With all the talk about edge computing lately, including our forthcoming Edge Field Day event, Chris Evans takes a look at the space. Recalling Field Day presentations by Dell and Scale Computing, Chris considers the hardware, software, application, and data requirements for edge deployment. Learn more by reading his article as well as the recent posts by Stephen Foskett at Gestalt IT, and tune in for Edge Field Day in February!
VMworld 2021 – Bringing It All Together With Project Ensemble
On his personal site, Architecting IT.com, Chris Evans writes his takeaways from VMware’s VMworld 2021. Specifically, he compares VMware’s Project Ensemble, displayed at the event, to other products such as those presented at a past Cloud Field Day event by Morpheus Data, in a past Tech Field Day appearance by Platform9, and the products displayed by ZeroStack during a Virtualization Field Day event, which he attended at as a delegate. Click the link below for more context behind these comparisons.
Rubrik, Cohesity and the Battle for NoSQL Backup
As always, Chris Evans has a keen insight into the backup market. He recently updated a post about Rubrik’s acquisition of Datos IO to add in some additional perspective on the NoSQL backup market. With Cohesity acquiring Imanis Data, Chris sees this as both companies trying to bridge the gap between traditional backup and data management, something always easier said than done.
Western Digital Redefines DRAM Caching
Chris Evans digis into Western Digital’s Ultrastar DC ME200. This is a solution to extend server DRAM using caching into byte-addressable NAND. Chris does a great job of giving this a technical overview, and considering if this will find a welcoming market, or simply cover up Western Digital’s lack of a true storage-class memory solution. He also highlights similar efforts to use NAND as a memory cache, specifically citing Diablo Technologies’ Memory1 solution, which he saw back in 2016 at a Tech Field Day event.
Rubrik Acquires Datos IO – Backup Wars Looming?
In this piece, Chris Evans shares his thoughts on Rubrik’s recent acquisition of Datos IO. This makes sense as a way for the company to grab an early leader in the NoSQL backup market, and increases their overall backup capability surface area. Overall he sees this down the line of providing another way for Rubrik to transition from backup into an overall data management company.
What are Storage Class Memory and Persistent Memory?
In this post, Chris Evans breaks down the differences between Persistent Memory and Storage Class Memory. The former puts non-volatile media directly in the DIMM slot, providing storage with extremely low latency, but requiring changes to BIOS and OS to address properly. The latter uses NAND and DRAM in a tiered system to effectively increase the addressable memory to the system. An example being Storage Field Day presenter Diablo Technologies. Of course, thanks to marketing, these terms are often interchangeable, but the article does a good job making the technical distinction clear.
Has NVMe Killed off NVDIMM?
Chris Evans looks at the impact here of NVMe on the nascent NVDIMM market. Without needing to reorganize architectures and with OS support already in place, Chris sees NVMe has having a number of advantages. He still sees a place for NVDIMMs in the data center, but perhaps its place is much smaller than previously assumed.
2017 Predictions, Prospects, and Prognostications
One of the best part of the New Year is the spate of predictions. Taylor Riggan has his own set, and they forecast a really interesting 2017 for enterprise IT. Taylor has some thoughts on where OpenStack, Hybrid Cloud, and Object Storage usage. He provides some really in-depth thoughts, so make sure you check it out!
Generating Maps of Your Traffic
For a network engineer, it sometimes feels impossible to avoid traceroute. Tim Miller thinks it can be a valuable tool to see where traffic is getting dropped, but it’s not without its issues. He’s highlighted some other solutions in previous posts, but the one he’s looking at today is SolarWinds. Their NetPath tool has gone from a lab toy to an official feature of their Network Performance Monitor solution in a little under a year. Tim finds it a really impressive tool. Even though it requires Windows-based polling appliances in a network, a Linux guy like Tim can still be tempted. It gives historical information layer on top of what you would find with a traceroute, and adds multipathing. Overall, Tim sees this as a very practical tool to help disentangle issues in increasingly complex networks.
Rubrik Firefly – Now with physical, edge, and moar cloud!
Rubrik Firefly – Now with physical, edge, and moar cloud!
Metadata search helps to offload some DB-like operations to storage
Metadata search helps to offload some DB-like operations to storage
Diablo Technologies Makes Memory Cheap With Memory1
Diablo Technologies Makes Memory Cheap With Memory1
