Pure Storage FlashArray//C with QLC

Event: Storage Field Day 20

Appearance: Pure Storage Presents at Storage Field Day 20

Company: Pure Storage

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Personnel: Pete Kirkpatrick

Pete Kirkpatrick, VP Engineering, Chief Hardware Architect, gives a deep dive into the Pure Storage FlashArray//C with all-QLC flash. Pure Storage announced an all-QLC version of the FlashArray//C previously, but this array is now shipping, bringing a new price point for the all-flash storage array market with availability, reliability, and enormous capacity. Kirkpatrick gives some background into the use of QLC NAND flash, including the problems that arise with lower performance and endurance of this medium. In a discussion with the Storage Field Day delegates, he presents the unique technical capabilities Pure Storage brings to this type of flash.


Pure Storage FlashArray//C in the Marketplace

Event: Storage Field Day 20

Appearance: Pure Storage Presents at Storage Field Day 20

Company: Pure Storage

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Personnel: Mike Kieran

Mike Kieran, FlashArray Product Marketing, gives a review of Pure Storage’s innovation over the last decade, including the market dynamics of flash storage. FlashArray and FlashBlade give Pure Storage a complete set of offerings across the entire data storage market, with FlashArray//C, FlashArray//X, and FlashBlade. Pure Storage is announcing the shipment of the first all-QLC FlashArray//C, new use cases for workload consolidation, and the new economics of QLC-based flash.


Nebulon Cloud-Defined Storage Demo

Event: Storage Field Day 20

Appearance: Nebulon Presents at Storage Field Day 20

Company: Nebulon

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Personnel: Andy Roberts, Clint Wyckoff

Clint Wyckoff, Principal Technical Marketing Engineer, demonstrates the Nebulon solution. He begins with an overview of the demo infrastructure, which consists of an nPod on four servers equipped with Nebulon SPUs and local SSDs. The first demo focuses on a VMware vSphere environment with SSDs in each server. Next, Andy Roberts, Solutions Architect, shows how to automate Nebulon using python to boot from Nebulon using CentOS. Finally, Wyckoff uses an Ansible playbook to set up a Kubernetes cluster with the Nebulon CSI driver via helm chart. Throughout the presentation, the Storage Field Day delegates are ask questions and make comments.


The Cloud Based Control Plane – Nebulon ON

Event: Storage Field Day 20

Appearance: Nebulon Presents at Storage Field Day 20

Company: Nebulon

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Personnel: Josh Price, Michael Heyeck

Michael Heyeck, Cloud Architect, presents Nebulon’s cloud-based control plane, Nebulon ON. Because the management stack comprises three quarters of the traditional storage operating system, Nebulon ON allows all Nebulon users to have an up to date management solution at all times. The SPUs, installed in each application server, run a lightweight storage operating system called nebOS. Nebulon ON is a true web scale product, designed to securely manage customer infrastructure as a service. Infrastructure is provisioned according to standard templates, with VMware, Kubernetes, and MongoDB offered initially. Heyeck is joined by Josh Price, Hardware Architect, as he takes questions from the Storage Field Day delegates.


The Endpoint – Nebulon Services Processing Unit (SPU)

Event: Storage Field Day 20

Appearance: Nebulon Presents at Storage Field Day 20

Company: Nebulon

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Personnel: Josh Price

Josh Price, Hardware Architect, details the Nebulon Services Processing Unit. The SPU replaces the RAID card of FC HBA in the application server, connecting server SSDs and presenting local or shared volumes. A group of SPU-equipped servers is called an nPod by Nebulon, scaling out to 32 servers. The SPU includes all the attributes of an enterprise all-flash array: a high-performance 8-core CPU and 32 GB NVRAM, hardware-accelerated encryption engine, two data plane ports and one cloud connection. The SPU offloads the full storage stack, with enterprise data services and no software dependencies. Throughout the presentation, Price takes questions from the Storage Field Day delegates.


