversation With Boyan Ivanov
Enrico Signoretti put out a new episode of the Voices in Data Storage podcast. This time around, he spoke with StorPool CEO Boyan Ivanov. They discussed how he got started in IT, his history before founding StorPool, and what he thinks about object storage, serverless, and more. Both were at Storage Field Day, be sure to check out the full video of StorPool’s presentation.
How IBM Is Rethinking Its Data Protection Line-Up
IBM made a return to Storage Field Day last month, updating the delegates on their data protection portfolio. Enrico Signoretti wrote up his thoughts. While IBM has rebranded some existing data protection solutions, their IBM Data Protection Plus is built from the ground up for modern solutions. A lack of feature parity with competitors is somewhat made up for by an aggressive development team and roadmap. For existing IBM customers, it should be a great way to modernize data protection using an existing vendor relationship.
Democratizing Data Management
Enrico Signoretti wrote up an excellent piece on how Cohesity and NetApp are approaching the data management market. He shared it on his blog, as well as the Gigaom link here.
Cohesity – The Gold Standard in Data Management
Max Mortillaro heard an update from Cohesity at Storage Field Day last month. This post, Max puts what he saw in the context of what data management and secondary storage mean to both business and IT use cases. In either case, he finds Cohesity to offer a gold standard, one that should continue to expand with their newly announced developer portal to easily add 3rd party programs on their Cohesity DataPlatform.
StorPool, Fast Storage for Fast Times
Ray Lucchesi wasn’t sure what to make of StorPool when they started their presentation at Storage Field Day. But as they went on, Ray saw the light after a particularly impressive demo. The company was trying to match a Windows Server 2019 Hyper V benchmark which hit 13.8 M IOPS, which they were able to do without 1.5TB of Optane memory, 25Gbps RDMA Ethernet, and without having the VMs and its storage running on same nodes. To say Ray was impressed would be an understatement.
StorPool and the Death of Hardware-Defined Storage
Dan Frith got to hear from StorPool at Storage Field Day last week. The company has been in the software-defined storage game for a while, and offers a solution that lets you pool attached disk and SSD storage on servers into single shared block storage pool. Dan was impressed they include a robust set of data management features on top. He sees this as particularly appealing to service providers. While “hardware-defined” storage isn’t going away tomorrow, for Dan, solutions like StorPool show that SDS can definitely deliver compelling solutions without being locked into hardware.
Clever Cohesity
It’s not often that the delegates at Storage Field Day found enlightenment during a presentation. But that’s exactly what happened during Cohesity’s presentation for Chin-Fah Heoh. They demoed the Cohesity App Marketplace at the event. This made Chin-Fah rethink the company, not as a universal data services platform for secondary data. Rather, as CEO Mohit Aron stated, “data protection is just an app.” The marketplace shows him that the company is now focused on bringing the best possible value of the data to the business.
Dual Actuator Drives: An Interesting Trend
Matt Leib had written off spinning disks as a storage media that didn’t have much of a future. That changed after seeing Western Digital present at Storage Field Day last month. They previewed a tech demo for a dual-actuator drive, which would offer double the read IOPS in a single drive. This could provide a new way to increase performance in a space that had previously only had more density to offer. Matt found it a really exciting possibility.
Western Digital to Demo Dual-Actuator HDDs Next Week: Double the Actuators for Double the Perf
AnandTech’s Anton Shilov was excited to hear that Western Digital announced they would be demoing dual-actuator drives at OCP Summit. This came during the company’s Storage Field Day presentation, where they made the case why the drive design makes sense. While drive capacity has increased over time, performance has remained roughly the same, meaning that performance per TB has decreased over time. This is problematic for service providers who need to meet SLAs based on this metric. Adding in dual-actuator, effectively putting two drives in one enclosure, would reduce the combined power usage and increase read IOPS.
