January 2017 Server StorageIO Update Newsletter

Volume 17, Issue I

Hello and welcome to first 2017 issue of the Server StorageIO update newsletter.

Now that we are past the holidays, year-end crunch, post new years activity including NFL football playoffs, its time to get back on track for the new year and new things.

There is a lot going on, in and around data infrastructure server, storage, and I/O networking connectivity from a hardware, software, and services perceptive. From consumer to small/medium business (SMB), enterprise to web-scale and cloud-managed service providers, physical to virtual, spanning structured database (aka “little data”) to unstructured big data and very big fast data, a lot is happening today.

Watch for more coverage involving data infrastructures as well as other related topics in future newsletters, at StorageIOblog.com as well as in different venues and events.

In This Issue

  • Commentary in the news
  • Tips and Articles
  • StorageIOblog posts
  • Events and Webinars
  • Industry Activity Trends
  • Resources and Links
  • Connect and Converse With Us
  • About Us
  • Enjoy this edition of the Server StorageIO update newsletter.

    Cheers GS

    Industry Activity Trends

    Recent Industry News and Activity includes:

    Broadcom buying Brocade for $5.5B USD (if you missed last fall)
    Cavium QLogic expands 10GbE connectivity for server and storage I/O
    HPE announces enhancements to flash-ready HPE StoreVirtual 3200
    HPE buying scaleable HCI vendor Simplivity for $650 million USD (Cash)
    LinBit and SUSE providing open source high availability (HA) solutions
    StorageCraft (data protection software) acquires Exablox (object storage)
    Teradata has launched their big data database on Azure

     

    StorageIOblog Posts

    Recent and popular Server StorageIOblog posts include:

    In case you missed it:

  • PCIe Server Storage I/O Network Fundamentals
  • If NVMe is the answer, what are the questions?
  • Fixing the Microsoft Windows 10 1709 post upgrade restart loop
  • Data Infrastructure server storage I/O network Recommended Reading
  • Introducing Windows Subsystem for Linux WSL Overview
  • IT transformation Serverless Life Beyond DevOps with New York Times CTO Nick Rockwell Podcast
  • HPE Announces AMD Powered Gen 10 ProLiant DL385 For Software Defined Workloads
  • AWS Announces New S3 Cloud Storage Security Encryption Features
  • NVM Non Volatile Memory Express NVMe Place
  • Data Protection Fundamental Topics Tools Techniques Technologies Tips
  • View other recent as well as past StorageIOblog posts here

     

    StorageIO Commentary in the news

    Recent Server StorageIO industry trends perspectives commentary in the news.

    Via InfoStor: 10 Top Data Storage Applications
    Via InfoStor: Cloud Storage Concerns, Considerations and Trends
    Via InfoStor: 10 Top Data Storage Applications
    Via InfoStor: SSD Trends, Tips and Topics
    Via HPE: Decision guide: Public cloud versus on-prem storage
    Via InfoStor: Six Ways to Boost Data Storage Performance

    View more Server, Storage and I/O trends and perspectives comments here

     

    StorageIO Tips and Articles

    Recent and past Server StorageIO articles appearing in different venues include:

    Via FutureReadyOEM:  When to implement ultra-dense storage
    Via InfoStor: Cloud Storage Concerns, Considerations and Trends
    Via InfoStor: SSD Trends, Tips and Topics

    Check out these resources techniques, trends and tools. View more tips and articles here

     

    Events and Activities

    Recent and upcoming event activities.

    April 3-7, 2017 – Seminars – Dutch workshop seminar series – Nijkerk Netherlands

    March 15, 2017 – Webinar – SNIA/BrightTalkHyperConverged (HCI) and Storage – 10AM PT

    January 26 2017 – Seminar – Presenting at Wipro SDx Summit London UK

    January 11, 2017 Webinar – Redmond Magazine
    Dell Software – Presenting – Tailor Your Backup Data Repositories to Fit Your Needs

    December 13 VMware webinar – vSAN, HCIBench, vSAN Observer and healthcheck

    December 7, 2016 11AM PT – BrightTalk Webinar: Hyper-Converged Infrastructure

    See more webinars and activities on the Server StorageIO Events page here.

     

    Server StorageIO Industry Resources and Links

    Useful links and pages:
    Microsoft TechNet – Various Microsoft related from Azure to Docker to Windows
    storageio.com/links – Various industry links (over 1,000 with more to be added soon)
    objectstoragecenter.com – Cloud and object storage topics, tips and news items
    OpenStack.org – Various OpenStack related items
    storageio.com/protect – Various data protection items and topics
    thenvmeplace.com – Focus on NVMe trends and technologies
    thessdplace.com – NVM and Solid State Disk topics, tips and techniques
    storageio.com/performance – Various server, storage and I/O benchmark and tools
    VMware Technical Network – Various VMware related items

    Ok, nuff said, for now.

    Gs

    Greg Schulz – Microsoft MVP Cloud and Data Center Management, VMware vExpert 2010-2017 (vSAN and vCloud). Author of Software Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials (CRC Press), as well as Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking (CRC Press), The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC Press), Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier) and twitter @storageio. Courteous comments are welcome for consideration. First published on https://storageioblog.com any reproduction in whole, in part, with changes to content, without source attribution under title or without permission is forbidden.

    All Comments, (C) and (TM) belong to their owners/posters, Other content (C) Copyright 2006-2024 Server StorageIO and UnlimitedIO. All Rights Reserved. StorageIO is a registered Trade Mark (TM) of Server StorageIO.

    SDx Summit London UK (Planning and Enabling Your Journey to Software Defined)

    Planning and Enabling Your Journey to Software Defined)

    server storage I/O trends

    Will 2017 be there year of all software-defined X (e.g. SDx) where X can be everything from data centers (SDDC), data infrastructures (SDDI), infrastructure (SDI), storage (SDS), network (SDN) or marketing (SDM) among others? What about IoT, IoD, ByoD, ByoL (bring your own license), MaaS (metal as a service), clouds, containers, object storage, OpenStack, Mesos, Docker, Kubernetes, NVMe, flash SSD, SCM (Storage Class Memory) among other buzzword bingo terms, technologies and trends, will 2017 be there year for those among others?

    What is safe to say is that the above buzzword items, topics, trends, technologies, tools and techniques are in your future, what varies is when, where, how, why, with what and whom to assist you on your journey.

    server storage I/O events

    On January 26 2017 join me and others at the Savoy hotel in London UK for the SDx summit organized by Wipro.

    My presentation titled Planning and Enabling Your Journey to SDx will have a theme of Transiting from Hype and Marketing Hope to Deployment and Management. In other words, moving beyond SDBS and SDM to how to prepare, plan and what you can do today including hybrid deployments. Some of the topics, themes, trends, technologies, tools and tips in my discussion will include among others:

    • Software Defined Management and Data Protection
    • How to pack and prepare for your Software Defined Journey
    • Be prepared, plan for the unexpected, manage your journey
    • Learn the local language, expand your trade craft (skills)
    • Moving and migrating (brownfield) vs. start from scratch (greenfield)
    • ByoD, DiY, IoD, IoT, Cloud and Container conversations
    • What you can do today to prepare for your upcoming journey

    Where To Learn More

    Learn more and register here for the London UK SDx summit.

    What This All Means

    Regardless of if 2017 will be the year of SDx or any of the other industry popular buzz term trends, technologies and techniques, it is time to start planning as well as preparing. This means identifying questions, concerns and learning about the new tools and technologies that can be used in new ways, while also leveraging old things in new ways to enable a resilient, scalable, flexible as well as cost-effective data infrastructure. For those of you in the London UK area, learn more about the SDx summit organized by Wipro here and hope to see you there.

    Ok, nuff said, for now…

    Cheers
    Gs

    Greg Schulz – Microsoft MVP Cloud and Data Center Management, vSAN and VMware vExpert. Author of Software Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials (CRC Press), as well as Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking (CRC Press), The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC Press), Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier) and twitter @storageio.

    All Comments, (C) and (TM) belong to their owners/posters, Other content (C) Copyright 2006-2023 Server StorageIO(R) and UnlimitedIO All Rights Reserved

    September and October 2016 Server StorageIO Update Newsletter

    Volume 16, Issue IX

    Hello and welcome to this September and October 2016 Server StorageIO update newsletter.

    In This Issue

  • Commentary in the news
  • Tips and Articles
  • StorageIOblog posts
  • Events and Webinars
  • Industry Activity Trends
  • Resources and Links
  • Connect and Converse With Us
  • About Us
  • Enjoy this edition of the Server StorageIO update newsletter.

    Cheers GS

    Industry Activity Trends

    Recent Industry Activates and Trends

    EMC is now Dell EMC – What this means is that EMC is no longer a publicly traded company instead now being privately held under the Dell Technologies umbrella. In case you did not know or had forgotten, one of the principal owners of Dell Technologies is Michael Dell aka the founder of Dell Computers which itself went private a few years ago. Read more in this Server StoageIOblog update post.

    While Michael Dell and Dell Technologies continues to expand by acquiring companies (granted also shedding some assets to support that growth), HP Enterprise (HPE) is taking a different approach. Similar to Dell, HPE has been offloading some of its divisions and assets since its split into two separate companies about a year ago.

    More recently HPE has announced it is selling off some of its software assets to which follows other deals where HPE created a new partnership with CSC to offload or park some of its services assets. What’s not clear is HPE CEO Meg Whitman leveraging the trend that some Private Equity (PE) firms are interested in acquiring under performing companies or assets to prepare them as part of a pivot to profit scenario, or something else?

    • HPE selling off business units including software group here, here, here and here
    • HPE looking to boost its HPC and super compute business with $275B acquisition of SGI
    • Announced new shared storage for SMB and mid-size environments including for sub $10K price points. These include HPE StoreVirtual 3200 and HPE MSA 2042.
    • HPE and Dropbox partnership
    • Various other HPE news and updates

    Hyper-Converged Infrastructure (HCI) startup vendor Nutanix finally IPO (NTNX) after a not so consolidated IPO cycle. Prior to the IPO NTNX acquired other startup Pernix (VMware cache software solution) and calmio to beef up their product portfolio. Congratulations to NTNX and best wishes, hopefully the public markets will provide risk vs. reward, on the other hand, now being public, the spotlight will be on them.

