It’s not uncommon to see Chin-Fah Heoh as a delegate at Storage Field Day. However for the first time, he’ll be around the table for Tech Field Day this week. He’s particularly looking forward to seeing more from Hammerspace, and getting a deeper dive with DriveScale. You can watch the presentations along with Chin-Fah on our live stream.
The Commvault 5Ps of change
After attending Tech Field Day Exclusive presentations at Commvault GO 2018, Chin-Fah Heoh thinks its obvious that big things are happening with Commvault. In this post, he looks at how the company is making fundamental changes to five areas: People, Process, Pricing, Products and Perception.
Let there be light with Commvault Activate
At Tech Field Day Exclusive at Commvault GO 2018, Chin-Fah Heoh heard about Commvault Activate, the company’s new data insights platform. For Chin-Fah, this brought back a flood of memories on the importance of storage resource management. For him, Commvault Activate’s ability to search, discover and learn about different types of data, data context and relationships within the organization is vital for anyone embracing modern data management or digital transformation.
Huawei Dorado – All about Speed
At Storage Field Day last month, Chin-Fah Heoh and the other delegates got to hear Huawei present for the first time. The presentation went into an architectural deep dive on Dorado V3, their premiere all-flash storage array. Chin-Fah was impressed with the speed the array is capable of, even with triple parity RAID. He’s looking forward to seeing more from the company going forward.
Own the Data Pipeline
In this post, Chin-Fah Heoh takes a look at NetApp’s Data Pipeline, which they outlined during their Storage Field Day presentation earlier this month. Chin-Fah puts the idea of a data pipeline into historical context, and looks at how NetApp is using it for AI workloads.
NetApp and IBM gotta take risks
At Storage Field Day, Chin-Fah Heoh heard from two companies with a considerable legacy in IT: NetApp and IBM. The former presented on their Data Pipeline, ONTAP 9.3 updates, and ONTAP Select. IBM meanwhile highlighted their data protection offerings with SpectrumProtect Plus.
Cohesity SpanFS – a foundational shift
For some time now, Cohesity has been using the metaphor of the storage iceberg to show how secondary storage is often largely hidden, but a source of siloed frustration for IT. Chin-Fah Heoh heard from Cohesity at Storage Field Day, and learned how the company’s hyperconverged data platform helps address secondary storage in a unified way. Underlying this platform is SpanFS, their cloud-scale, distributed data protection filesystem.
Magic happening
Since they’ve launched, Chin-Fah Heoh has seen Dropbox change from an innovative Enterprise File Synchronization and Sharing service to a full fledged collaboration platform. At Storage Field Day, he got a architectural overview of how the company transitioned away from AWS to their own infrastructure. This required moving more than 500PB of customer data, and saved the company over $75 million.
Storage dinosaurs evolving too
In the age of cloud, the traditional storage admin are often seen as relics of the past. But for Chin-Fah Heoh, these old “dinosaurs” are actually evolving to become vital to the modern enterprise. This is because they have a deep understanding of data. At Storage Field Day, he’s looking forward to hearing from companies like Hedvig and WekaIO on how they solve the problems of persistent storage in distributed systems. With these difficult data question more important than ever in the enterprise, Chin-Fah thinks its the best time to be a “storage dinosaur”.
My dilemma of stateful storage marriage
Chin-Fah Heoh has been thinking about stateful data in stateful storage containers and how they would interact with distributed applications containers and functions-as-a-service. This led to a consideration of what a distributed data systems would look like, wherein the idea of a “data center” seems like an oxymoron. He’s seen some past Storage Field Day companies offer pieces on how to get to a distributed data system. Chin-Fah will be at Storage Field Day next month, and looks forward to seeing how Hedvig and WekaIO will offer more pieces to this puzzle.
Always serendipitous Storage Field Days
We’re thrilled to have Chin-Fah Heoh returning for his fourth Storage Field Day event this March. In this post, he writes about how coming to the events has led to many serendipitous encounters and experiences have occurred as a result of attending, like getting a look at disruptive high performance multicloud technology from Elastifile. With a combination of new and veteran companies at this coming Storage Field Day, we can’t wait to see what his next bit of serendipity will be!
Of Object Storage, Filesystems and Multi-Cloud
IT has been calling for the elimination of silos seemingly forever. When cloud storage came along, it was thought this would solve storage silos. But as Chin-Fah Heoh points out in this piece, we just got siloed storage in the cloud. At Storage Field Day earlier this month, Chin-Fah got a look at Scality’s Zenko.io multi-cloud data controller. For him, this represents a new file system/data fabric, which may signal a new phase for cloud storage. One which bring high performance I/O to the table.
The power of E8
Chin-Fah Heoh does not mince words when it comes to what he saw from E8 Storage at Storage Field Day. In his view, it’s the most complete solution of all the next gen NVMe storage technologies. Their solution offers high throughput, low latency storage, via RDMA fabric. With this they can offer 10 million IOPS, with 100µsecs for reads and 40µsecs for writes.
DellEMC SC progressing well
At Storage Field Day, Chin-Fah Heoh and the other delegates got a look at Dell EMC’s SC series midrange storage arrays, which came out of the company’s acquisition of Compellent back in 2010. The presentation highlighted the arrays RAID Tiering and All-Flash SC hardware lineup.
Commvault UDI – a new CPUU
From Commvault GO, Chin-Fah Heoh shares his thoughts on one of the shows central tenants, that IT is now centered around data technology. From what he saw, Chin-Fah believes the Commvault Universal Dynamic Index should become a core component of Central Protection Universal Units to manage data across organizations. This is a demonstration of Commvault’s emphasis on powerful simplicity.
Commvault calling again
Commvault GO is right around the corner, and Chin-Fah Heoh can’t wait to attend. In this post, Chin-Fah runs through his personal history with the company, going as far back as 2001. He then outlines why the company has been successful in the backup and recovery space, with a long track record of innovation. The conference will include a Tech Field Day Exclusive presentation, so be sure to check back for more great coverage.
Can NetApp do it a bit better?
At Storage Field Day earlier this month, the delegates saw a presentation at NetApp. Chin-Fah Heoh wrote up his thoughts. For him, the highlight was hearing from company founder Dave Hitz, who spoke both during the presentation, and at a follow up lunch. He also liked what he saw from CloudSync, which he thought provided an interesting service for going between on-premise and AWS cloud. Make sure to check out the entire piece for Chin-Fah’s complete thoughts on the presentation.
The Engineering of Elastifile
Chin-Fah Heoh was at Storage Field Day last week. He’s written up his thoughts on what Elastifile presented, and came away “impressed to the max”. He thinks the company has put some in-depth computer science research behind their product, a truly distributed file system for object storage. The key to this is their internally designed consistency algorithm, Bizur. Check out the rest of the piece for a more in-depth look and the implications of their solution.
Ryussi MoSMB – High performance SMB
Chin-Fah Heoh saw a presentation from first time Storage Field Day company Ryussi, and they were talking about their MoSMB product, a proprietary SMB stack. Chin-Fah wondered what benefits it has over SAMBA, which has a long legacy and is free. Unlike SAMBA, MoSMB is designed for high availability and more demanding workloads. It also has support for enterprise grade applications like MS SQL and MSCS. Chin-Fah thinks there’s definitely an eager market for an enterprise-grade network file share system, and MoSMB seems up to the task.