Introduction to Nebulon Cloud-Defined Storage

Event: Storage Field Day 20

Appearance: Nebulon Presents at Storage Field Day 20

Company: Nebulon

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Personnel: Craig Nunes, Siamak Nazari

Siamak Nazari, CEO, introduces Nebulon’s cloud-defined storage solution at Storage Field Day 20. Founded in 2018, Nebulon includes many of the original 3PAR team, including CEO David Scott (now Executive Chairman), Chief Software Architect Nazari (now CEO), Platform Director Sean Etaati (now CTO), and CMO Craig Nunes (now COO). Nebulon cloud-defined storage (CDS) is an on-premises server-based enterprise-class storage solution that consumes no server CPU or memory resources and is managed through the cloud.

COO Craig Nunes then joins the presentation to present the ideal customer case for Nebulon: Demanding infrastructure managers who need low latency storage for mission-critical on-premises workloads. They buy from their existing server vendor, with HPE and Supermicro leading the way.


Intel Optane Technology in the Cloud

Event: Storage Field Day 20

Appearance: Intel Presents at Storage Field Day 20

Company: Intel

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Personnel: Frank Ober, Kristie Mann

Frank Ober, Principal Engineer, Intel Optane Solutions, presents the use cases for Intel’s Optane™ technology in cloud computing. He presents the case of VKontakte, which leverages Intel Optane SSDs and persistent memory, as well as Intel FPGAs to accelerate their cloud solution and reduce compute cost 40%. The session closes with a summary from Kristie Mann, General Manager, Intel Optane Persistent Memory Division.

 


Intel Optane Persistent Memory Usages

Event: Storage Field Day 20

Appearance: Intel Presents at Storage Field Day 20

Company: Intel

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Personnel: Andrey Kudryavtsev, Kelsey Prantis, Kristie Mann

Kristie Mann, General Manager, Intel Optane Persistent Memory Division, discusses the use case for Intel’s Optane™ technology as persistent memory. Intel launched the first generation Optane Persistent Memory (PMem) product in 2019 and recently introduced the second-generation 200 series. Optane PMem DIMMs are compatible with DDR but include a protocol to allow asynchronous communication between the media, DRAM, and the processor, as well as a memory controller that allows data to be used directly in any location. Optane PMem can be used as capacity memory (Memory Mode) or as native persistent memory (App Direct Mode).

Since block I/O limits today’s storage system performance, Intel has been developing a new technology known as DAOS which allows Intel Optane persistent memory technology to be used in an advanced storage stack for high-performance computing with advanced storage features. Kelsey Prantis, Software Engineering Manager, and Andrey Kudryavtsev, HPC Storage Architect, then go into detail about DAOS in a discussion with the Storage Field Day delegates. They present record-breaking performance of the solution from IO500 with solutions at TACC and Argonne National Labs.


Intel Optane SSD Usages

Event: Storage Field Day 20

Appearance: Intel Presents at Storage Field Day 20

Company: Intel

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Personnel: Christopher Tobias

Christopher Tobias, General Manager, Optane Software Solutions Division, presents the use case for Intel’s Optane™ technology in SSDs. He begins with a discussion of the Ceph project, to which Intel is a major contributor. Optane SSD for RocksDB/WAL delivers consistently low latency to speed up workloads on Ceph. Next Tobias discusses how Intel Optane SSD technology is able to accelerate analytics performance for the Los Angeles Dodgers organization in a Cisco HyperFlex HCI environment. The final example is a VMware vSAN solution for Cerner, where Intel Optane SSDs improved VM performance by 60% with 33% fewer nodes.


