Former Tech Field Day delegate Chin-Fah Heoh delves into the implications of AI on storage and data management, drawing from Gina Rosenthal’s recent article about Solidigm at AI Field Day. Chin-Fah discusses the escalating demands placed on storage systems by AI workloads, emphasizing the critical need for high-performance solutions. The stages of AI data processing (ingestion, preparation, training, checkpointing, and inferencing) require high read IOPS, ultra-high write throughput, and low latency. Chin-Fah also explores the role of data governance in ensuring the integrity and trustworthiness of data for AI applications. Read more on his blog!
Measuring Sustainability in Enterprise Storage
Max Mortillaro attended the latest Storage Field Day as a virtual delegate and provided his thoughts on Pure Storage’s presentation of their ESG report covering the company’s sustainability policy. You can watch Pure Storage’s presentation and all of the presentations from the Storage Field Day event on the Tech Field Day website!
Should You Bash Your Storage Competitor?
Check out this post from Chin-Fah Heoh on Storage Gaga or on the Tech Field Day website about how technology-based companies and their marketing competitors are turning a blind eye to unnecessary bashing habits in the storage networking industries.
Celebrating MinIO
Minio presented at Storage Field Day back in 2020 and Chin-Fah Heoh, a Field Day delegate, is still going “Gaga” over them! Let’s celebrate the min in Minio with Chin-Fah! Check out his thoughts here.
Kubernetes Persistent Storage Managed Well
Chin-Fah Heoh first saw StorPool back at Storage Field Day as a delegate more than a year ago and has followed their progress closely since then. In his blog, StorageGaga, he explores what he says are the many advantages of StorPool Storage and their market offering, including its expansion into managing Kubernetes services. Check out Chin-Fah’s full analysis of StorPool’s Kubernetes prowess on his blog.
Intel Is Still a Formidable Force
Chin-Fah Heoh saw the videos of Intel presenting at Storage Field Day and was impressed with their progression in terms of storage technologies. Chin-Fah writes that their Intel’s Optane technology has been a true game changer. If you haven’t yet, be sure to take a look at Intel’s presentations on their Optane technologies the Tech Field Day website!
Commvault Metallic With Microsoft Azure – From Seismic to Tectonic
During Tech Field Day Exclusive at Commvault GO 2019, Chin-Fah Heoh got to see the initial announcement about Commvault Metallic. This offers SaaS backup and recovery, with a modern UI and able to be deployed across a number of different models. Now Commvault has announced a deeper integration of Metallic with Microsoft Azure, something Chin-Fah sees as a significant move. By integrating with Azures engineering, Go To Market, and sales teams, he sees this as creating an ecosystem of innovation to purpose build the Metallic integration deeper than any vendor has so far with Microsoft Azure applications.
Dell EMC Isilon Is an Emmy Winner!
It’s not uncommon for presenters at Field Day events to win awards within the industry. We’re proud that our events feature the most influential and innovative companies in IT, so it’s not surprising to see that recognized. But it’s not often that we see one win an Emmy! That’s what Dell EMC’s Isilon did, winning a Technology & Engineering Emmy Award for early development of hierarchical storage management systems. Chin-Fah Heoh has been familiar with Isilon’s OneFS for a long time. He has respect for the platform for offering a real true clustered, scale-out file system that has proved it’s value over its life. He details the history of the platform, and how the company showed at Storage Field Day how they’re supporting running OneFS in the cloud.
StorageGRID Gets Gritty
Object storage has a reputation for being “cheap and deep”, offering scalable, affordable storage without much in the way of performance considerations. At Storage Field Day, Chin-Fah Heoh liked that NetApp challenged that narrative with their StorageGRID Webscale (SGWS) solution. With all-flash solutions available, SGWS is not a new platform, but offers new performance capabilities with a very mature software backend. While Chin-Fah wonder what might have been if NetApp had pivoted the platform to performance a little earlier, he sees the company properly positioning the solution for the general purpose object storage market.