    Nutanix Stock via Yahoo 10/31/16
    NTNX Stock Trading via Yahoo Finance 10/31/16 (Click to see current status)


    Microsoft has extended its software defined storage (SDS) along with software defined data center (SDDC) as well as software defined networking (SDN) capabilities by formerly announcing Windows Server 2016. A month or so ago Microsoft announced the 20th birthday or anniversary of Windows Server as well as having previously released Tech Previews (TP).
    See what’s new in Server 2016 here. For those not aware, With Windows Server 2016, you can configure it to be CI, HCI, legacy or various hybrid ways to meet your needs, along with your choice of hardware from your preferred vendor or solution provider. Read more about Microsoft Windows Server 2016 and related topics in this Server StorageIOblog post.

    Needless to say there is a lot of other activity in the works including VMware enhancements with vSphere 6.5 as well as VMware vSphere (and related tools) being announced as hosted on bare metal (BM) dedicated private servers (DPS) via AWS among other updates.

     

    StorageIOblog Posts

    Recent and popular Server StorageIOblog posts include:

    View other recent as well as past StorageIOblog posts here

     

    StorageIO Commentary in the news

    Recent Server StorageIO industry trends perspectives commentary in the news.

    Via InfoStor Top Ten Data Storage Performance Tips: Improving Data Storage
    Via ChannelProNetwork Your Time Will Come, All-Flash Storage
    Via FutureReadyOEM When to implement ultra-dense CI or HCI storage
    Via EnterpriseStorageForum Top 10 Enterprise SSD Market Trends
    Via EnterpriseStorageForum Storage Hyperconvergence: When Does It Make Sense?
    SearchCloudStorage: EMC VxRack Neutrino Nodes launched for OpenStack cloud storage
    EnterpriseStorageForum: Looking Beyond the Hype at Hyperconvergence in Storage
    CDW Digital: Transitioning Data Centers To Hybrid Environment
    SearchDataCenter: EMC, VCE, CI and Hyperconverged vs. Hyper-small
    InfoStor: Docker and Containerization Storage Buying Guide
    NetworkComputing: Dell-EMC: The Storage Ramifications
    EnterpriseTech: VMware Targets Synergies in Dell-EMC Deal 
    HPCwire: Dell to Buy EMC Focus on Large Enterprises and High-End Computing
    EnterpriseStorageForum: Storage Futures: Do We Really Need to Store Everything?

    View more Server, Storage and I/O hardware as well as software trends comments here

     

    StorageIO Tips and Articles

    Recent and past Server StorageIO articles appearing in different venues include:

    Via Iron Mountain  Is Your Data Infrastructure Prepared for Storm Season?
    Via Iron Mountain  Preventing Unexpected Disasters: IT and Data Infrastructure
    Via FutureReadyOEM  When to implement ultra-dense storage
    Via Micron Blog (Guest Post)  Whats next for NVMe and your Data Center
    Redmond Magazine  Data Protection Trends – Evolving Data Protection and Resiliency
    Virtual Blocks (VMware Blogs)  EVO:RAIL Part III – When And Where To Use It?
    Virtual Blocks (VMware Blogs)  EVO:RAIL Part II – Why And When To Use It?
    Virtual Blocks (VMware Blogs)  EVO:RAIL Part I – What Is It And Why Does It Matter?

    Check out these resources techniques, trends as well as tools. View more tips and articles here

     

    Events and Activities

    Recent and upcoming event activities.

    December 7, 2016 11AM PT – BrightTalk Webinar: Hyper-Converged Infrastructure

    November 29-30, 2016 – Nijkerk Netherlands Workshop Seminar (Presenting)
    Organized by Brouwer Storage Consultancy

    Converged and Other Server Storage Decision Making

    November 28, 2016 – Nijkerk Netherlands Workshop Seminar (Presenting)
    Organized by Brouwer Storage Consultancy
    – Industry Trends Update

    November 23, 2016 10AM PT – BrightTalk Webinar: BCDR and Cloud Backup
    Software Defined Data Infrastructures (SDDI) and Data Protection

    November 23, 2016 9AM PT – BrightTalk Webinar: Cloud Storage
    Hybrid and Software Defined Data Infrastructures (SDDI)

    November 22, 2016 10AM PT – BrightTalk Webinar: Cloud Infrastructure
    Hybrid and Software Defined Data Infrastructures (SDDI)

    November 15, 2016 11AM PT – Redmond Magazine and SolarWinds
    Presenting – The O.A.R. of Virtualization Scaling

    November 3, 2016 11AM PT – Redmond Magazine and Dell Software
    Presenting – Backup, Data Protection and Security Management

    October 27, 2016 10AM PT – Virtual Instruments Webinar
    The Value of Infrastructure Insight

    October 20, 2016 9AM PT – BrightTalk Webinar: Next-Gen Data Centers
    Software Defined Data Infrastructures (SDDI) – Servers, Storage and Virtualization

    September 20, 2016 8AM PT – BrightTalk Webinar
    Software Defined Data Infrastructures (SDDI)
    Enabling Software Defined Data Centers

    September 13, 2016 11AM PT – Redmond Magazine and Dell Software
    Windows Server 2016 and Active Directory
    What’s New and How to Plan for Migration

    See more webinars and other activities on the Server StorageIO Events page here.

     

    Server StorageIO Industry Resources and Links

    Useful links and pages:
    Microsoft TechNet – Various Microsoft related from Azure to Docker to Windows
    storageio.com/links – Various industry links (over 1,000 with more to be added soon)
    objectstoragecenter.com – Cloud and object storage topics, tips and news items
    OpenStack.org – Various OpenStack related items
    storageio.com/protect – Various data protection items and topics
    thenvmeplace.com – Focus on NVMe trends and technologies
    thessdplace.com – NVM and Solid State Disk topics, tips and techniques
    storageio.com/performance – Various server, storage and I/O performance and benchmarking
    VMware Technical Network – Various VMware related items

    Ok, nuff said, for now…

    Cheers
    Gs

    Greg Schulz – Microsoft MVP Cloud and Data Center Management, vSAN and VMware vExpert. Author Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking (CRC Press), The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC Press) and Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier) and twitter @storageio

    All Comments, (C) and (TM) belong to their owners/posters, Other content (C) Copyright 2006-2023 Server StorageIO(R) and UnlimitedIO All Rights Reserved

    Updated Software Defined Data Infrastructure Webinars and Fall 2016 events

    Software Defined Data Infrastructure Webinars and Fall 2016 events

    server storage I/O trends

    Here is the updated Server StorageIO fall 2016 webinar and event activities covering software defined data center, data infrastructure, virtual, cloud, containers, converged, hyper-converged server, storage, I/O network, performance and data protection among other topics.

    December 7, 2016 – Webinar 11AM PT – BrightTalk
    Hyper-Converged Infrastructure Decision Making

    Hyper-Converged Infrastructure, HCI and CI Decision Making

    Are Converged Infrastructures (CI), Hyper-Converged Infrastructures (HCI), Cluster in Box or Cloud in Box (CiB) solutions for you? The answer is it depends on what your needs, requirements, application among other criteria are. In addition are you focused on a particular technology solution or architecture approach, or, looking for something that adapts to your needs? Join us in this discussion exploring your options for different scenarios as we look beyond they hype including to next wave of hyper-scale converged along with applicable decision-making criteria. Topics include:

    – Data Infrastructures exist to support applications and their underlying resource needs
    – What are your application and environment needs along with other objectives
    – Explore various approaches for hyper-small and hyper-large environments
    – What are you converging, hardware, hypervisors, management or something else?
    – Does HCI mean hyper-vendor-lock-in, if so, is that a bad thing?
    – When, where, why and how to use different scenarios

    November 29-30, 2016 (New) – Converged & Hyper-Converged Decision Making
    Is Converged Infrastructure Right For You?
    Workshop Seminar – Nijkerk The Netherlands

    Converged and server storage I/O data infrastructure trends
    Agenda and topics to be covered include:

    • When should decide to evaluate CI/HCI vs. traditional approach
    • What are decision and evaluation criteria for apples to apples vs. Apples to pears
    • What are the costs, benefits, and caveats of the different approaches
    • How different applications such as VDI or VSI or database have different needs
    • What are the network, storage, software license and training cost implications
    • Different comparison criteria for smaller environments remote office vs. Larger enterprise
    • How will you protect and secure a CI, HCI environment (HA, BC, BR, DR, Backup)
    • What is the risk and benefit of startups, companies with limited portfolios vs. Big vendors
    • Do it yourself (DiY) vs. Turnkey software vs. Bundled tin wrapped software solution
    • We will also look at associated trends including software-defined, NVM/SSD, NVMe, VMware, Microsoft, KVM, Citrix/Xen, Docker, OpenStack among others.

    Organized by:
    Brouwer Storage Consultancy

    November 28, 2016 (New) – Server Storage I/O Fundamental Trends V2.1116
    Whats New, Whats the buzz, what you need to know about and whos doing what
    Workshop Seminar – Nijkerk The Netherlands

    Converged and server storage I/O data infrastructure trends
    Agenda and topics that will be covered include:

    • Who’s doing what, who are the new emerging vendors, solutions and technologies to watch
    • Non-Volatile Memory (NVM), flash solid state device (SSD), Storage Class Memory (SCM)
    • Networking with your servers and storage including NVMe, NVMeoF and RoCE
    • Cloud, Object and Bulk storage for data protection, archiving, near-line, scale-out
    • Data protection and software defined storage management (backup, BC, BR, DR, archive)
    • Microsoft Windows Server 2016, Nano, S2D and Hyper-V
    • VMware, OpenStack, Ceph, Docker and Containers, CI and HCI
    • EMC is gone, now there is Dell EMC and what that means
    • Various vendors and solutions from legacy to new and emerging
    • Recommendations, usage or deployment scenarios and tips
    • Some examples of who’s doing what includes AWS, Brocade, Cisco, Dell EMC, Enmotus, Futjistu, Google, HDS, HP and Huawei, IBM, Intel, Lenovo, Mellanox, Micron, Microsoft, NetApp, Nutanix, Oracle, Pure, Quantum, Qumulo, Reduxio, Rubrik, Samsung, SANdisk, Seagate, Simplivity and Tintri, Veeam, Veritas, VMware and WD among others.

