Author: greg

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Welcome to the Cloud Bulk Object Storage Resources Center

Updated 8/31/19

Cloud Bulk Big Data Software Defined Object Storage Resources

server storage I/O trends Object Storage resources

Welcome to the Cloud, Big Data, Software Defined, Bulk and Object Storage Resources Center Page objectstoragecenter.com.

This object storage resources, along with software defined, cloud, bulk, and scale-out storage page is part of the server StorageIOblog microsite collection of resources. Software-defined, Bulk, Cloud and Object Storage exist to support expanding and diverse application data demands.

Other related resources include:

  • Software Defined, Cloud, Bulk and Object Storage Fundamentals
  • Software Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials book (CRC Press)
  • Cloud, Software Defined, Scale-Out, Object Storage News Trends

    • Object storage SDDC SDDI
    Via Software Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials (CRC Press 2017)

    Bulk, Cloud, Object Storage Solutions and Services

    There are various types of cloud, bulk, and object storage including public services such as Amazon Web Services (AWS) Simple Storage Service (S3), Backblaze, Google, Microsoft Azure, IBM Softlayer, Rackspace among many others. There are also solutions for hybrid and private deployment from Cisco, Cloudian, CTERA, Cray, DDN, Dell EMC, Elastifile, Fujitsu, Vantera/HDS, HPE, Hedvig, Huawei, IBM, NetApp, Noobaa, OpenIO, OpenStack, Quantum, Rackspace, Rozo, Scality, Spectra, Storpool, StorageCraft, Suse, Swift, Virtuozzo, WekaIO, WD, among many others.

    Bulk Cloud Object storage SDDC SDDI
    Via Software Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials (CRC Press 2017)

    Cloud products and services among others, along with associated data infrastructures including object storage, file systems, repositories and access methods are at the center of bulk, big data, big bandwidth and little data initiatives on a public, private, hybrid and community basis. After all, not everything is the same in cloud, virtual and traditional data centers or information factories from active data to in-active deep digital archiving.

    Object Context Matters

    Before discussing Object Storage lets take a step back and look at some context that can clarify some confusion around the term object. The word object has many different meanings and context, both inside of the IT world as well as outside. Context matters with the term object such as a verb being a thing that can be seen or touched as well as a person or thing of action or feeling directed towards.

    Besides a person, place or physical thing, an object can be a software-defined data structure that describes something. For example, a database record describing somebody’s contact or banking information, or a file descriptor with name, index ID, date and time stamps, permissions and access control lists along with other attributes or metadata. Another example is an object or blob stored in a cloud or object storage system repository, as well as an item in a hypervisor, operating system, container image or other application.

    Besides being a verb, an object can also be a noun such as disapproval or disagreement with something or someone. From an IT context perspective, an object can also refer to a programming method (e.g. object-oriented programming [oop], or Java [among other environments] objects and classes) and systems development in addition to describing entities with data structures.

    In other words, a data structure describes an object that can be a simple variable, constant, complex descriptor of something being processed by a program, as well as a function or unit of work. There are also objects unique or with context to specific environments besides Java or databases, operating systems, hypervisors, file systems, cloud and other things.

    The Need For Bulk, Cloud and Object Storage

    There is no such thing as an information recession with more data being generated, moved, processed, stored, preserved and served, granted there are economic realities. Likewise as a society our dependence on information being available for work or entertainment, from medical healthcare to social media and all points in between continues to increase (check out the Human Face of Big Data).

    In addition, people and data are living longer, as well as getting larger (hence little data, big data and very big data). Cloud products and services along with associated object storage, file systems, repositories and access methods are at the center of big data, big bandwidth and little data initiatives on a public, private, hybrid and community basis. After all, not everything is the same in cloud, virtual and traditional data centers or information factories from active data to in-active deep digital archiving.

    Click here to view (and hear) more content including cloud and object storage fundamentals

    Click here to view software defined, bulk, cloud and object storage trend news

    cloud object storage

    Where to learn more

    The following resources provide additional information about big data, bulk, software defined, cloud and object storage.



    Via InfoStor: Object Storage Is In Your Future
    Via FujiFilm IT Summit: Software Defined Data Infrastructures (SDDI) and Hybrid Clouds
    Via MultiChannel: After ditching cloud business, Verizon inks Virtual Network Services deal with Amazon
    Via MultiChannel: Verizon Digital Media Services now offers integrated Microsoft Azure Storage
    Via StorageIOblog: AWS EFS Elastic File System (Cloud NAS) First Preview Look
    Via InfoStor: Cloud Storage Concerns, Considerations and Trends
    Via InfoStor: Object Storage Is In Your Future
    Via Server StorageIO: April 2015 Newsletter Focus on Cloud and Object storage
    Via StorageIOblog: AWS S3 Cross Region Replication storage enhancements
    Cloud conversations: AWS EBS, Glacier and S3 overview
    AWS (Amazon) storage gateway, first, second and third impressions
    Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking (CRC Book)

    View more news, trends and related cloud object storage activity here.

    Videos and podcasts at storageio.tv also available via Applie iTunes.

    Human Face of Big Data
    Human Face of Big Data (Book review)

    Seven Databases in Seven weeks Seven Databases in Seven Weeks (Book review)

    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

    Object and cloud storage are in your future, the questions are when, where, with what and how among others.

    Watch for more content and links to be added here soon to this object storage center page including posts, presentations, pod casts, polls, perspectives along with services and product solutions profiles.