Intel Optane Technology Primer

Event: Storage Field Day 20

Appearance: Intel Presents at Storage Field Day 20

Company: Intel

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Personnel: Christopher Tobias

Christopher Tobias, General Manager, Optane Software Solutions Division, introduces Intel’s Optane™ technology. Tobias begins with a general overview of memory technology, including DRAM, Intel Optane Technology, and 3D NAND, along a spectrum of cost, capacity, and performance. He then presents the unique properties of Intel Optane technology: It is persistent, allows write in place, is byte addressable, and is low latency. Intel Optane Technology is part of a complete memory and storage hierarchy, from tape and HDD to DRAM, in-package memory, and compute cache, based on the 90/10 locality “rule.”


VAST Data Use Case Update – AI at Lightspeed

Event: Storage Field Day 20

Appearance: VAST Data Presents at Storage Field Day 20

Company: VAST Data

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Personnel: Howard Marks, Jeff Denworth

Jeff Denworth, VP, Products, presents a key use case for VAST Data. Companies all over the world are applying machine and deep learning techniques to problems from self-driving cars to rendering the latest family film’s star field. The GPU servers running those neural networks are voracious, consuming many GB/s of random small file I/O. In this session Jeff will introduce Lightspeed, an even faster VAST Enclosure, and how Lightspeed let VAST set records with NVIDIA’s GPU Direct Storage.


VAST Data 18 Months Later – Learnings Since Launch

Event: Storage Field Day 20

Appearance: VAST Data Presents at Storage Field Day 20

Company: VAST Data

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Personnel: Howard Marks, Jeff Denworth

Howard Marks, Technologist Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary, outlines the progress VAST Data has made since their last trip to Storage Field day. He’ll cover new features, like SMB support, and how DASE makes adding and supporting new features easier. Marks is joined by Jeff Denworth, VP, Products as he takes questions from the Storage Field Day delegates.


The Evolution of Storage Architecture with VAST Data

Event: Storage Field Day 20

Appearance: VAST Data Presents at Storage Field Day 20

Company: VAST Data

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Personnel: Renen Hallak

Renen Hallak, CEO, introduces VAST Data at Storage Field Day 20. VAST has made a lot of news since our last visit to Storage Field Day from our investors funding us into the unicorn class to becoming the fastest growing startup in the history of IT infrastructure. In this session, Renen will bring the delegates up to speed on all of our latest news and will also dive into how VAST’s DASE (Disaggregated Shared Everything) architecture represents a new generation of scale-out storage systems.


Data Management and Real-Time Analytics Demonstration with Qumulo

Event: Storage Field Day 20

Appearance: Qumulo Presents at Storage Field Day 20

Company: Qumulo

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Personnel: Keith Nargi

Qumulo Field CTO Keith Nargi demonstrates their storage system user interface. Nargi focuses on the ways that the interface gives real-time information about the Qumulo cluster as well as a historical view of data. He then shows how to identify throughput and IOPS hot spots at the directory level, down to the individual file, helping to understand how users and applications are interacting with the system. He also shows activity by client and capacity trends for the system.


Advantages of a Flash-First Design with Qumulo

Event: Storage Field Day 20

Appearance: Qumulo Presents at Storage Field Day 20

Company: Qumulo

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Personnel: Jason Sturgeon, Keith Nargi, Molly Presley

Jason Sturgeon, Sr. Product Manager, discusses the Qumulo storage architecture, built on flash from the start. Sturgeon discusses the use cases for the Qumulo platform, along with Keith Nargi, Field CTO, and Molly Presley, Global Product Marketing, and takes questions from the Storage Field Day delegates. Qumulo can leverage flash through traditional SSD or hybrid architecture or can use the modern NVMe interface, but the flash-first design delivers better customer experience regardless. Sturgeon finishes with a series of real-life examples and benchmarks of the system.


