Databases are the next battleground for Public Cloud

This week, Amazon Web Services announced the availability of Amazon DocumentDB, a MongoDB-compatible document database.  For AWS at least, the database market has been heating up recently.  With so many offerings to choose from, are databases the next land-grab for the public cloud? DocumentDB Let’s look first at the announcement of Amazon DocumentDB.  This new… Read more »

The Biggest Storage Trends of 2019

It’s time to gaze into the crystal ball and think what might be on the storage agenda for 2019.  What will the biggest storage trends for 2019 be?  Let’s start with some easy ones. NVMe over Fabrics will be big Of course it will.  All of the major storage vendors are already working towards supporting… Read more »

Building a modern data platform – what have we learned?

This is a guest post by Paul Stringfellow from Gardner Systems and was originally posted at Building a modern data platform – what have we learned? where you can also find Paul’s “Tech Interviews” podcast. As I reach the end of this series, it raises the question “what have we learned?”. If you’ve read through it all,… Read more »

NooBaa is acquired by Red Hat

I was interested to see that Red Hat recently decided to acquire NooBaa, a start-up developing an object storage platform.  What makes this story interesting is not the NooBaa technology itself, but rather that Red Hat is acquiring yet another storage platform to complement those it already owns.  Why add another to the list? NooBaa… Read more »

Will VMware lead the newly public Dell Technologies?

At the end of 2018, Dell Technologies Inc returned to the stock market with the conversion of VMware tracking stock into Class C Dell Technologies shares.  It’s interesting to note that over 90% of Class V shareholders voted to receive cash rather than shares.  However, as the cash return was limited (and paid for by a… Read more »

Processors back under the spotlight for 2019

This is just a quick post to highlight the developments we’re seeing in processors at the moment.  Intel has announced Foveros, enabling more efficient component stacking.  AMD has EPYC, with more PCIe performance for external peripherals like storage.  And of course, we’re seeing a whole host of ARM processors being put into public cloud.  Let’s… Read more »

Thoughts from Hitachi NEXT 2018

Earlier this year I was invited to Hitachi NEXT in lovely San Diego.  As part of my trip, I took the time to learn a little more about some of the technology Hitachi has been working on and bringing to market either directly through Hitachi Ltd or Hitachi Vantara.  You may remember that Hitachi Vantara… Read more »

Elastifile Cloud File Service Now Available on Google Cloud

Elastifile has announced the availability of a fully managed scale-out file service for Google Cloud.  This is more than just another marketplace offering.  The company’s Cloud File Service is now fully integrated into the Google Cloud ecosystem.  Storage is configured through GCP APIs and GUIs and billed by Google based on consumption.  This is a… Read more »

Western Digital Redefines DRAM Caching

In a recent press release, Western Digital announced the release of an interesting if not curious solution for extending DRAM with fast storage.  The Ultrastar DC ME200 extends server DRAM using proprietary caching software in an attempt to fully exploit the capabilities of modern multi-core processors.  In an age where in-memory computing is increasing in… Read more »

ESXi on ARM – Why?

This is certainly a question I’ve been pondering for a few weeks since the announcements at VMworld 2018 and where Ray O’Farrell presented ESXi running on an ARM Cortex A72 device.  Since my last post covering some VMware news, I’ve been asking – is there any logic in running a hypervisor on an IoT platform… Read more »

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Latest

  • Rethinking Storage For Microservices

    The New Stack had a very interesting article this week that talked about rethinking the way storage is mapped to microservices like containers.  The discussion took me back 12+ months to my own attempts to raise money for a startup that addressed the issues raised in the article.  I’m still not sure that the issues… Read more »

  • Pure Storage Acquires StorReduce

    Congratulations to the folks at StorReduce for being acquired by Pure Storage.  Although terms of the deal were not disclosed, hopefully, this represents a successful exit for an interesting technology. Background I first looked at StorReduce in March 2015, including a trial of the software.  The premise of the technology is simple.  StorReduce acts as… Read more »

  • What Next for Violin Systems?

    It would be fair to say that Violin Systems (the former Violin Memory) has had a turbulent existence.  Once the darling of the industry, Violin missed the all-flash evolution and fell on hard times, going bust and returning with new investors.  Last year the new CEO stepped down to be replaced by Mark Lewis, previously… Read more »

  • The Shifting Storage Investment Paradigm

    The standard evolution for startup vendors in the storage market has been to create a product, build a customer base and wait to be acquired or float the company in an IPO.  Some companies have been more successful than others.  XtremIO for example was acquired very early – great for the VCs that put up… Read more »

  • Is AWS Moving to Private Cloud with Snowball Edge and EC2?

    At a recent AWS Summit in New York, Amazon Web Services announced the availability of EC2 on Snowball Edge devices.  Does this move represent a challenge for private cloud and could it be the start of a hybrid strategy for the company? Snowball Edge In case you’ve not seen it before, the Snowball is a… Read more »

  • Pure Storage AIRI – CI for AI

    Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence (ML/AI) are two of the biggest buzzwords in the tech industry at the moment.  The technologies have wide application, much greater than the often-repeated stories about self-driving cars.  ML/AI solutions can be used in healthcare to improve diagnostics.  It has applications across the financial world, allowing companies to be more… Read more »

  • Is Your Flash Storage Riding the DRAM Curve?

    Interested in learning more about NVMe?  Download our free 21-page white paper report (no registration required) here   NVMe in the Data Centre The rate of growth in flash media is truly incredible.  In ten years, we’ve gone from highly expensive SLC devices to a range of NAND flash media for all requirements.  Flash manufacturers continue… Read more »

  • Why Deterministic Storage Performance is Important

    In the days of spinning media, I/O performance was anything but consistent.  When mechanical head movement is involved, response time can vary enormously.  Actually, the variation of I/O isn’t just to do with mechanics as we will discuss in a moment.  However, inconsistent I/O response time is a problem for applications and as tolerances reduce,… Read more »

  • Samsung Introduces 8TB NF1 NVMe SSDs

    Samsung has recently announced an 8TB NF1 format NVMe SSD.  NF1 was originally called NGSFF (Next Generation Small Form Factor) and is intended as a replacement for the existing M.2 format drives.  With 15K and 10K drives disappearing from the market, is it time to accept we should move on from legacy HDD drive sizes?… Read more »