Dell EMC is a familiar face at Storage Field Day. As an iconic company in the storage industry, it’s always good to get an update on their latest and greatest. Dan Frith got to hear from them with an update on PowerOne, its converged “all-in-one autonomous infrastructure.” Converged infrastructure isn’t the newest idea on the block, but Dan thinks that PowerOne offers a substantially different experience than solutions of the past. In this post, Dan outlines a lot of the important automation features that help it stand out, which takes away the need to constantly consult documentation and other support documents to get the system up and running. While a lot of enterprise interest is taken by HCI solutions, Dan makes the case that Dell EMC is truly innovating with converged infrastructure to meet real enterprise need and keep it relevant.
Komprise – Non-Disruptive Data Management
Data management has been one of the fastest growing sectors of IT, with new startups popping up and older companies pivoting to address it. Komprise showed off their robust data management solution at Storage Field Day, and Dan Frith wrote up his thoughts about it in this post. He found they offered a way to intelligently access and store your unstructured data, something increasingly important when so much unstructured data is generated on a daily basis, with no signs of slowing down. What really made Komprise stand out to Dan though is their emphasis on making this management transparent to the administrator, something often overlooked in competing solutions. Be sure to check out his post for a feature deep dive, then watch their full presentation.
NetApp and the StorageGRID Evolution
Dan Frith is no stranger with Storage Field Day and the storage industry at large. It’s that kind of deep expertise that lends itself to excellent analysis of each presenter. In this post, Dan breaks down the updates he heard from NetApp on their object storage platform, StorageGRID. For Dan, the update really shows how the workloads people are using for object storage have changed, and how NetApp is working to stay on top of this to offer a compelling product to customers. They also showed off new hardware in the form of the SG1000 compute appliance, the dense SG6060 with a 2PB per node capacity, and the all-flash SGF6024. With Dan’s background with service providers, he really appreciates the flexible deployment models NetApp offers, with multi-tenancy built into the solution from the ground up.
097: GreyBeards Talk Open Source S3 Object Store With AB Periasamy, CEO MinIO
Keith Townsend and Ray Lucchesi published an interview with MinIO CEO Anand Babu Periasamy. Ray got to hear from him and the rest of the MinIO team recently at Storage Field Day. MinIO offers a fully open source AWS S3 compatible object store that you can run anywhere, something particularly timely as more organizations turn to them. This allows customers to turn away from costly cloud object stores, and deploy in their own data centers for better economics at scale. They discuss how the company is developing features to match Amazon S3, and dig into the tech in the interview.
Western Digital, Composable Infrastructure, Hyperscalers, and You
Western Digital had an impressive presentation at Storage Field Day, showing the breadth of offerings from the iconic storage media company. At the event, their Senior Director of Product Management and Marketing Scott Hamilton dived into how NVMe over Fabrics solves a lot of the storage problems required to operate at the very largest scale, and enables interesting new models like composable infrastructure. For Dan Frith, composable infrastructure right now seems eager to cater to the needs of hyperscalers. But far from making Western Digital’s presentation uninteresting, their continued investment and refinement of the approach means that when enterprises want to move to that approach, the storage ecosystem will be ready for them.
Storage Field Day 19–Western Digital
At their recent Storage Field Day presentation, Western Digital led with a startling estimate. They project that by 2023, 103 zetabytes worth of IoT data will be produced. This is to say nothing of the ever increasing video and other data constantly being generated. Much of their presentation was how Western Digital was working to provide ever increasing storage densities across all mediums. It was not lost on Joey D’Antoni during the event that a lot of this work seemed to be driven by demand from hyperscalers, who will increasingly carry the growth of stored data. Developments with multi-actuator drives and zoned storage were shown to be key in how Western Digital will provide for the industries storage needs in the future.