    Organized by:
    Brouwer Storage Consultancy

    November 23, 2016 – Webinar 10AM PT BrightTalk
    BCDR and Cloud Backup Software Defined Data Infrastructures (SDDI) and Data Protection

    BC DR Cloud Backup and Data Protection

    The answer is BCDR and Cloud Backup, however what was the question? Besides how to protect preserve and secure your data, applications along with data Infrastructures against various threat risk issues, what are some other common questions? For example how to modernize, rethink, re-architect, use new and old things in new ways, these and other topics, techniques, trends, tools have a common theme of BCDR and Cloud Backup. Join us in this discussion exploring your options for protecting data, applications and your data Infrastructures spanning legacy, software-defined virtual and cloud environments. Topics include:

    – Data Infrastructures exist to support applications and their underlying resource needs
    – Various cloud storage options to meet different application PACE needs
    – Do clouds need to be backed-up or protected?
    – How to leverage clouds for various data protection objectives
    – When, where, why and how to use different scenarios

    November 23, 2016 – Webinar 9AM PT – BrightTalk
    Cloud Storage – Hybrid and Software Defined Data Infrastructures (SDDI)

    Cloud Storage Decision Making

    You have been told, or determined that you need (or want) to use cloud storage, ok, now what? What type of cloud storage do you need or want, or do you simply want cloud storage? However, what are your options as well as application requirements including Performance, Availability, Capacity and Economics (PACE) along with access or interfaces? Where are your applications and where will they be located? What are your objectives for using cloud storage or is it simply you have heard or told its cheaper. Join us in this discussion exploring your options, considerations for cloud storage decision-making. Topics include:

    – Data Infrastructures exist to support applications and their underlying resource needs
    – Various cloud storage options to meet different application PACE needs
    – Storage for primary, secondary, performance, availability, capacity, backup, archiving
    – Public, private and hybrid cloud storage options from block, file, object to application service
    – When, where, why and how to use cloud storage for different scenarios

    November 22, 2016 – Webinar 10AM PT – BrightTalk
    Cloud Infrastructure Hybrid and Software Defined Data Infrastructures (SDDI)

    Cloud Infrastructure and Hybrid Software Defined

    At the core of cloud (public, private, hybrid) next generation data centers are software defined data infrastructures that exist to protect, preserve and serve applications, data along with their resulting information services. Software defined data infrastructure core components include hardware, software servers and storage configured (defined) to provide various services enabling application Performance Availability Capacity and Economics (PACE). Just as there are different types of environments, applications along with workloads various options, technologies as well as techniques exist for cloud services (and underlying data infrastructures). Join us in this session to discuss trends, technologies, tools, techniques and services options for cloud infrastructures. Topics include:

    – Data Infrastructures exist to support applications and their underlying resource needs
    – Software Defined Infrastructures (SDDI) are what enable Software Defined Data Centers and clouds
    – Various types of clouds along with cloud services that determine how resources get defined
    – When, where, why and how to use cloud Infrastructures along with associated resources

    November 15, 2016 (New) – 11AM PT Webinar – Redmond Magazine and Solarwinds
    The O.A.R. of Virtualization Scaling
    A journey of optimization, automation, and reporting

    Your journey to a flexible, scalable and secure IT universe begins now. Join Microsoft MVP and VMware vSAN and vExpert Greg Schulz of Server StorageIO along with VMware vExpert, Cisco Champion and Head Geek of Virtualization and Cloud Practice Kong Yang of SolarWinds for an interactive discussion empowering you to become the master of your software defined and virtual data center. Topics will include:

    • Trust your instruments and automation, however, verify they are working properl
    • Insight into how your environment, as well as automation tools, are working
    • Leverage automation to handle recurring tasks so you can focus on more productive activities
    • Capture, retain and transfer knowledge and tradecraft experiences into automation policies
    • Automated system management is only as good as the policies and data they rely upon
    • Optimize via automation that relies on reporting for insight, awareness and analytics 

    November 3, 2016 (New) – Webinar 11AM PT – Redmond Magazine and
    Dell Software
    Tailor Your Backup Data Repositories to
    Fit Your Security and Management Needs

    Does data protection storage have you working overtime to take care of it? Do you have the flexibility to protect, preserve, secure and serve different workgroups or customers in a shared environment? Is your environment looking to expand with new applications and remote offices, yet your data protection is slowing you down? 

    In this webinar we will look at current and emerging trends along with issues including how different threat risk challenges impact your evolving environment, as well as opportunities to address them. It’s time to deploy technology that works for you and your environment instead of you working for the solution. 

    Attend and learn about:

    • Data protection trends, issues, regulatory compliance, challenges and opportunities
    • How to utilize purpose built appliances to protect and defend your systems, applications and data from various threat risks
    • Importance of timely insight and situational awareness into your data protection infrastructure
    • Protecting centralized and distributed remote office branch offices (ROBO) workgroups
    • What you can do today to optimize your environment

    October 27, 2016 (New) – Webinar 10AM PT – Virtual Instruments
    The Value of Infrastructure Insight

    This webinar looks at the value of data center infrastructure insight both as a technology as well as a business productivity enabler. Besides productivity, having insight into how data infrastructure resources (servers, storage, networks, system software) are used, enables informed analysis, troubleshooting, planning, forecasting as well as cost-effective decision-making. In other words, data center infrastructure insight, based on infrastructure performance analytics, enables you to avoid flying blind, having situational awareness for proactive Information Technology (IT) management. Your return on innovation is increased, and leveraging insight awareness along with metrics that matter drives return on investment (ROI) along with enhanced service delivery.

    October 20, 2016 – Webinar 9AM PT – BrightTalk
    Next-Gen Data Centers Software Defined Data Infrastructures (SDDI) including Servers, Storage and Virtualization

    Cloud Storage Decision Making

    At the core of next generation data centers are software defined data infrastructures that enable, protect, preserve and serve applications, data along with their resulting information services. Software defined data infrastructure core components include hardware, software servers and storage configured (defined) to provide various services enabling application Performance Availability Capacity and Economics (PACE). Just as there are different types of environments, applications along with workloads various options, technologies as well as techniques exist for virtual servers and storage. Join us in this session to discuss trends, technologies, tools, techniques and services around storage and virtualization for today, tomorrow, and in the years to come. Topics include:

    – Data Infrastructures exist to support applications and their underlying resource needs
    – Software Defined Infrastructures (SDDI) are what enable Software Defined Data Centers
    – Server and Storage Virtualization better together, with and without CI/HCI
    – Many different facets (types) of Server virtualization and virtual storage
    – When, where, why and how to use storage virtualization and virtual storage

    September 20, 2016 – Webinar 8AM PT – BrightTalk
    Software Defined Data Infrastructures (SDDI) Enabling Software Defined Data Centers – Part of Software-Defined Storage summit

    Cloud Storage Decision Making

    Data Infrastructures exist to support applications and their underlying resource needs. Software-Defined Infrastructures (SDI) are what enable Software-Defined Data Centers, and at the heart of a SDI is storage that is software-defined. This spans cloud, virtual and physical storage and is at the focal point of today. Join us in this session to discuss trends, technologies, tools, techniques and services around SDI and SDDC- today, tomorrow, and in the years to come.

    September 13, 2016 – Webinar 11AM PT – Redmond Magazine and
    Dell Software
    Windows Server 2016 and Active Directory
    Whats New and How to Plan for Migration

    Windows Server 2016 is expected to GA this fall and is a modernized version of the Microsoft operating system that includes new capabilities such as Active Directory (AD) enhancements. AD is critical to organizational operations providing control and secure access to data, networks, servers, storage and more from physical, virtual and cloud (public and hybrid). But over time, organizations along with their associated IT infrastructures have evolved due to mergers, acquisitions, restructuring and general growth. As a result, yesterday’s AD deployments may look like they did in the past while using new technology (e.g. in old ways). Now is the time to start planning for how you will optimize your AD environment using new tools and technologies such as those in Windows Server 2016 and AD in new ways. Optimizing AD means having a new design, performing cleanup and restructuring prior to migration vs. simply moving what you have. Join us for this interactive webinar to begin planning your journey to Windows Server 2016 and a new optimized AD deployment that is flexible, scalable and elastic, and enables resilient infrastructures. You will learn:

    • What’s new in Windows Server 2016 and how it impacts your AD
    • Why an optimized AD is critical for IT environments moving forward
    • How to gain insight into your current AD environment
    • AD restructuring planning considerations

    September 8, 2016 – Webinar 11AM PT (Watch on Demand) – Redmond Magazine, Acronis and Unitrends
    Data Protection for Modern Microsoft Environments

    Your organization’s business depends on modern Microsoft® environments — Microsoft Azure and new versions of Windows Server 2016, Microsoft Hyper-V with RCT, and business applications — and you need a data protection solution that keeps pace with Microsoft technologies. If you lose mission-critical data, it can cost you $100,000 or more for a single hour of downtime. Join our webinar and learn how different data protection solutions can protect your Microsoft environment, whether you store data on company premises, at remote locations, in private and public clouds, and on mobile devices.

    Where To Learn More

    What This All Means

    Its fall back to school and learning time, join me on these and other upcoming event activities.

    Ok, nuff said, for now…

    Cheers
    Gs

    Greg Schulz – Microsoft MVP Cloud and Data Center Management, vSAN and VMware vExpert. Author Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking (CRC Press), The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC Press) and Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier) and twitter @storageio

    All Comments, (C) and (TM) belong to their owners/posters, Other content (C) Copyright 2006-2023 Server StorageIO(R) and UnlimitedIO All Rights Reserved

    Like an Eagle Standing Tall and Proud, 9/11 2001 Never Forget

    Like an Eagle Standing Tall and Proud, 9/11 2001 Never Forget

    eagle standing tall server storage I/O trends

    Updated 1/28/2018

    A Eagle Standing Tall and Proud

    Like an Eagle Standing Tall and Proud

    On this 15th anniversary of the September 11 (e.g. 9/11), 2001 terror attacks on the United States, instead of a lot of words, photos, videos, links and other items, standing tall and proud, never forget, always remember that fateful day (along with December 7, 1941) among others.

    My wife took the following photo (the flag was added later) of two adult bald eagles next to our backyard on a windy evening a few weeks ago. Something about the photo caught my eye, perhaps its the focus and look of the eagles or how they are standing tall together having each others backs.