    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.

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    Open Data Center Alliance (ODCA) BMW Private Cloud Strategy

    Storage I/O cloud virtual and big data perspectives

    If your organization like StorageIO is a member of the Open Data Center Alliance (ODCA) you may be aware of the resources they make available about cloud, virtualization, security and more. Unlike so many other industry associates or trade groups dominated by vendors, the ODCA has an IT or customer focus including member developed best practices, strategies and templates.

    A good example is the recently released ODCA member BMW group private cloud strategy document.

    This 24 page document covers BMW groups private cloud strategy that sets stage for phased future hybrid. By being a phased approach, it seems that BMW is leveraging and transitioning for the future while maintaining support for their current environment (including Windows-based) as part of a paradigm shift. This is refreshing and good to see how organizations are looking to use cloud as part of a paradigm or IT service deliver model and not just as a new technology or platform focus.

    Topics covered include IaaS along with PaaS for DB, Web, SAP and CSaaS or Corporate Software as a Service based on the NIST cloud model. Also included are roles and integration of CMDB, ITSM, ITIL, orchestration in a business vs. technology driven model. Being business driven, that means there is a mission statement for the BMW cloud strategy, with objectives aligned to support organization enablement vs. using different tools, technologies or trends along with design criteria.

    What I like about the BMW strategy is that it is aligned to support the business as opposed to finding ways to use technology to support the business, or justify why a cloud is needed. In other words, something different from those needing for a technology, tool, product, standard or service to be adopted.

    Thus while having been a vendor, the ODCA customer focused angle appeals to me from when I was on that side of the table working in IT organizations. Otoh, for some of you reading through the BMW document might result in DejaVu from experiences of web-based, client-server, information utilities and other IT service delivery models or paradigms.

    Learn more at the ODCA newsroom

    If you have not done, check out and join the ODCA.

    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

    Posted on

    Where has the FCoE hype and FUD gone? (with poll)

    Storage I/O cloud virtual and big data perspectives

    A couple of years ago I did this post about if Is FCoE Struggling to Gain Traction, or on a normal adoption course?

    Fast forward to today, has anybody else noticed that there seems to be less hype and fud on Fibre Channel (FC) over Ethernet (FCoE) than a year or two or three ago?

    Does this mean that FCoE as the fud or detractors were predicting is in fact stillborn with no adoption, no deployment and dead on arrival?

    Does this mean that FCoE as its proponents have said is still maturing, quietly finding adoption and deployment where it fits?

    Does this mean that FCoE like its predecessors Fibre Channel and Ethernet are still evolving, expanding from early adopter to a mature technology?

    Does this mean that FCoE is simply forgotten with software defined networking (SDN) having over-shadowed it?

    Does this mean that FCoE has finally lost out and that iSCSI has finally stepped up and living up to what it was hyped to do ten years ago?

    Does this mean that FC itself at either 8GFC or 16GFC is holding its own for now?

    Does this mean that InfiniBand is on the rebound?

    Does this mean that FCoE is simply not fun or interesting, or a shiny new technology with vendors not spending marketing money so thus people not talking, tweeting or blogging?

    Does this mean that those who were either proponents pitching it or detractors despising it have found other things to talk about from SDN to OpenFlow to IOV to Software Defined Storage (what ever, or who ever definition your subscribe to) to cloud, big or little data and the list goes on?

    I continue hear of or talk with customers organizations deploying FCoE in addition to iSCSI, FC, NAS and other means of accessing storage for cloud, virtual and physical environments.

    Likewise I see some vendor discussions occurring not to mention what gets picked up via google alerts.

    However in general, the rhetoric both pro and against, hype and FUD seems to have subsided, or at least for now.

    So what gives, what’s your take on FCoE hype and FUD?

    Cast your vote and see results here.

     

    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

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    Are your analyst, blogger, media or press requests being read?

    Storage I/O cloud virtual and big data perspectives

    Are you a marketing or public relations, press or analyst relations or social media expert and your email messages, notes, updates or requests get overlooked? Are you in the first paragraph or couple of sentences indicating who you are representing, what the info or request is about as well as what call to action you are looking for? If you are doing what is done in many of the requests for coverage or meetings or even announcements, you may be getting overlooked resulting in a missed opportunity, that is unless your goal is to simply gauge how many requests you send out.

    Now do I have your attention?

    Time for some tough love.

    Almost every day (not as much on weekends) my email inbox gets filled up with notes from vendor marketing and public relations (PR) firms organizations telling about an announcement, requesting a briefing, giving heads up for something that will be occurring, pitching a story, idea or looking for coverage.

    Being an analyst, author, advisory consultant, blogger among other roles, getting all of those emails as well as phone calls or other messages comes with the territory. However to get to the point or, the point of this post, most of those notes or messages I receive do not get to the point. More importantly I’m noticing on an increasing basis that many of the request for meetings, coverage, or introductions to announcements are not passing the quick scan test.

    Storage I/O cloud virtual and big data perspectives

    The trend that I have noticed for a couple of years now is that what is being announced or what the topic is or worse, who it is about gets lost in the paragraph or two or three or more of content. Thus for those who get lots of messages a day, get to the point, save the prose and sample article or content for later, unless that is what you are sending.

