In this episode of the CTO Advisor Podcast, Keith and I sit down with James Myer of Intel to talk about how Intel is looking to change the computing landscape with their next-generation storage class memory, Optane. Intel is hoping that with the soon to be released Optane Memory Module,  that we’ll have a second tier of memory that performs similar to DRAM but with NAND like capacity. Keith and I review some business cases with James and talk about the challenges Intel is facing by building a new market. This was a great conversation around next generation storage and its convergence with memory. Show Notes:  Wikibon research on Intel Optane (Disclaimer: Keith has appeared as a paid co-host on Wikibon’s theCube) The Evaluator Groups research on vSphere Intel August 7th Optane Webcast Keith’s favorite chocolate chip cookie recipe Subscribe iTunesRead More →

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We think of the cloud as this vast pool of unlimited storage, usually at not super fast speeds, and accessed via the internet. Great use case if your compute is in the cloud, or you’re not concerned about the latency. If you want low latency access to the data, you’re probably going to at least look at a storage array. We think of storage arrays as having a finite bucket of capacity, the polar opposite of cloud storage. The closest thing a storage array has to unlimited capacity, snapshots, are usually tied to some strict limits. Your storage array needs more capacity. Public cloud providers have extra capacity. It sounds like the beginnings of a match made in heaven. At Storage Field Day 13 Dell EMC talked about their Unity storage array and its integration with their own Cloud Tier Appliance. The Cloud Tiering Appliance is an external device that allows data to move from the storageRead More →

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In: Cloud, Events, Infrastructure, Storage, Tech Field Day

Sometimes when you’re roasting a Thanksgiving turkey in the oven, you notice what appears to be uneven cooking on the bird. Uneven cooking can create a problem for the cook because you risk drying out one part or under cooking another. The last thing you want to do is serve undercooked and dangerous food. The second to last thing you want to do is serve dry turkey to your grandma. Uneven cooking is the bain of cooks everywhere, so they take great care to avoid and mitigate the problem. No, you haven’t stumbled onto a random food post, I just wanted to point out that consistency and predictability matters in the kitchen. Just like it matters in the kitchen, it matters in nearly every aspect of technology. We want web pages to load quickly, search results to return instantly, and our turkeys to cook evenly. We want gravy without lumps and wifi without bumps. Nowhere is consistentlyRead More →

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I started my career in the information technology industry when I was young, so young that I was still in high school.  I wasn’t working at Burger King or the mall like most of my friends, instead I was putting my passion for technology to work bringing the people of the Cincinnati area dial-up internet access. A few friends and I had connected with a local businessman and, somehow, the idea to start a new company was formed.  In the beginning, it was a handful of us, with me and my friend Todd doing all the server and development work. We spent countless hours of the mid-90s building servers, creating web pages, and working hard in out tiny server room. It felt like the pinnacle of technology to me. The whole world was at our fingertips just waiting for us the capture it. Roles shifting and Todd moved on to bigger and better-paying things.  Soon after heRead More →

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In: Cloud, Storage

In the IT industry today it is nearly impossible not to hear the word cloud dozens of times a day, but many storage administrators treat cloud a four letter word.  The basic tenant for a storage administrator is to ensure an organization’s data is safe and secure.  If the storage administrator makes a mistake bad, bad things happen.  Companies fold, black holes collapse, and sun exploded.  NetApp is trying to change the minds of those storage administrators, and for good reason.  IT organizations are always looking to do more work with lesss money, and cloud storage can’t be ignored as a viable way to do that.   At Storage Field Day 9, NetApp talked a fair amount about how they are embracing cloud storage as key to the industry’s future.  No more a storage vendor affords not to embrace cloud storage,  and NetApp sees it as a key.  Part of the future for NetApp is expanding theRead More →

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Pure Storage Logo

This week I’ve been spending some time at Pure Accelerate,  where I’ve been able to talk to the engineering and executive teams behind the new FlashBlade system. In an attempt to embrace its start up cultural roots, Pure Storage developed FlashBlade as a startup inside the company.  What that means is they hired new engineering staff to build a unique and separate product from the ground up.  The new team members, to keep the development secretive,  were not connected to other traditional Pure employees on Linkedin. While the development was largely separate,  some of the FlashArray development team did help where it main sense.  That collaboration resulted in a fork of the FlashArray management interface which is used by FlashBlade. The result of the startup of a company is a new and a unique product. The first thing to understand about FlashBlade is what it is not.  It is nor a replacement for a low latency andRead More →

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In: Cloud, Storage

It wasn’t that long ago that Violin Memory pioneered the high-performance flash market.  They created the market for speed but were lacking a rich data services offering.  It wasn’t long before many other all-flash storage arrays came to market which may not have been as fast but were good enough with a rich feature set. The lack of data services and competition ultimately causes a lot of pain for Violin Memory.  It was so bad that many people thought the company was doomed, but after our SFD8 presentation I’m not convinced. The meeting had started before the cameras were actually rolling, which I think was really unfortunate for Violin.  We were doing two things: eating breakfast and talking financials with the CEO.  As we listened to him talk one thing became apparent – Violin financials say they have a chance.  CEO Kevin DeNuccio said they had a quarterly burn rate of $12mm with a break-even point beingRead More →

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In: Storage

If you’ve worked in IT for any amount of time you’ve likely heard the term “secondary storage” which you’ve known as a backup tier.  You’ve also heard of “tier 2” storage for test and development workloads not needing the data services of production.  These two terms have had very different requirements.  Backups target storage is generally cheap, deep, and optimized for sequential writes.  Test/dev storage, on the other hand, needs to have different performance since it has actual workloads. Cohesity thinks this needs to change.  They content that secondary storage needs to be anything that is not primary storage. Redefining a term and carving out a new market segment is no small task, but Cohesity shows some pretty interesting use cases: Data Protection for VMware environments – Once a hypervisor snapshot is created the data is sent to the Cohesity array where things like deduplication and replication can be applied. This gives you unlimited snaps without theRead More →

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In: Cloud, Storage

Over the last decade, storage arrays have been evolving to becomes faster and protect data better.  They have become smarter with where and how data is stored and how to predict when data will be accessed.  However one thing has not, by and large, changed.  Storage arrays haven’t learned much about what data is actually stored on them.  In the last year, this has begun to, in part, change.  A few companies now have products which provide some type of data awareness, but they aren’t created equal. Content awareness is nothing new. However, it has mostly existed for legal and compliance separate from the storage array. Today I attended Storage Field Day 8 and had a chance to meet with Andy Warfield of Coho Data and I saw a different take on this.  A few months ago I saw Coho Data start talking about running containers directly on their storage array.  I dismissed this mostly edge casesRead More →

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In: Cloud, Storage

At VMworld this year I attended Tech Field Day Extra event as a delegate. Once of the more interesting presentations came from DataGravity. One of the reasons I found them so interesting is they are attempting to add a new dimension to the storage array market. Since the storage array market was created people have cared about three things: data resiliency, speed, and capacity. These three metrics should not come as a surprise since the intent was to leverage a larger pool of capacity for reduced cost and improved performance. Fast forward to now and these three things have not fundamentally changed much. We still care about protection our data, making it perform well, and how much data we can store. DataGravity is trying to change this by building new Data Analytics capabilities into their storage array. If you’ve every worked in a large enterprise, you have most likely dealt with legal and security teams. They alwaysRead More →

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In: Storage, Tech Field Day