    A picture is worth a hundred or thousands of words, photos, videos or links

    Standing Tall and Proud

    Additional learning experiences along with common questions (and answers), as well as tips can be found in Software Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials book.

    Software Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials Book SDDC

    What This All Means

    Never forget, always remember, like the bald eagles in the photo united standing tall and proud.

    Ok, nuff said, for now.

    Gs

    Greg Schulz – Microsoft MVP Cloud and Data Center Management, VMware vExpert 2010-2017 (vSAN and vCloud). Author of Software Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials (CRC Press), as well as Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking (CRC Press), The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC Press), Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier) and twitter @storageio. Courteous comments are welcome for consideration. First published on https://storageioblog.com any reproduction in whole, in part, with changes to content, without source attribution under title or without permission is forbidden.

    All Comments, (C) and (TM) belong to their owners/posters, Other content (C) Copyright 2006-2024 Server StorageIO and UnlimitedIO. All Rights Reserved. StorageIO is a registered Trade Mark (TM) of Server StorageIO.

    Server StorageIO August 2016 Update Newsletter

    Volume 16, Issue VIII

    Hello and welcome to this August 2016 Server StorageIO update newsletter.

    In This Issue

  • Commentary in the news
  • Tips and Articles
  • StorageIOblog posts
  • Events and Webinars
  • Industry Activity Trends
  • Resources and Links
  • Enjoy this shortened summer edition of the Server StorageIO update newsletter.

    Cheers GS

    Industry Activity Trends

    With VMworld coming up this week, rest assured, there will be plenty to talk about and discuss in the following weeks. However for now, here are a few things from this past month.

    At Flash Memory Summit (FMS) which is more of a component, vendor to vendor industry type event, there was buzz about analytics, however what was shown as analytics tended to be Iometer. Hmmm, more on that in a future post. However something else at FMS besides variations of Non-Volatile Memory (NVM) including SSD, NAND, Flash, Storage Class Memory (SCM) such as 3D XPoint (among its new marketing names) along with NVM Expres (NVMe) was NVMe over Fabric.

    This includes NVMe over RoCE (RDMA over Converged Ethernet) which can be implemented on some 10 Gb (and faster) Ethernet adapters as well as some InfiniBand adapters from Mellanox among others. Another variation is Fibre Channel NVMe (FC-NVMe) where the NVMe protocol command set is transported as a Upper Level Protocol (ULP) over FC. This is similar to how the SCSI command set is implemented on FC (e.g. SCSI_FCP or FCP) which means NVMe can be seen as a competing protocol to FCP (which it will or could be). Naturally not to be left out, some of the marketers have already started with Persistent Memory over Fabric among other variations of Non- Ephemeral Memory over Fabrics. More on NVM, NVMe and fabrics in future posts, commentary and newsletter.

    Some other buzzword topics regaining mention (or perhaps for the first time for some) includes
    FedRAMP, Authority To Operate (ATO) clouds for Government entities, and FISMA among others. Many service providers, cloud and hosting providers from large AWS and Azure to smaller Blackmesh have added FedRAMP and other options in addition to traditional, DevOps.

    Some of you may recall me mentioning ScaleMP in the past which is a technology for aggregating multiple compute servers including processors and memory into a converged resource pool. Think the opposite of a hypervisor that divides up resources to support consolidation. In other words, where you need to scale up without complexity of clustering or to avoid having to change and partition your software applications. In addition to ScaleMP, a newer hardware agnostic startup to check out is Tidal Scale.

    On the merger and acquisition front, the Dell / EMC deal is moving forward expected to close soon, perhaps by time or before you read this. In other news, HPE announced that it is buying SGI to gain access to a larger part of the traditional legacy big data Super Compute and High Performance Compute (HPC) market. One of the SGI diamonds in the rough that if you are not aware, is DMF for data management. HPE and Dropbox also announced a partnership deal earlier this summer.

    That’s all for now, time to pack my bags and off to Las Vegas for VMworld 2016.

    Ok, nuff said, for now…

     

    StorageIOblog Posts

    Recent and popular Server StorageIOblog posts include:

    View other recent as well as past StorageIOblog posts here

     

    StorageIO Commentary in the news

    Recent Server StorageIO industry trends perspectives commentary in the news.

    Via FutureReadyOEM Q&A: when to implement ultra-dense storage
    Via EnterpriseStorageForum Comments on Top 10 Enterprise SSD Market Trends
    Via SearchStorage Comments on NAS system buying decisions
    Via EnterpriseStorageForum Comments on Cloud Storage Pros and Cons
    EnterpriseStorageForum Comments on Top 10 Enterprise SSD Market Trends

    View more Server, Storage and I/O hardware as well as software trends comments here

     

    StorageIO Tips and Articles

    Recent and past Server StorageIO articles appearing in different venues include:

    Via Iron Mountain Preventing Unexpected Disasters: IT and Data Infrastructure
    Via FutureReadyOEM Q&A: When to implement ultra-dense storage servers
    Via Micron Blog Whats next for NVMe and your Data Center – Preparing for Tomorrow
    Redmond Magazine: Trends – Evolving from Data Protection to Data Resiliency
    IronMountain: 5 Noteworthy Data Privacy Trends From 2015
    InfoStor: Data Protection Gaps, Some Good, Some Not So Good
    Virtual Blocks (VMware Blogs): EVO:RAIL ? When And Where To Use It?

    Check out these resources techniques, trends as well as tools. View more tips and articles here

    StorageIO Webinars and Industry Events

    December 7: BrightTalk Webinar – Hyper-Converged Infrastructure (HCI) Webinar 11AM PT

    November 23: BrightTalk Webinar – BCDR and Cloud Backup – Software Defined Data Infrastructures (SDDI) and Data Protection – 10AM PT

    November 23: BrightTalk Webinar – Cloud Storage – Hybrid and Software Defined Data Infrastructures (SDDI) – 9AM PT

    November 22: BrightTalk Webinar – Cloud Infrastructure – Hybrid and Software Defined Data Infrastructures (SDDI) – 10AM PT

    October 20: BrightTalk Webinar – Next-Gen Data Centers – Software Defined Data Infrastructures (SDDI) including Servers, Storage and Virtualizations – 9AM PT

    September 29: TBA Webinar – 10AM PT

    September 27-28 – NetApp – Las Vegas

    September 20: BrightTalk Webinar – Software Defined Data Infrastructures (SDDI) Enabling Software Defined Data Centers – Part of Software-Defined Storage summit – 8AM PT

    September 13: Redmond Webinar – Windows Server 2016 and Active Directory What’s New and How to Plan for Migration – 11AM PT

    September 8: Redmond Webinar – Data Protection for Modern Microsoft Environments – 11AM PT

    August 29-31: VMworld Las Vegas

    August 25 – MSP CMG – The Answer is Software Defined – What was the question?

    August 16: BrightTalk Webinar Software Defined Data Centers (SDDC) are in your future (if not already) – Part of Enterprise Software and Infrastructure summit 8AM PT

    August 10-11 Flash Memory Summit (Panel discussion August 11th) – NVMe over Fabric

    See more webinars and other activities on the Server StorageIO Events page here.

     

    Server StorageIO Industry Resources and Links

    Check out these useful links and pages:

    storageio.com/links – Various industry links (over 1,000 with more to be added soon)
    objectstoragecenter.com – Cloud and object storage topics, tips and news items
    storageioblog.com/data-protection-diaries-main/ – Various data protection items and topics
    thenvmeplace.com – Focus on NVMe trends and technologies
    thessdplace.com – NVM and Solid State Disk topics, tips and techniques
    storageio.com/performance.com – Various server, storage and I/O performance and benchmarking

    Ok, nuff said

    Cheers
    Gs

    Greg Schulz – Author Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking (CRC Press), The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC Press) and Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier)
    twitter @storageio

    All Comments, (C) and (TM) belong to their owners/posters, Other content (C) Copyright 2006-2024 Server StorageIO and UnlimitedIO LLC All Rights Reserved

    2016 Going Dutch Cloud Virtualization Server Storage I/O Seminars

    2016 Going Dutch Cloud Virtualization Server Storage I/O Seminars

    server storage I/O trends

    In June 2016 Brouwer Storage Consultancy is organizing their yearly spring seminar workshops in Nijkerk Holland (south of Amsterdam, near Utrecht and Amersfoort) with myself among others presenting.

    Brouwer Consultancy

    Cloud Virtualization Server Storage I/O Seminars

    For this series of seminar workshops, there are four sessions, two being presented by myself, and two others in conjunction with Reduxio as well as Fujitsu & SJ Solutions.

    Brouwer and Server StorageIO Seminar Sessions

    Agenda, How To Register and Where To Learn More

    The vendor sponsored sessions will consist of about 50% content being independent presented by myself and Gert Brouwer, the balance by the event sponsors as well as their partners. All presentation and associated content including handouts will be in English.

    There will be 4 seminar workshop sessions, two of those are paid sessions dedicated to Greg Schulz and the other two are free (sponsored) sessions where 50% of the content is sponsored (Reduxio, FujitsuSJ Solutions) and the other 50% will be independent (Greg Schulz & Gert Brouwer).

    Thursday June 9th – Server StorageIO Trends and Updates

    Server Storage I/O Fundamental Trends V2.016 and Updates. What’s New, What’s the buzz, what you need to know about. From Speeds and Feeds, Slots and Watts to Who’s doing what. Event Location: Golden Tulip Ampt van Nijkerk Hotel, Berencamperweg 4, 3861MC, Nijkerk. Learn more here (PDF abstract and topics to be covered).

    Thursday June 10th – Converged Day

    Converged Day – Moving beyond Hyper-Converged Hype and Server Storage I/O Decision Making Strategies. Event Location: Golden Tulip Ampt van Nijkerk Hotel, Berencamperweg 4, 3861MC, Nijkerk. Learn more here (PDF abstract and topics to be covered).

    Brouwer and Server StorageIO Seminar Sessions De Roode Schuur

    Tuesday June 14th – Round Table Vendor Session with Reduxio

    Symposium Workshop – Round Table Vendor Session with Reduxio – Are some solutions really ‘a Paradigm shift’ or ‘new and revolutionary” as they claim to be, or is it just more of the same (e.g. evolutionary)? – Presentations and discussions led by Greg Schulz (StorageIO), Reduxio and Brouwer Storage Consultancy. (Free, sponsored Session, Access for end-users only). Event Location: Hotel & Gasterij De Roode Schuur, Oude Barneveldseweg 98, 3862PS Nijkerk. Learn more here (PDF abstract and topics to be covered).