    In other words, tell the reader who you are representing (e.g. the company), product or focus area, what the news is about, why relevant, and call to action. Skip the long intro citing marketing research or testimonials and what read like mini articles, not to mention mentioning other vendors that might cause a quick scan to confuse the message about them vs. you or your client.

    The other day I received one of many announcements or briefing and meeting requests and this one stood out. In fact it stood out so much not for what was actually being announced or by whom or what it pertained to (all of which are relevant btw). It stood out because it did what most are not doing these days. It got to the point and in about the time required for a sip of coffee, I new what I needed to know as opposed to a trip to the coffee pot to refill to read the piece.

    The note impressed me so much that I asked Melissa Kolodziej who sent it to me if I could repost her note here as an example of how to do it.

    Subject: News: Attunity Enhances Big Data Replication Solution for Data Warehousing & Cloud Initiatives

    Dear Greg,
    Good morning. I wanted to share with you the exciting product news we announced regarding  Attunity Replicate 2.1. This latest release of our high-performance data delivery solution now features several new enhancements for data warehousing and the cloud. One key optimization is the addition of Attunity  TurboStream CDC, an innovative feature designed to significantly enhance delivery performance of changed data. This proprietary technology stages source data, consolidates changes, and delivers data in parallel to the target, optimizing change data capture (CDC) for high-volume and low-bandwidth scenarios. The enhanced Attunity Replicate solution is ideal for strategic initiatives including Big Data analytics and business intelligence typically seen in data warehouse and cloud environments.

    Please review the release below and contact me at your earliest convenience (Tel. 781-730-4073) to set up a time to interview Matt Benati, Attunity’s VP of Global Marketing. He is available for briefings this week and next.  I would also appreciate hearing back from you if you plan to cover this news.

    Thank you for your time and best regards,

    Melissa Kolodziej
    Director of Marketing Communications, Attunity
    Tel. 781-730-4073
    melissa.kolodziej@attunity.com

    I thought about showing an example of what not to do, however for now, lets leave sleeping dogs lay where the rest. Although I will say make sure you put a name in the name field for your email blasts vs. receiving Dear <Name_Goes_Here> or using the wrong name. The wrong name I’m used to however I may respond and have some fun at your expense so that you don’t forget ;).

    Kudos and nice job Melissa for doing what should be common knowledge or basic best practices however what I now see as the exception vs. the norm from many public relations firms or vendors.

    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

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    A Pivotal or cloudy moment for EMC and VMware?

    Storage I/O cloud virtual and big data perspectives

    EMC and VMware (who is majority owned by EMC) have announced a new joint initiative called Pivotal (read more here and here) as part of their software defined data center strategies and architecture.

    Image of EMC and VMware Pivotal PaaS cloud

    Is this a pivotal moment for both EMC and VMware signaling that they will be going head to head (via their new initiative based company) with Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, HP Cloud services, Rackspace and a long list of others?

    Part of the answer to that question would be based on what is meant by going head to head, and which aspects of those services. For Cloud Platform as a Service (PaaS) along with big data analytics related I would say yes. In terms of other Cloud AaaS or SaaS or IaaS probably not as much so at this time.

    On the surface Pivotal appears to at least initially be more of a Platform as a Service (PaaS) play vs. Software as a Service (SaaS) or Application as a Service (AaaS) or Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) play. Thus it will be interesting to see how Pivotal pivots and evolves into other directions beyond first cloud and big data applications development assistance.

    This will not be the first initiative or company jointly formed with VMware following on the heals of VCE that also includes Cisco and Intel as partners.

    Pivotal will be headed up by Paul Maritz who has been EMC Chief Strategist and formerly CEO of VMware as well as having spent time at Microsoft. EMC will have 69% ownership with VMware having the balance, it is estimated that about $400 Million US dollars will need to be invested.

    The new company or initiative is slated to launch on or about April 1, 2013 (April Fools day) with target 2013 revenues of about $300 Million. Projections are for an annual revenue of around $1 Billion in five years. That revenue will come from the existing assets and business being brought together along with probably some net new business. Doing some quick back of the napkin based math shows an average straight line growth of about 36% over five years.

    VMware intellectual property and assets contributed:
    Cloudfoundry
    Spring source
    Cetas

    EMC intellectual property and assets continued:
    Pivotal labs
    Greenplum big data solutions

    Thus is this a Pivotal move signaling the entry into new areas that could further disrupt and cloud that status of VMware and EMC as technology suppliers?

    Or this clear the clouds a bit to bring clarity to what EMC and VMware are doing along with leveraging various acquisitions?

    By clarity, this in theory should help place both EMC and VMware with their customer, partners and prospects as technology (along with associated services) supplier (what some refer to as arms merchants) vs. competing with those entities.

    Storage I/O cloud virtual and big data perspectives

    IMHO this is pivotal in that it helps to bring clarity for some of the different technologies and business that EMC and VMware has acquired. That clarity will help its own sales teams along with partners avoid creation of revenue prevention teams impacting sales of other solutions.

    Likewise there should be good synergy around the various tools, technology and offerings around big data, little data and application development with pivotal. That synergy is a combination of tools, technologies, development techniques. The combination of the tools and new techniques should enable customers to leverage new technologies in new ways, vs. trying to use and deploy in old ways.

    Btw, anybody notice Mozy or the lack of that mention keeping in mind that technology was brought back into the EMC backup group fold, while still being operated as a service. Also keep in mind that Mozy was bought by EMC and then transferred to VMware a couple of years ago.