File Data Management Across On-Prem and the Cloud with Qumulo

Event: Storage Field Day 20

Appearance: Qumulo Presents at Storage Field Day 20

Company: Qumulo

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Personnel: Keith Nargi, Molly Presley

Molly Presley, Global Product Marketing, discusses the diversity of storage options for data-driven projects and workloads. After presenting cloud storage at Cloud Field Day 8, Qumulo focuses this time on datacenter-resident storage. Presley begins with a review of a recent survey they conducted, highlighting the top pain points for storage administrators and the key workloads and use cases for hybrid cloud. The main portion of the presentation focuses on file data management, from on-premises to the cloud. Organizations are creating unprecedented amounts of unstructured data and face many challenges managing and leveraging it. Qumulo consolidates all data and applications in an efficient and scalable single-tier storage solution connected to the cloud. Presley is joined in this presentation by Field CTO Keith Nargi and they take questions from the Field Day delegates.


Enabling NVMe-IP with Cisco Nexus 9000

Event: Storage Field Day 20

Appearance: Cisco Presents NVMe Transport at Storage Field Day 20

Company: Cisco

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Personnel: Kamal Bakshi

Kamal Bakshi, Principal Engineer, presents IP fabric in the Cisco Nexus 9000. He focuses on some key challenges to NVMe/IP adoption: End point security, low latency, visibility, and automation. Cisco’s switches provide visibility into storage traffic, smart buffers improve latency performance, NXOS and ACI enable automation, and ACI also provides endpoint security.


Accelerating NVMeOF Adoption with Cisco Solutions and Intersight

Event: Storage Field Day 20

Appearance: Cisco Presents NVMe Transport at Storage Field Day 20

Company: Cisco

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Personnel: Chris O'Brien

Chris O’Brien, Technical Marketing Director, presents Cisco’s Data Center Modernization solutions in converged infrastructure. Cisco is working to accelerate adoption of converged infrastructure by configuring a base platform of Nexus, UCS, MDS, and partner storage technology for SAP, Oracle, AI/ML, VDI, and other applications. He focuses on Cisco’s FlexPod offering in partnership with NetApp, which today includes NVMe over fabric. He then presents FlashStack, in partnership with Oracle to support RAC 19c with NVMe and RoCE. He also discusses Cisco Intersight’s support of 3rd party devices through a Restful OpenAPI, DCNM, and APIC. Intersight Assist Appliances are available for VMware vCenter, Pure Storage, and others. He finishes with a discussion of the Intersight integration with Pure Storage before taking questions from the Storage Field Day delegates.


NVMe-FC Analytics with Cisco SAN Insights

Event: Storage Field Day 20

Appearance: Cisco Presents NVMe Transport at Storage Field Day 20

Company: Cisco

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Personnel: Paresh Gupta

Paresh Gupta, Technical Marketing Engineer, discusses how Cisco can collect and present SAN analytics for NVMe-FC. He follows a NVMe-FC write operation from the initiator to the Cisco MDS switch to the target, recording storage access latency and exchange completion time. The Cisco MDS switch includes traffic inspection, metric calculation, and metric export. Gupta then demonstrates this metric collection for the Storage Field Day delegates and answers their questions about NVMe-FC storage analytics.


Cisco NVMe Storage Transport Solutions

Event: Storage Field Day 20

Appearance: Cisco Presents NVMe Transport at Storage Field Day 20

Company: Cisco

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Personnel: Kamal Bakshi

Kamal Bakshi, Principal Engineer, introduces Cisco’s NVMe storage transport solutions. He begins with a review of the history of storage transport, from FC-SCSI to iSCSI to FCoE, and discusses how flash storage is affected by these protocols. NVMe gives greater performance than SAS, and next-generation SANs will consist of an NVMe fabric using FC, InfiniBand, RoCE, or TCP. Cisco supports all modern storage transports, on the MDS and Nexus 9000 switches, as enterprises adopt end-to-end NVMe storage. Bakshi then discusses the emerging NVMe-FC fabric. The MDS Fibre Channel director features a crossbar architecture that is highly scalable and supports 64G FC on the same chassis. Enterprises can deploy NVMe storage anywhere using this Cisco network fabric. Bakshi also takes questions from the Storage Field Day delegates.


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