Stellus Is Doing Something With All That Machine Data
It’s always great when events like Storage Field Day can help bring new companies to light and assist with their launch. Stellus Technologies recently came out of stealth at Storage Field Day, and definitely made an impression on our delegates. They built a solution to answer what they saw as the problem of exponential growth of unstructured data, combined with the massively increased size of data sources themselves. Quite simply, file systems developed for the age of spinning disk weren’t meeting current needs. Their Stellus Data Platform was designed to provide native parallelism, scale, and consistency, while letting organizations scale performance and capacity independently. They do this with a Key-Value-over-NVMe Fabrics architecture, that Dan thinks has major implications as organization adopt ever increasing drive capacities. We can’t wait to hear more from this exciting startup!
Stellus Delivers Scale-Out Storage With NVMe & KV Tech
Chris Evans got to hear from Stellus Technologies at Storage Field Day. It’s always great to hear from new and exciting companies at Field Day events, and Stellus was no exception. They showed off their Stellus Data Platform, which offers a scale-out architecture of multiple Data Manager nodes and Key-value Store nodes, connected through a shared network fabric. Chris sees value in their approach as the key-value nodes take care of any specific tasks that need to be performed in managing physical media, meaning that in the future new media can be dropped in without further consideration from IT, as long as Stellus knows how to use it efficiently.
Dell EMC Isilon – Cloudy With a Chance of Scale Out
Dell EMC’s Isilon storage solution has been in the industry for a while, providing capacity and performance scaling to meet the needs of petabyte scale organizations. In this piece, Dan Frith digs into the platforms latest updates, which he heard at Storage Field Day earlier this year. In the post, he looks at how Isilon’s OneFS file system is designed to provide non-disruptive scaling for organizations, and can run either in your data center or directly on a public cloud. The latter is a key new addition for Dan, who sees this having major implications for organizations looking to shift workloads to the cloud, providing features those customers depend on that aren’t available natively on public cloud platforms. Isilon is particularly popular for media and entertainment workloads, which often aren’t optimized for the cloud. This capability opens up whole new possibilities without having to abandon existing workflows and tools.
Dell Technologies PowerOne – Dell’s Private Cloud?
In this sponsored episode of the CTO Advisor podcast, host Keith Townsend talks with Dell EMC’s Conor Duffy, David Iovino, and Justin Jones. In the episode, they discuss the company’s PowerOne converged infrastructure, which was announced late last year. The company recently went into detail on this at Storage Field Day. They discuss where CI approaches fit in an IT landscape dominated by cloud and HCI, and Dell lays out how their investments in automation make PowerOne stand out. Keith wasn’t at the event, but got caught up on it with our comprehensive video coverage. After you listen to the episode, be sure to check out the video for yourself.
MinIO – Not Your Father’s Object Storage Platform
Dan Frith definitely was intrigued by what he heard from MinIO at Storage Field Day. They showed off their private cloud focused high performance, software-defined, distributed object storage server infrastructure. They made the distinction the private and public cloud have very different needs, and designed their solution with peta-scale. The solution is entirely written in Go and open-sourced, allowing organizations to avoid having a license key as the ultimate vendor leverage. Storage folks may have a set of expectations when it comes to object storage, but Dan makes the case that this is very different from the typical object storage stack. Dan does have some questions about how they will monetize the approach, but allowing storage admins to dig into the code and selling support subscriptions has worked well for some open source companies.
Gaming Is Driving Storage Innovation at WDC
Western Digital has long been a stalwart in the storage industry, designing storage media and innovating in that space for decades. At Storage Field Day, the provided updates on how a lot of their designs are catering toward hyperscale companies, or how the emergence of 5G will ramp up the need for faster performance with streaming video. But for Ray Lucchesi, what stood out in the session was how gaming was increasingly driving innovation with Western Digital. As a result of high performance needs, both of gamers to play games and for services that host them, WD detailed innovations with their WD Black line, which includes HDD, but is increasingly featuring SSDs. The showed how they are catering these drives to the unique requirements and environment found in gaming PCs.
Rebooting Infrascale
While Infrascale might have been a newer face to some of the Storage Field Day delegates, for Dan Frith, he was familiar with them since 2016 after researching the BC and DR landscape. For Dan, the company represents a welcome option in the DR-as-a-Service market, something he’s found underserved, especially in Asia. The company approached their Storage Field Day presentation as a way to reboot both their offerings and perception within the market. He’s excited to see the company taking this approach and can’t wait to hear more from them in the future as the continue to build off this rebooted image.