    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

    Posted on

    Some things keep going around, Seagate ships 2 Billion HDD’s

    Seagate

    Seagate (@Seagate) announced today that it reached a milestone of having shipped 2 Billion hard disk drives (HDD’s), something that is round stores data that keeps growing. As part of their announcement, Seagate has a good info graphics and facts page here going back to 1979 when it was founded as Shugart Technology (read about Al Shugart here).

    By coincidence, just a few years before Seagate was founded, McDonalds (who makes round things as well) announced that they had served over 20 billion hamburgers. Thus McDonald feeds the appetites of consumers hungry for a quick meal while Seagate feeds the information demands, perhaps while stopping for a quick breakfast, lunch, coffee or dinner. Speaking of things that go around (like HDD’s), check out what NAS, NASA and NASCAR have in common all of which are also involved in big data as well as little data.

    Storage I/O industry trends image

    Both Seagate and McDonalds have also expanded their menu of offerings over the years maintaining their core products while expanding into new and adjacent areas given different appetites and preferences. After all, in the data cloud, virtual or physical data center also known as an information factory not everything is the same either.

    Cloud

    Granted Seagate is helping to feed or fuel the internet along with traditional hungry demand for data, not to mention people and data are living longer, as well as getting larger.

    Cloud, virtual server, big data and little data storage I/O image

    In the case of Seagate and other driver manufactures of which have consolidated down to three (Toshiba, Seagate and Western Digital), the physical devices are getting smaller, however capacities are increasing.

    Storage I/O

    Why the continued growth? As mentioned data is getting larger (big data and little data) and living longer, there is also no such thing as a data or information recession. Consequently data storage is an important pillar or part of cloud, virtual and traditional information services with HDD’s remaining popular along side nand flash solid state devices (SSD).

    The Seagate info graphic page can be seen here and is a good walk back in time for some, perhaps a history lesson for others. It goes back to the Sony Walkman which some might remember, launch of the PC and Apple Macintosh in the 80s, Linux and the web in the 90s and moving forward from then to now.

    HDD
    A few of my HDD’s, different types for various tasks.

    If you think or believe HDD’s are a dead technology, take a few minutes to view the info graphic to update your insight on what has been an important aspect of computing and remains popular in cloud environments. Otoh, if you believe that HDD’s are still a core piece of computing and will remain so including in roles in the future, have a look to see how things have progressed, maybe some Dejavu.

    Oh, for those who are thinking that the HDD did not begin in 1979, you are absolutely correct as it dates back into the 1950s. Here is a link to something that I wrote a few years ago on the HDD’s 50th birthday and looks like it will easily celebrate 60 and beyond.

    Additional related reading:
    In the data center or information factory, not everything is the same
    Hard Disk Drives (HDDs) for virtual and physical environments
    Happy 50th, hard drive. But will you make it to 60?
    Seagate to say goodbye to Cayman Islands, Hello Ireland
    More Storage IO momentus HHDD and SSD moments part II
    In the data center or information factory, not everything is the same
    The Human Face of Big Data, a Book Review

    Congratulations to Seagate, now how long until the 3 billion served, excuse me, shipped HDD occurs?

    Disclosure: Its been almost a month since my last visit to McDonalds or buying another HDD (or SSD) from Amazon.com.

    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

    Posted on

    Part II: XtremIO, XtremSW and XtremSF EMC flash ssd portfolio redefined

    Part one of this two-part post provided a summary of today’s EMC (@EMCflash) announcement around XtremIO and renaming VFCache to XtremSF and associated software as XtremSW.

    Storage I/O industry trends and perspectives

    Synopsis of announcement

    • Product rollout and selective availability of the new all flash SSD array XtremIO
    • Rename server-side PCIe ssd flash cards from VFCache to XtremSF
    • New XtremSF models including enhanced multi-level cell (eMLC) with larger capacities
    • Rename VFCache caching software to XtremSW (enables cache mode vs. target mode)

    Now lets take a closer look at what was announced along with what it means in terms of Industry Trends and Perspectives.

    XtremIO  has been in customer beta for some time and now those along with some other early customers are able to acquire the product. In addition, EMC is opening up XtremIO to more prospective customers (Directed Availability) who have requirements or needs that line up with the products target market capabilities.

    Storage I/O industry trends and perspectives

    What this means is that XtremIO is not being simply put out into the general product population for broad distribution. Instead, it is being put into a controlled release (Directed Availability) to help customers, partners and EMC sales decide where best to use it and thus risk revenue prevention in other areas. The criteria or target opportunity (at least initially) are little-data applications including OLTP, server virtualization (where aggregation can cause aggravation) along with virtual desktop or VDI. In other words, many of the traditional or legacy IOP focused SSD opportunities.

    In addition to XtremIO EMC has renamed their VFCache PCIe flash SSD cards (Launched February 2012) to XtremSF along with new models with both SLC and MLC nand flash. Also as part of today’s announcement EMC is renaming the cache software for XtremSF (e.g. VFCache) to be known as XtremSW. Now if that did not prompt the question of if you can now buy XtremSF as a target mode only card without the cache software the answer is yes.

    What is XtremIO?