    Wednesday June 15th – Software Defined Data Center Symposium Workshop

    Software Defined Data Center Symposium Workshop – Round Table Vendor Session with Fujitsu & SJ Solutions
    With subjects like Openstack, Ceph, distributed object storage, Bigdata, Hyper-Converged Infrastructure (HCI), Converged Infrastructure (CI), Software defined storage (SDS) and Network (SDN and NFV), this round table format workshop seminars explores these and other related topics including what to use when, where, why and how. Presentations by Greg Schulz (StorageIO), SJ Solutions & Fujitsu and Brouwer Storage Consultancy. Event Location: Hotel & Gasterij De Roode Schuur, Oude Barneveldseweg 98, 3862PS Nijkerk. Learn more here (PDF abstract and topics to be covered).

    For more information, abstracts/agenda, registration and the specific locations for all the above events click here.

    Brouwer and Server StorageIO Sessions Ampt van Nijkerk

    What This All Means

    There is a lot of things occurring in the IT industry from physical to software defined clouds, containers and virtualization, nonvolatile memory (NVM) including flash SSD among others. These series of interactive educational workshop seminars converge on Nijkerk Holland combing content discussions from strategy, planning decision making, to what’s new (and old) that can be used in new ways, as well as some trends, speeds and feeds along with practicality for your environment.

    Brouwer Consultancy

    I Look forward to seeing you in Nijkerk and Europe during June 2016, in the meantime, contact Brouwer Storage Consultancy for more information on the above sessions as well as to arrange private discussions or meetings.

    Ok, nuff said, for now…

    Cheers
    Gs

    Greg Schulz – Author Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking (CRC Press), The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC Press) and Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier)
    twitter @storageio

    All Comments, (C) and (TM) belong to their owners/posters, Other content (C) Copyright 2006-2023 Server StorageIO(R) and UnlimitedIO All Rights Reserved

    Server StorageIO September 2015 Update Newsletter


    Server and StorageIO Update Newsletter

    Volume 15, Issue IX

    Hello and welcome to this September 2015 Server StorageIO update newsletter. Summer has wrapped up here in the northern hemisphere which means the fall conference season has started. In addition to large conferences, there are also many smaller events including the sessions I will be doing in Nijkerk Holland week of October 13-16, along with others (in-person and on-line) throughout the fall.

    Enjoy this edition of the Server StorageIO update newsletter and watch for new tips, articles, StorageIO lab report reviews, blog posts, videos and podcast’s along with in the news commentary appearing soon.

    Cheers GS

    In This Issue

  • Industry Trends News
  • Commentary in the news
  • Tips and Articles
  • StorageIOblog posts
  • Videos and Podcasts
  • Events and Webinars
  • Recommended Reading List
  • Industry Activity Trends
  • New and Old Vendor Update
  • Resources and Links
  • StorageIOblog Posts

    Recent and popular Server StorageIOblog posts include:

    View other recent as well as past blog posts here

    Server Storage I/O Industry Activity Trends (Cloud, Virtual, Physical)

    StorageIO news (image licensed for use from Shutterstock by StorageIO)

    • AWS adds new S3 (Simple Storage Service) class (Infrequent Access)
    • EMC releases ScaleIO software appliance bundle
    • VMware VSAN V6.1, VSAN Witness appliance and more
    • All Flash Array (AFA) SSD startup Pure Storage files for IPO
    • Microsoft Windows Server 2016 Tech Preview 3 (TP3) features

    View other recent news and industry trends here

    StorageIO Commentary in the news

    StorageIO news (image licensed for use from Shutterstock by StorageIO)
    Recent Server StorageIO commentary and industry trends perspectives about news, activities tips, and announcements.

    • EnterpriseStorageForum: Top Ten Ways to Use OpenStack for Storage
    • EnterpriseStorageForum: Are We Heading for Storage Armageddon?

    View more Server, Storage and I/O hardware as well as software trends comments here

    Vendors you may not have heard of

    Various vendors (and service providers) you may not know or heard about recently.

    • Formation Data Systems – Software Defined Storage Management Solutions
    • Tesora – OpenStack Trove Database Management tools

    Check out more vendors you may know, have heard of, or that are perhaps new on the Server StorageIO Industry Links page here (over 1,000 entries and growing).

    StorageIO Tips and Articles

    Recent Server StorageIO articles appearing in different venues include:

    • NetworkComputing:  Selecting Storage: It’s All About The Applications
      Choosing the right storage for your applications depends on using the PACE model, evaluating Performance, Availability, Capacity and Economics (e.g. PACE). Often when I discuss mainstream applications with people, the perception is that bandwidth only applies to big data and analytics, video, and high-performance compute (HPC) or supercomputing applications such as those used in the seismic, geo, energy, video security surveillance, or entertainment industries. The reality is that those applications can be bandwidth or throughput intensive, but they can also need a large number of small I/Os that need many IOPs to handle metadata related processing. Even bulk storage repositories for archiving, solutions using scale-out NAS, and object storage have a mix of IOPs and bandwidth. Read more here.


    • EnterpriseStorageForum:  NAND, DRAM, SAS/SCSI and SATA/AHCI: Not Dead, Yet

      Manufacturers are coming out with new non-volatile memory (NVM) media like3D XPoint. Does that mean that DRAM and other NVM media such as NAND flash are now dead?

      Do new NVM storage access protocols such as NVM Express (NVMe) mean SCSI/SAS and AHCI/SATA are now dead?

      My simple answer is no, they all have bright futures. Read more here.

    Check out these resources and links technology, techniques, trends as well as tools. View more tips and articles here

    StorageIO Videos and Podcasts

    StorageIO podcasts are also available via and at StorageIO.tv

    StorageIO Webinars and Industry Events

    Deltaware Emerging Technology Summit November 10, 2015

    Microsoft MVP Summit Nov 2-5, 2015

    Server Storage I/O Dutch Workshop Seminar Series
    Nijkerk Netherlands October 13-16 2015

    October 13 – Symposium: Software Defined Storage Management
    October 14 – Server Storage I/O Fundamental Trends
    October 15 – Symposium – Data Center Infrastructure Management (DCIM)
    October 16 – “Converged Day” Server and Storage Decision making

    Learn more and register at the Brouwer Consultancy website here.

    September 23 – Webinar Redmond Magazine & Dell Data Protection
    The New World Order of Data Protection – Focus on Recovery
    Learn more about the 9Rs of data protection and recovery

    See more webinars and other activities on the Server StorageIO Events page here.

    Server StorageIO Recommended Reading List

    The following are various recommended reading including books, blogs and videos. If you have not done so recently, also check out the Intel Recommended Reading List (here) where you will also find a couple of my books.

    Seven Databases in Seven Weeks guide to no SQL via Amazon.com
    Seven Databases in Seven Weeks (A Guide to Modern Databases and the NoSQL Movement) is a book written Eric Redmond (@coderoshi) and Jim Wilson (@hexlib), that takes a look at several non SQL based database systems. Coverage includes PostgreSQL, Riak, Apache HBase, MongoDB, Apache CouchDB, Neo4J and Redis with plenty of code and architecture examples. Also covered include relational vs. key value, columnar and document based systems among others. Read more here.

    Server StorageIO Industry Resources and Links

    Check out these useful links and pages:

    storageio.com/links
    objectstoragecenter.com
    storageioblog.com/data-protection-diaries-main/
    storageperformance.us
    thenvmeplace
    thessdplace.com
    storageio.com/raid
    storageio.com/ssd

    Ok, nuff said

    Cheers
    Gs

    Greg Schulz – Author Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking (CRC Press), The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC Press) and Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier)
    twitter @storageio

    All Comments, (C) and (TM) belong to their owners/posters, Other content (C) Copyright 2006-2024 Server StorageIO and UnlimitedIO LLC All Rights Reserved

    August Server StorageIO Update Newsletter – NVM and Flash SSD Focus

    Volume 15, Issue VIII

    Hello and welcome to this August 2015 Server StorageIO update newsletter. Summer is wrapping up here in the northern hemisphere which means the fall conference season has started, holidays in progress as well as getting ready for back to school time. I have been spending my summer working on various things involving servers, storage, I/O networking hardware, software, services from cloud to containers, virtual and physical. This includes OpenStack, VMware vCloud Air, AWS, Microsoft Azure, GCS among others, as well as new versions of Microsoft Windows and Servers, Non Volatile Memory (NVM) including flash SSD, NVM Express (NVMe), databases, data protection, software defined, cache, micro-tiering and benchmarking using various tools among other things (some are still under wraps).

    Enjoy this edition of the Server StorageIO update newsletter and watch for new tips, articles, StorageIO lab report reviews, blog posts, videos and podcast’s along with in the news commentary appearing soon.

    Cheers GS

    In This Issue

  • Feature Topic
  • Industry Trends News
  • Commentary in the news
  • Tips and Articles
  • StorageIOblog posts
  • Videos and Podcasts
  • Events and Webinars
  • Recommended Reading List
  • Industry Activity Trends
  • Server StorageIO Lab reports
  • New and Old Vendor Update
  • Resources and Links
  • Feature Topic – Non Volatile Memory including NAND flash SSD

    Via Intel History of Memory
    Via Intel: Click above image to view history of memory

    This months feature topic theme is Non Volatile Memory (NVM) which includes technologies such as NAND flash commonly used in Solid State Devices (SSDs) storage today, as well as in USB thumb drive, mobile and hand-held devices among many other uses. NVM spans servers, storage, I/O devices along with mobile and handheld among many other technologies. In addition to NAND flash, other forms of NVM include Non Volatile Random Access Memory (NVRAM), Read Only Memory (ROM) along with some emerging new technologies including the recently announced Intel and Micron 3D XPoint among others.