Dell EMC PowerOne Is Next-Gen Converged Infrastructure
Enrico Signoretti saw two sessions from Dell EMC at Storage Field Day that really piqued his interest, touching on DevOps and infrastructure automation. Enrico was really surprised by their presentation on PowerOne, a next-generation converged infrastructure. He’s admittedly not a fan on converged infrastructure in general, but in Dell EMC’s PowerOne Controller, Enrico sees something that could be an automation hub for automating all the storage infrastructure, simplifying the configuration management of large scale infrastructures. This kind of potential really stood out during the presentation.
Open Source and Open Standards Open the Future
Chin-Fah Heoh has heard from Western Digital at back to back Storage Field Day events, and appreciates that the company dives right into their informative sessions. During their presentation, they shared a few open source initiatives to address present inefficiencies. This included Zoned Storage to increase the efficiencies of shingled magnetic recording. They also reviewed their involvement with the RISC-V organization, the CHIPS Alliance, and Google OpenTitan project. Chin-Fah really appreciated their commitment to open source, and found it vital for the company to meet the ever increasing scaling needs of data storage.
Storage Management and DevOps
At a recent Storage Field Day event, Chris Evans got to hear from Audrius Stripeikis of Dell EMC discussing findings from their latest research on storage management automation. Their findings saw that organizations with ten or more platforms depended upon automation for service delivery. This meant dealing with three challenges, consistency, scale, and automating self-service. Dell EMC showed how their API framework is designed to meet those challenges , giving developers access to APIs to directly provision resources. Resources aren’t infinite, so Dell EMC built in additional systems to keep things manageable, but this approach simplified a lot of traditional bottlenecks in the pipeline.
Tiger Technology Brings the Cloud to You
Gina Rosenthal got to hear from Tiger Technology at Storage Field Day, a company that while new to the event, has been a force in the media and entertainment data management space since 2004. During the event, the company went into detail about the development of Tiger Bridge, their cloud tiering solution for Windows. This hierarchical storage management was designed to meet the video needs of airport surveillance, which needed to handle data from thousands of 4K cameras and retain it for six months. Tiger Bridge allows customers with similar needs to keep data on-site, while seamlessly taking advantage of the scale and economics of cloud object storage. Gina was definitely impressed with the solution, be sure to read her post for more details.
Infrascale Protects Your Infrastructure at Scale
Dan Frith frequently crosses an ocean to join us for Field Day events, including the most recent Storage Field Day. As someone particularly interested in data protection overall, he was really interested to hear from Infrascale. The company was new to Dan prior to the presentation, but judging from this post, Dan is very glad to have seen their in-depth technical presentation. He found the company distinguished themselves by offering hardware as a core part of the offering, rather than building a solution based on one of the major data protection vendors. Be sure to watch their presentation and let us know what you think!
SFD19: No Komprise on Knowing Thy Data
For Beck Elliott, Komprise stood at as one of her favorite presenters during Storage Field Day. While not her first introduction to the company, she appreciates their storage-agnostic approach and integration into file-based protocols, making it easy to use the solution with your existing storage infrastructure. The architecture for their analytics-driven data management platform is built around three pillars: dynamic data analytics, transparent data movement, and direct data access. There’s a lot to unpack from their presentation, so be sure to check out their full video coverage as well.
Komprise Is a Winner
Chin-Fah Heoh was not exactly oozing with excitement for Komprise’s presentation when he saw them on the Storage Field Day schedule. He’s seen and implemented more than his fair share of “file lifecycle and data management” software solutions, and expected to hear a familiar story. But after the presentation, he think it stood out as the best of the event. Their Observer VM grid-like architecture offered scalability often lacking in their competition, thanks to it being both agentless and “database-less”, meaning it can reach petabyte scale and beyond. Chin-Fah also loved their Transparent Move Technology, which creates a dynamic symlink once a file is moved. This symlink is associated with the Komprise Access Address and persists for the life of the file. He thought they offer a solid competitive offering in the market, and is excited how their analytics play could add additional value as well.