    It is a new all flash SSD storage array. XtremIO is a Cluster, grid or collection of nodes called bricks with linear performance scaling providing block based all flash SSD storage. Data services consists of data footprint reduction (DFR) including inline global (across all nodes or bricks) dedupe on 4Kbyte chunks along with thin provisioning. Global dedupe is done on ingest using a combination of flash buffered meta-data (tables, index or dictionary) of what has been seen before along with multi-threaded software to leverage multi-core processors. Using the global dedupe at ingest; only new unique data is saved based on 4 Kbyte chunks.

    Performance per EMC scales from one single node to more second node or a fourth node. Note: architecturally more nodes can be added with EMC indicating added models will be available in the future.

    In addition to DFR, other data services including writable snapshots, and auto-load balancing when new bricks are added. Note that in a normal running XtremIO, data is automatically spread across the nodes for both performance and resiliency. Data only needs to be moved or load-balanced in the background when new bricks are added. Instant copy snapshots are supported along with writable snapshots. Currently replication is done via external EMC products such as VPLEX or RecoverPoint with statement of directions (SOD) for future enhancements.

    Additional attributes of XtremIO include:

    • Each node or brick (X-Brick) has up to 16 (16 was Gen 1 hardware platform, it is now 25 SSD drives)
    • All bricks are involved in IO and storage processing
    • Positioned by EMC as Software Defined (no proprietary hardware)
    • Four x 8Gb Fibre Channel (8GFC) and four x 10Gb Ethernet (iSCSI) per brick
    • Bricks communicate with each other via a separate interconnect network or fabric
    • Bricks have redundant processors (think of as controllers) with multiple sockets and cores
    • 4KB random read IOP’s scale from 250K (one brick), 500K (two bricks) and 1 Million (four bricks). For 4K random write IOPS, the numbers are 100K, 200K and 400K across one, two and four brick configurations with low latency and all data services running (EMC supplied numbers)

    In addition to 4K being a commonly used or referred to IO size, it is also the same size as the new industry standard Advanced Format (AF). Today the standard storage block, page or sector size is 512 bytes however AF moves that to a larger 4,096 bytes (e.g. 4KB) to closer align with larger IO sizes. Note that many HDD’s and some SSD’s today support AF and provide 512 byte emulation modes for compatibility.

    What is XtremSF?

    VFCache is renamed XtremSF with new models using eMLC as companion to existing SLC PCIe  cards and blade server mezzanine cards. EMC is emphasizing performance metrics that matter including IOPs that are relative to customer workloads such as 4K, 8K or larger with mix of reads and writes with low latency. In addition to IOPs with latency, size along with reads or writes for little data, EMC is also showing bandwidth or throughput numbers for big-data and big-bandwidth.

    Model
    Capacity
    Read Transfer GB/sec
    Write Transfer GB/sec
    Random 4K Read (IOPS)
    Random 4K Write (IOPS)

    Random 4K Mixed ( IOPS)

    Read latency (usec)
    Write latency (usec)
    2200 (eMLC)
    2.2 TB
    2.47
    1.1
    343K
    105K
    206K
    87us
    30us
    700 (SLC)
    700 GB
    2.9
    1.8
    712K
    197K
    411K
    50us
    13us
    550 (eMLC)
    550 GB
    1.36
    512 MB/s
    174K
    49K
    96K
    87us
    37us
    350 (SLC)
    350 GB
    2.9
    756 MB/s
    715K
    95K
    267K
    50us
    13us

    Sampling of SLC and eMLC XtremSF PCIe SSD cards performance characteristics (via EMC) including latency measured in microseconds). Note performance differences due to some cards being based on SLC and others on eMLC.

    Additional attributes, some new and some previously announced include:

    • 8X  PCIe bandwidth lanes for performance
    • No IO impact to applications during garbage collection
    • Supports multi-core processor workloads with parallel design
    • Low CPU overhead by off-loading functions to PCIe card
    • Half-height, half-length PCIe form factor
    • Wear-leveling for nand flash program/erase (P/E) cycle duration
    Other storage, server and systems vendors including Cisco, Dell, HP, IBM, NetApp and Oracle offer various PCIe nand flash SSD cards either as target, cache or mixed modes. Manufactures or suppliers of PCIe nand flash SSD cache and target cards include among others FusionIO, Intel, LSI, Micron , OCZ and Virident (who is partnered with Seagate).

    What is XtremSW?

    Server side flash software (not to be confused with FAST) for using XtremSF as a tier 0 (server-side) ssd cache or target. In target mode the XtremSF functions as a high performance persistent local dedicated direct attached storage (DAS) device. Cache mode enables frequently accessed data to be kept close to the applications off-loading underlying storage systems to be more effectively used. The XtremSW complements back-end storage systems for data protection and persistence along with investment protection of those assets.

    Storage I/O industry trends and perspectives

    What this all means

    SSD is in your future, question is where, when and with what.

    Why not just use SSD (DRAM and or nand flash) everywhere?

    Keep in mind that in the data center (traditional, virtual or cloud) everything is not the same. Thus the simple answer is that there is not enough of it available at a low enough price point (think closer to Hard Disk Drives (HDD) costs) to fit into customers budget. Sure SSDs provide better performance and productivity benefits, however while there is no such thing as a data or information recession, there are budget constraints.

    Another reason why SSD cant simply be used everywhere are physical (and logical) constraints such as amount of memory a server can directly access, or current DDR3 DIMMs (this could change with DDR4 according to Micron) can only address and work with DRAM, PCIe bus physical slot space, operating and hypervisor addressing limits among others.

