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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In: Cloud, Storage
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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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

Image: Gartner Inc Gartner recently released their Magic Quadrant (MQ)for x86 Server Virtualization Infrastructure. Both The Register and ZDnet have questioned the logic in the research. Many of the subject matter experts I follow on Twitter have questioned if the MQ is little more than marketing for those vendors that spend money with Gartner. I tackle the question and make some suggestions for Gartner which includes following the lead of Big 4 consulting practices that have to deal with similar issues. Read More →

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In: Infrastructure
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Earlier this year I attended Storage Field Day 7 and a hot topic was, of course, hyperconvergence. The simplicity of all-in-one convergence is helping lead a transformation in the datacenter market – no wonder that we had three sessions on the topic. The session from Maxta was interesting because their offering helps overcome a preconception many in the enterprise space have about hyperconvergence. The issue is that of linear scaling whereby when you need storage you must add compute and vice versa. By eliminating the need to add compute power and storage simultaneously Maxta provides huge benefits when compared to others.   A Maxta solution consists of a minimum of three nodes. All virtual machines are protected in a RAID-1 style by keeping a second copy of the VM on another host. The 3nd node serves as a witness to ensure data integrity. Each node consists of compute, storage, and a hypervisor. The storage is designed asRead More →

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In: Converged, Tech Field Day

My wife’s legacy PDA may be the perfect metaphor for the advantages and disadvantages of hyperconverged infrastructure. I discuss why convergence may benefit the majority of data centers while not being a universal solution for every enterprise.Read More →

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In: Infrastructure

I recently attended Storage Field Day 7 and spent some time talking about the concept of data virtualization.  Data virtualization seeks to add a layer of        abstraction between the storage type and the client. Data virtualization, similar to what server virtualization did for compute resource, seeks to free the data from the underlying physical resources. Primary Data seeks to make data virtualization the cornerstone of software-defined storage. In November of last year Primary Data came out of stealth to address the problem of data mobility using data virtualization.  Today data is locked up in storage arrays, public cloud providers, and local server storage.  Each of these types of data repositories had different data service offerings ranging from rich to extremely limited. The metadata and data are locked away of the silo of the repository. A few solutions exist in the market today for data virtualization, but they rely on the data capabilities of theRead More →

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In: Storage, Tech Field Day