Software Defining Your Storage

There is a lot of talk in the technology industry of “software defining”, the idea that elements of our technology stack, traditionally based on a hardware appliance can be abstracted from it and made available as a software-only appliance that can be installed on any hardware.  But why? Wouldn’t you rather your key assets were… Read more »

Podcast #3 – Chris & Matt review the SFD18 presenters

Here’s a little extra podcast Matt Leib and I recorded this afternoon in preparation for Storage Field Day 18.  You can tell this wasn’t recorded in a studio, but actually Matt’s hotel room!  Matt preps coffee in his mini-Nespresso device while we discuss each of the presenting vendors. The discussion is ad-hoc, off the cuff… Read more »

NetApp buys into Kubernetes Orchestration with StackPointCloud

In September 2018, NetApp acquired a little-known cloud services company called StackPointCloud.  StackPoint offers a managed Kubernetes service that enables customers to build Kubernetes clusters across a range of public cloud providers.  Why would NetApp want to acquire this technology and where could it be used? Containerisation First of all, let’s take a step back… Read more »

Performance Benchmarks: Reading Between the Lines

As we move into 2019, storage performance becomes more important than ever.  At the media level, vendors are pushing the boundaries with fast solid-state technologies like NAND flash and 3D-Xpoint.  These products provide performance capabilities we’ve never seen before.  Storage system vendors then take components and build storage solutions, either as bespoke hardware or part… 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 »

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 »

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Latest

  • Avoiding All-Flash Missing IOPS

    We are living in a golden age of storage media, where new products come to market offering ever greater performance with lower latency than previous generations.  Today the hard drive and even early flash drives look positively archaic compared to modern NVMe drives built from 3D-XPoint, capable of delivering hundreds of thousands of IOPS and… Read more »

  • Micron ushers in the era of QLC SSDs

    To date we’ve only seen QLC NAND storage in the consumer SD card format, however, that’s set to change as Micron announces the first QLC SATA SSD for the data centre.  The Micron 5210 ION SSD will deliver up to 7.68TB of capacity in a standard 2.5″, 7mm form factor.  But there’s a catch –… Read more »

  • Conflating Data Protection and Data Mobility

    Sitting on the sidelines, I’ve been watching some of the traffic and communications coming from VeeamON this week.  Chris Mellor just posted a quick article summing up the ambitions of Veeam as a company.  It struck me that we continue to conflate the idea of data protection and data mobility.  To me, these are two… Read more »

  • NetApp Extends Cloud Volumes to GCP

    Following their introduction on Microsoft Azure last year, native NetApp Cloud Volumes are to be made available through Google Cloud Platform.  NetApp now offers Cloud Volumes in some form on the three major (Western) cloud providers, AWS, Azure and GCP.  How should we view this, especially in respect of how cloud services are evolving? Maturity… Read more »

  • Are We Suffering Logo Addiction Syndrome?

    Remember when converged infrastructure came in?  We were told that packaging was the next best thing and doing things in separate towers of skills was bad.  Now it appears we’ve developed Logo Addiction and should be looking to build things from scratch again. The basis of this thesis is a presentation at Interop ITX by… Read more »

  • Validating HYCU Deployment By The Numbers

    Vendors like to claim that their software is “1-click” or installable within 30 seconds.  In general these claims are pretty fatuous unless you’re either frequently deploying or looking to automate.  I’ve been spending a bit of time looking at a range of storage solutions that are fully software-defined and seeing how easy that deployment process… Read more »

  • Dell EMC to Offer Isilon on Google Cloud Platform

    It’s Dell Technologies World this week in Las Vegas and the first announcement of interest is the future offering of the Isilon NAS platform on Google Cloud Platform.  The details of Isilon Cloud on GCP are scant, to say the least.  All I’ve found so far is this community post (link).  With little to go… Read more »

  • The Burden of Technical Debt

    As the issues at TSB continue to unfold, I look on at an IT problem that will likely never be fully explained and eventually disappear into the archives as yet another “computer glitch”.  Why does it keep happening, what’s wrong with the industry and how can we do better next time? Experience Who am I… Read more »

  • NetApp embraces cloud for future business growth

    Technology is a fickle business and surviving more than a few short years is hard to achieve.  The industry changes very quickly, as the next greatest thing consigns solutions and products to being legacy, even if they are still running many organisations’ core business.  Storage has evolved to be a major part of any IT… Read more »