    If SSD (DRAM and or nand flash) were priced were priced low enough (e.g. much closer to HDDs) and available SSD including both DRAM and nand flash (SLC, MLC, eMLC, TLC, etc) along with emerging Phase Change Memory (PCM) are at the convergence of traditional memory and data storage. While some storage (or server) professionals may not agree, storage is an extension of memory and thus part of the traditional server and storage memory hierarchy shown below.

    Storage I/O and cache locality of reference

    This brings up the locality of reference topic also shown in the following figure where the best IO is the one that does not have to be done. The second best is the one that can be done closest to application to a given level of service. Locality of reference which is important for servers and storage systems including caching refers to how close frequently accessed data is to where it is needed. For some applications this means as much DRAM main memory in a server as possible either clustered, with battery backup or other data persistency protection including onboard HDD or SSD (e.g. towards the top of the hierarchy).

    nand flash SSD and storage I/O location options

    There are other applications where localized SSD (DRAM or nand flash) are a benefit to compliment main memory or as a persistent cache and target such as PCIe cards or SAS and SATA drives. Further down the stack and for housing larger amounts of storage with performance (reads or writes, random or sequential) along with data services is where all SSD and hybrid (mix of SSD and HDD) fit. Even further down the stack and for a broader segment is where cloud storage services based on SSD such as those from Rackspace (Cloud Block Storage with SSD) and Amazon (provisioned IOPS for EBS) have a play. Lets not forget about SSD in laptop, tablets and workstations, for example I have a Samsung model 830 in my Lenvo X1.

    Storage I/O industry trends and perspectives

    Some general industry trends include:

    • SSD is like real estate, location can matter, a little can go a long way
    • SSD media options include DRAM and nand flash (SLC, MLC, eMLC, TLC)
    • Portfolios broadening with different products for various needs
    • SSD functionality in servers, appliances, storage systems and cloud services
    • All flash SSD arrays have not killed off all traditional or hybrid storage arrays
    • Focus expanding from Just a Bunch Of SSD (JBOS) to enterprise like functionality
    • Software needs hardware, hardware needs software, the two work better together
    • Comparing meaningful metrics that matter vs. industry marketing metrics

    Related items about nand flash, SSD and metrics related themes:

    Storage I/O industry trends and perspectives

    Some additional thoughts and perspectives

    Does this mean traditional storage arrays are now dead?

    IMHO, no, there will be some cannibalization of existing storage systems by XtremIO within EMC customers or prospects if not managed, as well as via those from others. Keep in mind that recently EMC announced enhancements to their VMAX including entry-level options for service providers. Some new opportunities opened up will be where traditional all SSD (flash or dram) systems have historically had success.

    Traditional SSD and new dedicated SSD systems include Texas Memory Systems (TMS) bought by IBM in 2012, and the recently announced NetApp EF540 (and future FlashRay) along with startups Solidfire, Violin, Whiptail among others. There will be environments where XtremIO may take care of all storage needs for a customer or specific application or piece of it. Then there will be other situations where XtremIO will go-exist with EMC or other vendor’s storage solutions as part of a data infrastructure.

    Storage I/O industry trends and perspectives

    Who will EMC be competing against with XtremIO?

    Certainly the startups or smaller players such as Violin, Whiptail, Purestorage, Solidfire along with IBM/TMS and NetApp EF540 (eventually FlashRay as well) among others.

    There will also be some competition with other hybrid storage array vendors that have a mix of HDD and SSD. XtremIO will also compete in some situations on its own vs. other PCIe flash target and cache cards such as FusionIO, however for the most part those will up against XtremSF and XtremSW.

    Why the slow or “Directed Availability” rollout?

    Why not? By taking a controlled rollout selecting and qualifying customers for XtremIO, EMC gets to manage how the product goes out into production and control how it is used to increase chances of success. Unlike a startup that would be forced to try to put their new technology anywhere, EMC has the luxury of selecting where it goes, not to mention needing to avoid introducing a revenue prevention play for its other products.

    Overall, I give an Atta boy and Atta girl to the EMC crew for a Product Defined Announcement (PDA) extending their flash portfolio to complement their different customers and prospects various environment needs. Now watch EMC, NetApp and others step up their flash dance moves to see who will out flash the others in the eXtreme flash games, not to mention emerging software defined marketing moves (SDMM) ;) .

    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)
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    XtremIO, XtremSW and XtremSF EMC flash ssd portfolio redefined

    EMC (@EMCflash) today announced some new, enhanced, renamed and a rebrand flash solid-state device (SSD) storage portfolio around theme of XtremIO. XtremIO was the startup company with a new all flash SSD storage array that EMC announced they were buying in May 2012. Since that announcement, Project “X” has been used when referring to the product now known as XtremIO (e.g. all flash new storage array).

    Synopsis of announcement

    • Product rollout and selective availability of the new all flash SSD array XtremIO
    • Rename server-side PCIe ssd flash cards from VFCache to XtremSF
    • New XtremSF models including enhanced multi-level cell (eMLC) with larger capacities
    • Rename VFCache caching software to XtremSW (enables cache mode vs. target mode)

    What was previously announced:

    • Buying the company XtremeIO
    • Productizing  the new all flash array as part of Project “X”
    • It would formally announce the new product in 2013 (which is now)
    • VFCache and later enhancements during 2012.