    • NVMe: The Golden Ticket for Faster Flash Storage? (Via EnterpriseStorageForum)
    • What should I consider when using SSD cloud? (Via SearchCloudStorage)
    • MSP CMG, Sept. 2014 Presentation (Flash back to reality – Myths and Realities
    • Flash and SSD Industry trends perspectives plus benchmarking tips) – PDF
    • Selecting Storage: Start With Requirements (Via NetworkComputing)
    • Spot The Newest & Best Server Trends (Via Processor)
    • Market ripe for embedded flash storage as prices drop (Via Powermore (Dell))

    Continue reading more about NVM, NVMe, NAND flash, SSD Server and storage I/O related topics at www.thessdplace.com as well as about I/O performance, monitoring and benchmarking tools at www.storageperformance.us.

     

    StorageIOblog Posts

    Recent and popular Server StorageIOblog posts include:

    View other recent as well as past blog posts here

    Server Storage I/O Industry Activity Trends (Cloud, Virtual, Physical)

    StorageIO news (image licensed for use from Shutterstock by StorageIO)

    • PMC Announces NVMe SSD Controllers (Via TomsITpro)
    • New SATA SSD powers elastic cloud agility for CSPs (Via Cbronline)
    • Toshiba Solid-State Drive Family Features PCIe Technology (Via Eweek)
    • SanDisk aims CloudSpeed Ultra SSD at cloud providers (Via ITwire)
    • Everspin & Aupera reveal MRAM Module M.2 Form Factor (Via BusinessWire)
    • PMC-Sierra Scales Storage with PCIe, NVMe (Via EEtimes)
    • Seagate Grows Its Nytro Enterprise Flash Storage Line (Via InfoStor)
    • New SAS Solid State Drive From Seagate Micron Alliance (Via Seagate)
    • Samsung ups the SSD ante with faster, higher capacity drives (Via ITworld)

    View other recent news and industry trends here

    StorageIO Commentary in the news

    StorageIO news (image licensed for use from Shutterstock by StorageIO)
    Recent Server StorageIO commentary and industry trends perspectives about news, activities tips, and announcements.

    • Processor: Comments on Spot The Newest & Best Server Trends
    • Processor: Comments on A Snapshot Strategy For Backups & Data Recovery
    • EnterpriseStorageForum: Comments on Defining the Future of DR Storage
    • EnterpriseStorageForum: Comments on Top Ten Tips for DR as a Service
    • EnterpriseStorageForum: Comments on NVMe: Golden Ticket for Faster Storage

    View more Server, Storage and I/O hardware as well as software trends comments here

    Vendors you may not have heard of

    Various vendors (and service providers) you may not know or heard about recently.

    • Scala – Scale out storage management software tools
    • Reduxio – Enterprise hybrid storage with data services
    • Jam TreeSize Pro – Data discovery and storage resource analysis and reporting

    Check out more vendors you may know, have heard of, or that are perhaps new on the Server StorageIO Industry Links page here (over 1,000 entries and growing).

    StorageIO Tips and Articles

    Recent Server StorageIO articles appearing in different venues include:

    • IronMountain:  Information Lifecycle Management: Which Data Types Have Value?
      It’s important to keep in mind that on a fundamental level, there are three types of data: information that has value, information that does not have value and information that has unknown value. Data value can be measured along performance, availability, capacity and economic attributes, which define how the data gets managed across different tiers of storage. In general data can have value, unknown value or no value. Read more here.
    • EnterpriseStorageForum:  Is Future Storage Converging Around Hyper-Converged?
      Depending on who you talk or listen to, hyper-converged storage is either the future of storage, or it is a hype niche market that is not for everybody, particular not larger environments. How converged is the hyper-converged market? There are many environments that can leverage CI along with HCI, CiB or other bundles solutions. Granted, not all of those environments will converge around the same CI, CiB and HCI or pod solution bundles as everything is not the same in most IT environments and data centers. Not all markets, environments or solutions are the same. Read more here.

    Check out these resources and links technology, techniques, trends as well as tools. View more tips and articles here

    StorageIO Videos and Podcasts

    StorageIO podcasts are also available via and at StorageIO.tv

    StorageIO Webinars and Industry Events

    Server Storage I/O Workshop Seminars
    Nijkerk Netherlands October 13-16 2015

    VMworld August 30-September 3 2015

    See additional webinars and other activities on the Server StorageIO Events page here.

    From StorageIO Labs

    Research, Reviews and Reports

    Enmotus FuzeDrive (Server based Micro-Tiering)
    Enmotus FuzeDrive
    • Micro-teiring of reads and writes
    • FuzeDrive for transparent tiering
    • Dynamic tiering with selectable options
    • Monitoring and diagnostics tools
    • Transparent to operating systems
    • Hardware transparent (HDD and SSD)
    • Server I/O interface agnostic
    • Optional RAM cache and file pinning
    • Maximize NVM flash SSD investment
    • Compliment other SDS solutions
    • Use for servers or workstations

    Enmotus FuzeDrive provides micro-tiering boosting performance (reads and writes) of storage attached to physical bare metal servers, virtual and cloud instances including Windows and Linux operating systems across various applications. In the simple example above five separate SQL Server databases (260GB each) were placed on a single 6TB HDD. A TPCC workload was run concurrently against all databases with various numbers of users. One workload used a single 6TB HDD (blue) while the other used a FuzeDrive (green) comprised of a 6TB HDD and a 400GB SSD showing basic micro-tiering improvements.

    View other StorageIO lab review reports here

    Server StorageIO Recommended Reading List

    The following are various recommended reading including books, blogs and videos. If you have not done so recently, also check out the Intel Recommended Reading List (here) where you will also find a couple of my books.

    Get Whats Yours via Amazon.com
    While not a technology book, you do not have to be at or near retirement age to be planning for retirement. Some of you may already be at or near retirement age, for others, its time to start planning or refining your plans. A friend recommended this book and I’m recommending it to others. Its pretty straight forward and you might be surprised how much money people may be leaving on the table! Check it out here at Amazon.com.

    Server StorageIO Industry Resources and Links

    Check out these useful links and pages:

    storageio.com/links
    objectstoragecenter.com
    storageioblog.com/data-protection-diaries-main/
    storageperformance.us
    thenvmeplace
    thessdplace.com
    storageio.com/raid
    storageio.com/ssd

    Ok, nuff said

    Cheers
    Gs

    Greg Schulz – Author Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking (CRC Press), The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC Press) and Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier)
    twitter @storageio

    All Comments, (C) and (TM) belong to their owners/posters, Other content (C) Copyright 2006-2024 Server StorageIO and UnlimitedIO LLC All Rights Reserved

    Non Volatile Memory (NVM), NVMe, Flash Memory Summit and SSD updates

    Storage I/O trends

    Non Volatile Memory (NVM), NVMe, Flash Memory Summit and SSD updates

    I attended the Flash Memory Summit in Santa Clara CA last week and not surprisingly there were many announcements about Non-Volatile Memory (NVM) along with related enabling technologies. Some of these announcements were component based intended for original equipment manufactures (OEMs) ranging from startup to established, systems integrators (SI), value added resellers (VAR’s) while others were more customer solution focused. From a customer solution focus, some of the technologies were consumer oriented while others for business and some for cloud scale service providers.

    Recent NVM, NVMe and Flash SSD news

    A sampling of some recent NVM, NVMe and Flash related news includes among others:

    • PMC Announces Flashtec NVMe SSD NVMe2106, NVMe2032 Controllers (Via TomsITpro)
    • New SATA SSD powers elastic cloud agility for CSPs (Via Cbronline)
    • Toshiba Solid-State Drive Family Features PCIe Technology (Via Eweek)
    • SanDisk aims CloudSpeed Ultra SSD at cloud providers (Via ITwire)
    • Everspin & Aupera show all-MRAM Storage Module in M.2 Form Factor (Via BusinessWire)
    • Intel and Micron unveil new 3D XPoint Non Volatile Memory (NVM) for servers and storage (part I, part II and part III)
    • PMC-Sierra Scales Storage with PCIe, NVMe (Via EEtimes)
    • Seagate Grows Its Nytro Enterprise Flash Storage Line (Via InfoStor)
    • New SAS Solid State Drive First Product From Seagate Micron Alliance (Via Seagate)
    • Wow, Samsung’s New 16 Terabyte SSD Is the World’s Largest Hard Drive (Via Gizmodo)
    • Samsung ups the SSD ante with faster, higher capacity drives (Via ITworld)

    NVMe primer

    Via Intel History of Memory
    Via Intel: Click above image to view history of memory via Intel site

    NVM includes technologies such as NAND flash commonly used in Solid State Devices (SSD’s) storage today, as well as in USB thumb drive, mobile and hand-held devices among many other uses. NVM spans servers, storage, I/O devices along with mobile and handheld among many other technologies. In addition to NAND flash, other forms of NVM include Non Volatile Random Access Memory (NVRAM), Read Only Memory (ROM) along with some emerging new technologies including the recently announced Intel and Micron 3D XPoint among others.

    Server Storage I/O access and NVM
    Server Storage I/O memory (and storage) hierarchy

    Keep in mind that memory is storage and storage is persistent memory as well as that there are different classes, categories and tiers of memory and storage as shown above to meet various performance, availability, capacity and economic requirements. Besides NVM ranging from flash to NVRAM to emerging 3D XPoint among others, another popular topic that is gaining momentum is NVM Express (NVMe). NVMe (more material here at www.thenvmeplace.com) is a new server storage I/O access method and protocol for fast access to NVM based products. NVMe is an alternative to existing block based server storage I/O access protocols such as AHCI/SATA and SCSI/SAS devices commonly used for access Hard Disk Drives (HDD) along with SSD among other things.

    Server Storage I/O NVMe PCIe SAS SATA AHCI
    Comparing AHCI/SATA, SCSI/SAS and NVMe all of which can coexist to address different needs.

    Leveraging the common PCIe hardware interface, NVMe based devices (that have an NVMe controller) can be accessed via various operating systems (and hypervisors such as VMware ESXi) with both in the box drivers or optional third-party device drivers. Devices that support NVMe can be 2.5" drive format packaged that use a converged 8637/8639 connector (e.g. PCIe x4) coexisting with SAS and SATA devices as well as being add in card (AIC) PCIe cards supporting x4, x8 and other implementations. Initially NVMe is being positioned as a back-end to servers (or storage systems) interface for accessing fast flash and other NVM based devices.