Paradigm Shift of Dev to Storage Ops
Chin-Fah Heoh considers how the advent of containers and Kubernetes have moved storage and DevOps closer than ever. In his mind, the Container Storage Interface commonly used in the industry cannot scale nearly as well in the cloud like object storage, which is clearly where container storage needs to go in the future. At Storage Field Day, he heard how MinIO is looking to bridge the divide between Dev and Ops with their Kubernetes friendly high performance object storage platform. He then looks at how VMware is adapting to the times with Project Pacific, which includes Cloud Native Storage and has chosen MinIO as the resident object storage provider. It’s a key integration for a high performance scalable storage solution.
DellEMC Project Nautilus Re-Imagine Storage for Streams
Chin-Fah Heoh got to hear about Dell EMC’s Project Nautilus at Storage Field Day. This is their composite software platform for both streaming real-time data and historical batch data. A key component of this is Pravega, an open source storage framework for streaming data. This allows for storage streams to be treated as a new class of storage primitives, which can use protocols like Fibre Channel, SMB or NFS. Data streams can then further be fed into analytics frameworks like Flink and Apache Spark. With the increasing importance of edge computing, Chin-Fah sees Project Nautilus as an very timely framework.
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.
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.
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.
Tiger Bridge Extending NTFS to the Cloud
For Chin-Fah Heoh, just seeing the name of Tiger Technology on the presenter list for Storage Field Day was enough to get him excited. Then he realized that he was familiar with the company in the media and entertainment space. At the event, the showed their Tiger Bridge solution, which effectively lets you extend NTFS into the cloud. While NTFS is a venerable file system, for Chin-Fah, it’s also the most reliable and go-to file system in Windows. They showed how their hierarchical storage management tiering tech is capable of replication and disaster recovery, while at the same time reducing those dreaded cloud egress charges. It was an great debut presentation for the company at Storage Field Day, be sure to check out their full video.
Hadoop Is Truly Dead – LOTR Version
Chin-Fah Heoh didn’t initially set out to write a post declaring the death of Hadoop. But what he heard at Storage Field Day made it seem like he had to. While at the event, he participated in the On-Premise IT Roundtable podcast at Pure Storage, ostensibly to talk about storage metrics. However Hadoop quickly became the focus of the discussion. From there, other presentations further showed solutions that made it impossible to consider any other premise. Because this is the world of technology, Chin-Fah doesn’t think it’s impossible for Hadoop to live again in some other fashion, but right now the case is beyond terminal.
Zoned Technologies With Western Digital
A lot has changed since Chin-Fah Heoh last heard from Western Digital at Storage Field Day. Though only a year has passed, the company sold IntelliFlash to Data Direct Networks and is seemingly trying to sell off their ActiveScale object storage platform. But that doesn’t mean Chin-Fah isn’t excited to hear from the company. Indeed, their advances in Zoned Storage points to a bright future. We can’t wait to hear more about this from Western Digital and Chin-Fah.
Is General Purpose Object Storage Disenfranchised?
It’s hard to image a Storage Field Day without the sharp insight and experience of Chin-Fah Heoh around the delegate table. In this post, he writes how general purpose object storage experienced a unique race to the bottom in Malaysia, with hosting companies chasing the lowest price per TB. This created a set of assumptions about object storage that aren’t strickly true. That’s why he’s excited to hear from MinIO at Storage Field Day, who break free from the classic cheap, slow, and cloud-locked assumptions.
Time to Advocate Common Data Personality
In this post Chin-Fah Heoh talks about the challenges of getting valuable and relevant data from a data lake in a timely fashion. He considers different approaches he’s seen over time, coming to the latest in creating intent-based data personalities. For Chin-Fah, it all comes down to handling metadata.
Brainy Commvault
It’s no secret that a lot of storage companies are suddenly rebranding as data management companies. But how do you go beyond a rebrand and actually make substantive change to a large organization. Commvault shared their approach to managing this duality with a brain lateralization metaphor. Chin-Fah Heoh looks at if this answers his questions about why Commvault recently acquired Hedvig.