    Storage I/O industry trends and perspectives

    Overall, I give an Atta boy and Atta girl to the EMC crew for a Product Defined Announcement (PDA) extending their flash portfolio to complement their different customers and prospects various environment needs. Now let us sit back and watch EMC, NetApp and others step up their flash dance moves to see who will out flash the others in the eXtreme flash games, including software defined storage, software defined data centers, software defined flash, and software defined cache.

    Related items about nand flash and metrics related themes:

    Read more about XtremIO, XtremSF, XtremSW and flash related items here in part II of this post.

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

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    February 2013 Server and StorageIO Update Newsletter

    StorageIO News Letter Image
    February 2013 News letter

    Welcome to the February 2013 edition of the StorageIO Update news letter including a new format and added content.

    You can get access to this news letter via various social media venues (some are shown below) in addition to StorageIO web sites and subscriptions.

    Click on the following links to view the February 2013 edition as (HTML sent via Email) version, or PDF versions.

    Visit the news letter page to view previous editions of the StorageIO Update.

    You can subscribe to the news letter by clicking here.

    Enjoy this edition of the StorageIO Update news letter, let me know your comments and feedback.

    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

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    Vote for top 2013 vblogs, thanks for your continued support

    Eric Siebert (@Ericsiebert) author of the book Maximum vSphere (get your copy on Amazon.com here) has opened up voting for the annual top vBlog over at his site (vSphere-land).

    While there is a focus on VMware and Virtualization blogs, there are also other categories such as Storage, Scripting, pod casting as well as independent for the non vendors and VARs.

    VMware vExpert

    It is an honor to be included in the polling along with my many 2012 fellow vExperts on the list.

    Last year I made Eric’s 2012 top 50 list as well as appearing in the storage and some other categories in those rankings (thanks to all who voted last year).

    This year I forgot to nominate myself (it’s a self nomination process) so while I am not on the storage, independent bloggers, pod cast sub-categories, I am however included in the general voting having made the top 50 list last year (#46).

    A summary of Eric’s recommended voting criteria vs. basic popularity are:

    • Longevity: How long has somebody been blogging and posting for vs. starting and stopping.
    • Length: Short quick snippet posts vs more original content, time and effort vs. just posting.
    • Frequency: How often do posts appear, lots of short pieces vs. regular longer ones vs. an occasional post.
    • Quality: What’s in the post, original ideas, tips, information, insight, analysis, thought perspectives vs. reposting or reporting what others are doing.

    Voting is now open (click here on the vote image) and closes on March 1, 2013 so if you read this or any of my other posts, comments and content or listen to our new pod casts at storageio.tv (also on iTunes).

    Thank you in advance for your continued support and watch for more posts, comments, perspectives and pod casts about data and information infrastructure topics, trends, tools and techniques including servers, storage, IO networking, cloud, virtualization, backup/recovery, BC, DR and data protection along with big and little data (among other things).

    Ok, nuff said.

    Cheers gs

    Greg Schulz – Author Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking (CRC Press, 2011), The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC Press, 2009), and Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier, 2004)

    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

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    VCE revisited, now & zen

    StorageIO Industry trends and perspectives image

    Yesterday VCE and their proud parents announced revenues had reached an annual run rate of a billion dollars. Today VCE announced some new products along with enhancements to others.

    Before going forward though, lets take go back for a moment to help set the stage to see where things might be going in the future. A little over a three years ago, back in November 2009 VCE was born and initially named ACADIA by its proud parents (Cisco, EMC, Intel and VMware). Here is a post that I did back then.

    Btw the reference to Zen might cause some to think that I don’t how to properly refer to the Xen hypervisor. It is really a play from Robert Plants album Now & Zen and its song Tall Cool One. For those not familiar, click on the link and listen (some will have DejaVu, others might think its new and cool) as it takes a look back as well as present, similar to VCE.

    Robert plant now & zen vs. Xen hypervisor

    On the other hand, this might prompt the question of when will Xen be available on a Vblock? For that I defer you to VCE CTO Trey Layton (@treylayton).

    VCE stands for Virtual Computing Environment and was launched as a joint initiative including products and a company (since renamed from Acadia to VCE) to bring all the pieces together. As a company, VCE is based in Plano (Richardson) Texas just north of downtown Dallas and down the road from EDS or what is now left of it after the HP acquisition  The primary product of VCE has been the Vblock. The Vblock is a converged solution comprising components from their parents such as VMware virtualization and management software tools, Cisco servers, EMC storage and software tools and Intel processors.

    Not surprisingly there are many ex-EDS personal at VCE along with some Cisco, EMC, VMware and many other people from other organizations in Plano as well as other cites. Also interesting to note that unlike other youngsters that grow up and stay in touch with their parents via technology or social media tools, VCE is also more than a few miles (try hundreds to thousands) from the proud parent headquarters on the San Jose California and Boston areas.

    As part of a momentum update, VCE and their parents (Cisco, EMC, VMware and Intel) announced annual revenue run rate of a billion dollars in just three years. In addition the proud parents and VCE announced that they have over 1,000 revenue shipped and installed Vblock systems (also here) based on Cisco compute servers, and EMC storage solutions.