    NVMe as back-end storage
    NVMe as a "back-end" I/O interface in a server or storage system accessing NVM storage/media devices

    NVMe as front-end server storage I/O interface
    NVMe as a “front-end” interface for servers (or storage systems/appliances) to use NVMe based storage systems

    NVMe has also been shown to work over low latency, high-speed RDMA based network interfaces including RoCE (RDMA over Converged Ethernet) and InfiniBand (read more here, here and here involving Mangstor, Mellanox and PMC among others). What this means is that like SCSI based SAS which can be both a back-end drive (HDD, SSD, etc) access protocol and interface, NVMe can in addition to being used for back-end can also be used as a front-end of server to storage interface like how Fibre Channel SCSI_Protocol (aka FCP), SCSI based iSCSI, SCSI RDMA Protocol via InfiniBand (among others) are used.

    Shared external PCIe using NVMe
    NVMe and shared PCIe

    NVMe features

    Main features of NVMe include among others:

    • Lower latency due to improve drivers and increased queues (and queue sizes)
    • Lower CPU used to handler larger number of I/Os (more CPU available for useful work)
    • Higher I/O activity rates (IOPs) to boost productivity unlock value of fast flash and NVM
    • Bandwidth improvements leveraging various fast PCIe interface and available lanes
    • Dual-pathing of devices like what is available with dual-path SAS devices
    • Unlock the value of more cores per processor socket and software threads (productivity)
    • Various packaging options, deployment scenarios and configuration options
    • Appears as a standard storage device on most operating systems
    • Plug-play with in-box drivers on many popular operating systems and hypervisors

    Watch for more about NVMe as it continues to gain in both industry adoption and deployment as well as customer adoption and deployment.

    Where to read, watch and learn more

    • NVMe: The Golden Ticket for Faster Flash Storage? (Via EnterpriseStorageForum)
    • What should I consider when using SSD cloud? (Via SearchCloudStorage)
    • MSP CMG, September 2014 Presentation (Flash back to reality – Myths and Realities Flash and SSD Industry trends perspectives plus benchmarking tips) – PDF
    • Selecting Storage: Start With Requirements (Via NetworkComputing)
    • Spot The Newest & Best Server Trends (Via Processor)
    • Intel and Micron unveil new 3D XPoint Non Volatile Memory (NVM) for servers and storage (part I, part II and part III)
    • Market ripe for embedded flash storage as prices drop (Via Powermore (Dell))
    • Continue reading more about NVM, NVMe, NAND flash, SSD Server and storage I/O related topics at www.thessdplace.com as well as about I/O performance, monitoring and benchmarking tools at www.storageperformance.us.

    Storage I/O trends

    What this all means and wrap up

    The question is not if NVM is in your future, it is! Instead the questions are what type of NVM including NAND flash among other mediums will be deployed where, using what type of packaging or solutions (drives, cards, systems, appliances, cloud) for what role (as storage, primary memory, persistent cache) along with how much among others. For some environments the solution is already, or will be All NVM Arrays (ANA) or All Flash Arrays (AFA) or All SSD Arrays (ASA) while for others the home run will be hybrid based solutions that work for you, fitting in and adapting to your environment as it changes.

    Also keep in mind that a little bit of fast memory including NVM based flash among others in the right place can have a big benefit. My experiences using NVMe to use flash enabled NVMe devices on Windows and Linux systems is that you can see lower response times at higher-IOP’s however also with lower CPU consumption particular when compared to 6Gbps SATA. Likewise bandwidth can easily be pushed to the limits of the NVMe device as well as PCIe interface being used such as x4 or x8 depending on implementation. That is also a warning and something to watch out for comparing apples to oranges in that while NVMe uses PCIe, understand when looking at different results if those are for x4 or x8 or faster PCIe as their mere presence of using PCIe does not mean you are running at full potential.

    Keep an eye on NVMe as a new high-speed, low-latency server storage I/O access protocol for unlocking the full performance capabilities of fast NVM based storage as well as leveraging the multiple cores in today’s fast processors. Does this mean AHCI/SATA or SCSI/SAS are now dead? Some will claim that, however at least near-term for next few years (if not longer), those interfaces will continue to be used where they make sense, as well as where they can save dollars specifically for cost sensitive, high-capacity environments that do not need the full performance of NVMe just yet.

    As for the Flash Memory Summit event in Santa Clara, that was a good day with time well spent in briefings, meetings, demo’s and add hoc discussions on the expo floor.

    Ok, nuff said

    Cheers
    Gs

    Greg Schulz – Author Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking (CRC Press), The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC Press) and Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier)
    twitter @storageio

    All Comments, (C) and (TM) belong to their owners/posters, Other content (C) Copyright 2006-2024 Server StorageIO and UnlimitedIO LLC All Rights Reserved

    EMCworld 2015 How Do You Want Your Storage Wrapped?

    Server Storage I/O trends

    EMCworld 2015 How Do You Want Your Storage Wrapped?

    Back in early May I was invited by EMC to attend EMCworld 2015 which included both the public sessions, as well as several NDA based discussions. Keep in mind that there is the known, there is the unknown (or assumed or speculated) and in between there are NDA’s, nuff said on that. EMC covered my hotel and registration costs to attend the event in Las Vegas (thanks EMC, that’s a disclosure btw ;) and here is a synopsis of various EMCworld 2015 announcements.

    What EMC announced

    • VMAX3 enhancements to the EMC enterprise flagship storage platform to keep it relevant for traditional legacy workloads as well as for in a converged, scale-out, cloud, virtual and software defined environment.
    • VNX 3200 entry-level All Flash Array (AFA) flash SSD system starting at $25,000 USD for a 3TB unified platform with full data services found in other VNX products.
    • vVNX aka Virtual VNX aka "project liberty" which is a community (e.g. free) software version of the VNX. vVNX is a Virtual Storage Appliance (VSA) that you download and run on a VMware platform. Learn more and download here. Note the install will do a CPU type check so forget about trying to run it on a Intel Nuc or similar, I tried just because I could, the install will protect you from doing such things.
    • Various data protection related items including new Datadomain platforms as well as software updates and integration with other EMC platforms (storage systems).
    • All Flash Array (AFA) XtremIO 4.0 enhancements including larger clusters, larger nodes to boost performance, capacity and availability, along with copy service updates among others improvements.
    • Preview of DSSD shared (inside a rack) external flash Solid State Device (SSD) including more details. While much of DSSD is still under NDA, EMC did provide more public details at EMCworld. Between what was displayed and announced publicly at EMCworld as well as what can be found via Google (or other searches) you can piece together more of the DSSD story. What is known publicly today is that DSSD leverages the new Non-Volatile Memory express (NVMe) access protocol built upon underlying PCIe technology. More on DSSD in future discussions,if you have not done so, get an NDA deep dive briefing on it from EMC.
    • ScaleIO is now available via a free download here including both Windows and Linux clients as well as instructions for those operating systems as well as VMware.
    • ViPR can also be downloaded here for free (has been previously available) from here as well as it has been placed into open source by EMC.

    What EMC announced since EMCworld 2015

    • Acquisition of cloud services (and software tools) vendor Virtustream for $1.2B adding to the federation cloud services portfolio (companion to VMware vCloud Air).
    • Release of ECS 2.0 including a free download here. This new version of ECS (Elastic Cloud Storage) can be used independent of the ViPR controller, or in conjunction with ViPR. In addition ECS now has about 80% of the functionality of the Centera object storage platform. The remaining 20% functionality (mainly regulatory compliance governance) of Centera will be added to ECS in the future providing a migration path for Centera customers. In case you are wondering what does EMC do with Centera, Atmos, ViPR and now ECS, answer is that ECS can work with or without ViPR, second is that the functionality of Centera, Atmos are being rolled into ECS. ECS as a refresher is software that transforms general purpose industry standard servers with direct storage into a scale-out HDFS and object storage solution.
    • Check out EMCcode including S3motion that I use and have reviewed here. Also check out EMCcode Rex-Ray which if you are into docker containers, it should be of interest, I know I’m interested in it.

    Server Storage I/O trends

    What this all means and wrap-up

    There were no single major explosive announcements however the sum of all the announcements together should not be over shadowed by the big tent made for TV (or web) big tent productions and entertainment. What EMC announced was effectively how would you like, how do you want and need your storage and associated data services along with management wrapped.

    tin wrapped software

    By being wrapped, do you want your software defined storage management and storage wrapped in a legacy turnkey solution such as VMAX3, VNX or Isilon, do you want or need it to be hybrid or all flash, converged and unified, block, file or object.

    software wrapped storage

    Or do you need or want the software defined storage management and storage to be "shrink wrapped" as a download so you can deploy on your own hardware "tin wrapped" or as a VSA "virtual wrapped" or cloud wrapped? Do you need or want the software defined storage management and storage to leverage anybody’s hardware while being open source?

    server storage software wrapping

    How do you need or want your storage to be wrapped to fit your specific needs, that IMHO was the essence of what EMC announced at EMCworld 2015, granted the motorcycles and other production entertainment was engaging as well as educational.

    Ok, nuff said for now

    Cheers
    Gs

    Greg Schulz – Author Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking (CRC Press), The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC Press) and Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier)
    twitter @storageio

    All Comments, (C) and (TM) belong to their owners/posters, Other content (C) Copyright 2006-2024 Server StorageIO and UnlimitedIO LLC All Rights Reserved

    S3motion Buckets Containers Objects AWS S3 Cloud and EMCcode

    Storage I/O trends

    S3motion Buckets Containers Objects AWS S3 Cloud and EMCcode

    It’s springtime in Kentucky and recently I had the opportunity to have a conversation with Kendrick Coleman to talk about S3motion, Buckets, Containers, Objects, AWS S3, Cloud and Object Storage, node.js, EMCcode and open source among other related topics which are available in a podcast here, or video here and available at StorageIO.tv.

    In this Server StorageIO industry trends perspective podcast episode, @EMCcode (Part of EMC) developer advocate Kendrick Coleman (@KendrickColeman) joins me for a conversation. Our conversation spans spring-time in Kentucky (where Kendrick lives) which means Bourbon and horse racing as well as his blog (www.kendrickcoleman.com).

    Btw, in the podcast I refer to Captain Obvious and Kendrick’s beard, for those not familiar with who or what @Captainobvious is that is made reference to, click here to learn more.


    @Kendrickcoleman
    & @Captainobvious

    What about Clouds Object Storage Programming and other technical stuff?

