Chin-Fah Heoh was a man on a mission at Commvault GO. He went there looking for some answers about the company’s plans with their recently acquisition of Hedvig. In this piece, he discusses what he found out and breaks down all the other announcements. Being based in Malaysia, this piece provides a great lens to see a lot of the Commvault news from a different perspective. Be sure to check out all the technical sessions Chin-Fah and the other delegates saw at Tech Field Day Exclusive at Commvault GO 2019.
Commvault Big Bet
In this piece, Chin-Fah Heoh considers what the recent acquisition of Hedvig means for Commvault. As a not infrequent Field Day delegate, and well familiar with the world of enterprise storage in general, Chin-Fah breaks down what Commvault is getting in this acquisition, if it was a good exit for Hedvig, and what the future might hold. Be sure to dig into the details.
Scaling New HPC With Composable Architecture
Liqid presented at Tech Field Day Extra at Dell Technologies World, after announcing a new partnership with Dell EMC ahead of the show. Chin-Fah Heoh was there and got a deep dive into the Liqid Composable Architecture. What he saw excited him, with Liqid offering a simple-to-use, high-bandwidth, low latency approach to composable infrastructure.
Connecting Ideas and People With Dell Influencers
Chin-Fah Heoh attended Dell Technologies World this year, and was a delegate at the Tech Field Day Extra event we held there as well. During the presentations, he was introduced to Liqid, Kemp, and Big Switch Networks, all of whom recently announced major partnerships with Dell. For him, events focused on influencers are at their best when they foster real connections with real people, something he’s definitely got out of his Field Day experiences.
We Got to Keep More Data
As a delegate at Tech Field Day Exclusive At Intel Data-Centric Innovation Day, Chin-Fah Heoh got to hear a startling estimate from Intel, that only about 2% of data worldwide is analyzed. For Chin-Fah, data analytics is a competitive edge, so keeping and analyzing more data is essential for any business. In this post, he looks at what Intel presented at the event that can help organizations achieve this goal.
Dell and the Power of Influencing Influencers
Chin-Fah, HEOH is very impressed by how Dell is handling influencer relations, and discusses his reaction to being invited to Dell Technologies World at the end of April. Chin-Fah has been a Field Day delegate as well and says their work with influencers reminds him of how we do things here at Gestalt IT. Thanks!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Catch Up (Fast) – IBM Spectrum Protect Plus
It’s been almost a full calendar year since Chin-Fah Heoh last heard from IBM at Storage Field Day. They returned again last month to give an update on IBM Spectrum Protect Plus. While still a relatively nascent offering, SPP is starting to gain industry recognition, and adding must-have features for the backup and recovery market. For Chin-Fah, the pricing is there to appeal to the SMB/SME market, and he sees potential in it with regional cloud service providers as well.
VAST Data Must Be Something Special
It’s always a unique experience when a company comes out of stealth at a Field Day event. At Storage Field Day last month, the delegates, including Chin-Fah Heoh, got to be part of the public unveiling for Vast Data. Aside from having a very amiable tech evangelist, Chin-Fah was impressed by their unique architecture, which uses stateless compute nodes running the Vast Universal File System in containers, which connect to Databoxes that store metadata via Intel Optane. Their data reduction was just as impressive, and left Chin-Fah with a very positive impression about this emerging company.
A Storage Field 18 I Will Go – for the Fun of It
Chin-Fah Heoh proves that writing a blog post about a forthcoming Storage Field Day event doesn’t limit the author to simple prose. Channeling his inner Sondheim, he wrote a catchy little ditty about what he’s expecting to see at the event. Feel free to use it at your next karaoke night!
Is Pure Play Storage good?
Chin-Fah Heoh has seen a number of pure play storage companies present at Storage Field Day over the years. In this post, he looks at the Gartner Magic Quadrants from 2010 and 2017, looking how the Big 5 storage companies have fared in that time. NetApp remains the only company in the leaders quadrant, with Pure Storage as the notable new kid on the block. But for Chin-Fah, this doesn’t represent the death of pure play storage, rather representative of a changing of the guard.
Disaggregation or hyperconvergence?
Chin-Fah Heoh got to thinking about the current crop of HCI solutions. He thought of how companies like NetApp and Datrium have architectures that provide discrete data and compute nodes. But after seeing the presentation from DriveScale at Tech Field Day this month, disaggregation may actually prove to be more important for organizations. Their approach allows for assembling storage, compute and networking resources into virtual clusters, composing them as needed. Chin-Fah needs to dig deeper into their solution, but was fascinated at the prospect.
Oracle Cloud Infrastructure to prove skeptics wrong
Chin-Fah Heoh got to hear from Oracle at Tech Field Day earlier this month. They gave a detailed look at their Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, outlining recent enhancements and updates to the service. Despite some corporate baggage, Chin-Fah found the product messaging remarkably focused, with OCI seeking to offer the highest performance, enterprise-grade IaaS on the market. What impressed Chin-Fah the most was OCI’s willingness to break with legacy in order to do what’s best for customers.
The Network is Still the Computer
DriveScale first came to Chin-Fah Heoh’s attention when NFS guru Brian Pawlowski joined their team earlier this year. At Tech Field Day earlier this month, he got a deeper dive into how the company’s scale-out architecture is designed to address the needs of webscale data processing. He got a look at their virtual cluster framework and how they use a advanced switching fabric to bridge compute and storage with extremely low latency. Chin-Fah came away impressed with the engineering talent at the company.
The Dell EMC Data Bunker
At Tech Field Day, Dell EMC announced a new product to the delegates, the Cyber Recovery solution, coming from their Data Protection BU. Chin-Fah Heoh wrote up his thoughts after seeing the announcement as a delegate at the event. He frames Cyber Recovery as a data bunker, isolating mission critical secondary data, while preserving the integrity of the copy. Chin-Fah thinks this falls more into the security camp rather than the storage side, but it appears to line up well with enterprise security standards.
Hammering Next Gen Hybrid Clouds
Chin-Fah Heoh looks at Hammerspace, a company that came out of stealth at Tech Field Day this week. Chin-Fah sees them offering Metadata-as-a-Service, delivering just the right data needed for applications, using metadata to determine those requirements, and delivering it in the cloud of on-premises. The company has an impressive data-as-a-service portfolio at launch, but Chin-Fah was impressed by this capability in itself.