    Of course we also talk some tech including what is EMCcode, EMC Federation, Cloud Foundry, clouds, object storage, buckets, containers, objects, node.js, Docker, Openstack, AWS S3, micro services, and the S3motion tool that Kendrick developed.

    Cloud and Object Storage Access
    Click to view video

    Kendrick explains the motivation behind S3motion along with trends in and around objects (including GET, PUT vs. traditional Read, Write) as well as programming among related topic themes and how context matters.

    S3motion for AWS S3 Google and object storage
    Click to listen to podcast

    I have used S3motion for moving buckets, containers and objects around including between AWS S3, Google Cloud Storage (GCS) and Microsoft Azure as well as to/from local. S3motion is a good tool to have in your server storage I/O tool box for working with cloud and object storage along with others such as Cloudberry, S3fs, Cyberduck, S3 browser among many others.

    You can get S3motion free from git hub here.

    Amazon Web Services AWS

    Where to learn more

    Here are some links to learn more about AWS S3, Cloud and Object Storage along with related topics

    Also available on

    What this all means and wrap-up

    Context matters when it comes to many things particular about objects as they can mean different things. Tools such as S3motion make it easy for moving your buckets or containers along with objects from one cloud storage system, solution or service to another. Also check out EMCcode to see what they are doing on different fronts from supporting new and greenfield development with Cloud Foundry and PaaS to Openstack to bridging current environments to the next generation of platforms. Also check out Kendricks blog site as he has a lot of good technical content as well as some other fun stuff to learn about. Look forward to having Kendrick on as a guest again soon to continue our conversations. In the meantime, check out S3motion to see how it can fit into your server storage I/O tool box.

    Ok, nuff said, for now..

    Cheers gs

    Greg Schulz – Author Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking (CRC Press), The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC Press) and Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier)
    twitter @storageio

    All Comments, (C) and (TM) belong to their owners/posters, Other content (C) Copyright 2006-2024 Server StorageIO and UnlimitedIO LLC All Rights Reserved

    December 2014 Server StorageIO Newsletter

    December 2014

    Hello and welcome to this December Server and StorageIO update newsletter.

    Seasons Greetings

    Seasons greetings

    Commentary In The News

    StorageIO news

    Following are some StorageIO industry trends perspectives comments that have appeared in various venues. Cloud conversations continue to be popular including concerns about privacy, security and availability. Over at BizTech Magazine there are some comments about cloud and ROI. Some comments on AWS and Google SSD services can be viewed at SearchAWS. View other trends comments here

    Tips and Articles

    View recent as well as past tips and articles here

    StorageIOblog posts

    Recent StorageIOblog posts include:

    View other recent as well as past blog posts here

    In This Issue

  • Industry Trends Perspectives
  • Commentary in the news
  • Tips and Articles
  • StorageIOblog posts
  • Events & Activities

    View other recent and upcoming events here

    Webinars

    December 11, 2014 – BrightTalk
    Server & Storage I/O Performance

    December 10, 2014 – BrightTalk
    Server & Storage I/O Decision Making

    December 9, 2014 – BrightTalk
    Virtual Server and Storage Decision Making

    December 3, 2014 – BrightTalk
    Data Protection Modernization

    Videos and Podcasts

    StorageIO podcasts are also available via and at StorageIO.tv

    From StorageIO Labs

    Research, Reviews and Reports

    StarWind Virtual SAN for Microsoft SOFS

    May require registration
    This looks at the shared storage needs of SMB’s and ROBO’s leveraging Microsoft Scale-Out File Server (SOFS). Focus is on Microsoft Windows Server 2012, Server Message Block version (SMB) 3.0, SOFS and StarWind Virtual SAN management software

    View additional reports and lab reviews here.

    Resources and Links

    Check out these useful links and pages:
    storageio.com/links
    objectstoragecenter.com
    storageioblog.com/data-protection-diaries-main/
    storageio.com/ssd
    storageio.com/ssd

    Enjoy this edition of the Server and StorageIO update newsletter and watch for new tips, articles, StorageIO lab report reviews, blog posts, videos and podcasts along with in the news commentary appearing soon.

    Seasons greetings 2014

    Greg Schulz – Author Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking (CRC Press), The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC Press) and Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier)
    twitter @storageio

    All Comments, (C) and (TM) belong to their owners/posters, Other content (C) Copyright 2006-2024 Server StorageIO and UnlimitedIO LLC All Rights Reserved

    Cloud Conversations: Revisiting re:Invent 2014 and other AWS updates

    server storage I/O trends

    This is part one of a two-part series about Amazon Web Services (AWS) re:Invent 2014 and other recent cloud updates, read part two here.

    Revisiting re:Invent 2014 and other AWS updates

    AWS re:Invent 2014

    A few weeks ago I attended Amazon Web Service (AWS) re:Invent 2014 in Las Vegas for a few days. For those of you who have not yet attended this event, I recommend adding it to your agenda. If you have interest in compute servers, networking, storage, development tools or management of cloud (public, private, hybrid), virtualization and related topic themes, you should check out AWS re:invent.

    AWS made several announcements at re:invent including many around development tools, compute and data storage services. One of those to keep an eye on is cloud based Aurora relational database service that complement existing RDS tools. Aurora is positioned as an alternative to traditional SQL based transactional databases commonly found in enterprise environments (e.g. SQL Server among others).

    Some recent AWS announcements prior to re:Invent include

    AWS vCenter Portal

    Using the AWS Management Portal for vCenter adds a plug-in within your VMware vCenter to manage your AWS infrastructure. The vCenter for AWS plug-in includes support for AWS EC2 and Virtual Machine (VM) import to migrate your VMware VMs to AWS EC2, create VPC (Virtual Private Clouds) along with subnet’s. There is no cost for the plug-in, you simply pay for the underlying AWS resources consumed (e.g. EC2, EBS, S3). Learn more about AWS Management Portal for vCenter here, and download the OVA plug-in for vCenter here.

    AWS re:invent content


    AWS Andy Jassy (Image via AWS)

    November 12, 2014 (Day 1) Keynote (highlight video, full keynote). This is the session where AWS SVP Andy Jassy made several announcements including Aurora relational database that complements existing RDS (Relational Data Services). In addition to Andy, the key-note sessions also included various special guests ranging from AWS customers, partners and internal people in support of the various initiatives and announcements.


    Amazon.com CTO Werner Vogels (Image via AWS)

    November 13, 2014 (Day 2) Keynote (highlight video, full keynote). In this session, Amazon.com CTO Werner Vogels appears making announcements about the new Container and Lambda services.

    AWS re:Invent announcements

    Announcements and enhancements made by AWS during re:Invent include:

    • Key Management Service (KMS)
    • Amazon RDS for Aurora
    • Amazon EC2 Container Service
    • AWS Lambda
    • Amazon EBS Enhancements
    • Application development, deployed and life-cycle management tools
    • AWS Service Catalog
    • AWS CodeDeploy
    • AWS CodeCommit
    • AWS CodePipeline

    Key Management Service (KMS)

    Hardware security module (HSM) based key managed service for creating and control of encryption keys to protect security of digital assets and their keys. Integration with AWS EBS and others services including S3 and Redshift along with CloudTrail logs for regulatory, compliance and management. Learn more about AWS KMS here

    AWS Database

    For those who are not familiar, AWS has a suite of database related services including SQL and no SQL based, simple to transactional to Petabyte (PB) scale data warehouses for big data and analytics. AWS offers the Relational Database Service (RDS) which is a suite of different database types, instances and services. RDS instance and types include SimpleDB, MySQL, Postgress, Oracle, SQL Server and the new AWS Aurora offering (read more below).  Other little data database and big data repository related offerings include DynamoDB (a non-SQL database), ElasticCache (in memory cache repository) and Redshift (large-scale data warehouse and big data repository).

    In addition to database services offered by AWS, you can also combine various AWS resources including EC2 compute, EBS and other storage offerings to create your own solution. For example there are various Amazon Machine Images (AMI’s) or pre-built operating systems and database tools available with EC2 as well as via the AWS Marketplace , such as MongoDB and Couchbase among others. For those not familiar with MongoDB, Couchbase, Cassandra, Riak along with other non SQL or alternative databases and key value repositories, check out Seven Databases in Seven Weeks in my book review of it here.

    Seven Databases book review
    Seven Databases in Seven Weeks and NoSQL movement available from Amazon.com

    Amazon RDS for Aurora

    Aurora is a new relational database offering part of the AWS RDS suite of services. Positioned as an alternative to commercial high-end database, Aurora is a cost-effective database engine compatible with MySQL. AWS is claiming 5x better performance than standard MySQL with Aurora while being resilient and durable. Learn more about Aurora which will be available in early 2015 and its current preview here.

    Amazon EC2 C4 instances

    AWS will be adding a new C4 instance as a next generation of EC2 compute instance based on Intel Xeon E5-2666 v3 (Haswell) processors. The Intel Xeon E5-2666 v3 processors run at a clock speed of 2.9 GHz providing the highest level of EC2 performance. AWS is targeting traditional High Performance Computing (HPC) along with other compute intensive workloads including analytics, gaming, and transcoding among others. Learn more AWS EC2 instances here, and view this Server and StorageIO EC2, EBS and associated AWS primer here.

    Amazon EC2 Container Service

    Containers such as those via Docker have become popular to support developers rapidly build as well as deploy scalable applications. AWS has added a new feature called EC2 Container Service that supports Docker using simple API’s. In addition to supporting Docker, EC2 Container Service is a high performance scalable container management service for distributed applications deployed on a cluster of EC2 instances. Similar to other EC2 services, EC2 Container Service leverages security groups, EBS volumes and Identity Access Management (IAM) roles along with scheduling placement of containers to meet your needs. Note that AWS is not alone in adding container and docker support with Microsoft Azure also having recently made some announcements, learn more about Azure and Docker here. Learn more about EC2 container service here and more about Docker here.

    Docker for smarties

    Continue reading about re:Invent 2014 and other recent AWS enhancements here in part two of this two-part series.

    Ok, nuff said (for now)

    Cheers gs

    Greg Schulz – Author Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking (CRC Press), The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC Press) and Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier)
    twitter @storageio

    All Comments, (C) and (TM) belong to their owners/posters, Other content (C) Copyright 2006-2024 Server StorageIO and UnlimitedIO LLC All Rights Reserved