    The VCE announcement consists of:

    • SAP HANA database application optimized Vblocks (two modes, 4 node and 8 node)
    • VCE Vision management tools and middleware or what I have refered to as Valueware
    • Entry level Vblock (100 and 200) with Cisco C servers and EMC (VNXe and VNX) storage
    • Performance and functionality enhancements to existing Vblock models 300 and 700
    • Statement of direction for more specialized Vblocks besides SAP HANA


    Images courtesy with permission of VCE.com

    While VCE is known for their Vblock converged, stack, integrated, data center in a box, private cloud or among other descriptors, there is more to the story. VCE is addressing convergence of common IT building blocks for cloud, virtual, and traditional physical environments. Common core building blocks include servers (compute or processors), networking (IO and connectivity), storage, hardware, software, management tools along with people, processes, metrics, policies and protocols.

    Storage I/O image of cloud and virtual IT building blocks

    I like the visual image that VCE is using (see below) as it aligns with and has themes common to what I have discussing in the past.


    Images courtesy with permission of VCE.com

    VCE Vision is software with APIs that collects information about Vblock hardware and software components to give insight to other tools and management frameworks. For example VMware vCenter plug-in and vCenter Operations Manager Adapter which should not be a surprise. Customers will also be able to write to the Vision API to meet their custom needs. Let us watch and see what VCE does to add support for other software and management tools, along with gain support from others.


    Images courtesy with permission of VCE.com

    Vision is more than just an information source feed for VMware vCenter or VASA or tools and frameworks from others. Vision is software developed by VCE that will enable insight and awareness into the Vblock and applications, however also confirm and give status of physical and logical component configuration. This means the basis for setting up automated or programmatic remediation such as determining what software or firmware to update based on different guidelines.


    Images courtesy with permission of VCE.com

    Initially VCE Vision provides (information) inventory and perspective of how those components are in compliance with firmware or software releases, so stay tuned. VCE is indicating that Vision will continue to evolve after all this is the V1.0 release with future enhancements targeted towards taking action, controlling or active management.

    StorageIO Industry trends and perspectives image

    Some trends, thoughts and perspectives

    The industry adoption buzz is around software defined X where X can be data center (SDDC), or storage (SDS) or networking (SDN), or marketing (SDM) or other things. The hype and noise around software defined which in the case of some technologies is good. On the marketing hype side, this has led to some Software Defined BS (SDBS).

    Thus, it was refreshing at least in the briefing session I was involved in to hear a minimum focus around software defined and more around customer and IT business enablement with technology that is shipping today.

    VCE Vision is a good example of adding value hence what I refer to as Valueware around converged components. For those vendors who have similar solutions, I urge them to streamline, simplify and more clearly articulate their value proposition if they have valueware.

    Vendors including VCE continue to evolve their platform based converged solutions by adding more valueware, management tools, interfaces, APIs, interoperability and support for more applications. The support for applications is also moving beyond simple line item ordering or part number skews to ease acquisition and purchasing. Some solutions include VCE Vblock, NetApp FlexPod that also uses Cisco compute servers, IBM PureSystems (PureFlex etc) and Dell vStart among others are extending their support and optimization for various software solutions. These software solutions range from SAP (including HANA), Microsoft (Exchange, SQLserver, Sharepoint), Citrix desktop (VDI), Oracle, OpenStack, Hadoop map reduce along with other little-data, big-data and big-bandwidth applications to name a few.

    Additional and related reading:
    Acadia VCE: VMware + Cisco + EMC = Virtual Computing Environment
    Cloud conversations: Public, Private, Hybrid what about Community Clouds?
    Cloud, virtualization, Storage I/O trends for 2013 and beyond
    Convergence: People, Processes, Policies and Products
    Hard product vs. soft product
    Hardware, Software, what about Valueware?
    Industry adoption vs. industry deployment, is there a difference?
    Many faces of storage hypervisor, virtual storage or storage virtualization
    The Human Face of Big Data, a Book Review
    Why VASA is important to have in your VMware CASA

    Congratulations to VCE, along with their proud parents, family, friends and partners, now how long will it take to reach your next billion dollars in annual run rate revenue. Hopefully it wont be three years until the next VCE revisited now and Zen ;).

    Disclosure: EMC and Cisco have been StorageIO clients, I am a VMware vExpert that gets me a free beer after I pay for VMworld and Intel has named two of my books listed on their Recommended Reading List for Developers.

    Ok, nuff said, time to head off to vBeers over in Minneapolis.

    Cheers gs

    Greg Schulz – Author Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking (CRC Press, 2011), The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC Press, 2009), and Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier, 2004)

    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

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    NetApp EF540, something familiar, something new

    StorageIO Industry trends and perspectives image

    NetApp announced the other day a new all nand flash solid-state devices (SSD) storage system called the EF540 that is available now. The EF540 has something’s new and cool, along with some things familiar, tried, true and proven.

    What is new is that the EF540 is an all nand flash multi-level cell (MLC) SSD storage system. What is old is that the EF540 is based on the NetApp E-Series (read more here and here) and SANtricity software with hundreds of thousands installed systems. As a refresher, the E-Series are the storage system technologies and solutions obtained via the Engenio acquisition from LSI in 2011.

    Image of NetApp EF540 via ntapgeek.com
    Image via www.ntapgeek.com

    The EF540 expands the NetApp SSD flash portfolio which includes products such as FlashCache (read cache aka PAM) for controllers in ONTAP based storage systems. Other NetApp items in the NetApp flash portfolio include FlashPool SSD drives for persistent read and write storage in ONTAP based systems. Complimenting FlashCache and FlashPool is the server-side PCIe caching card and software FlashAccel. NetApp is claiming to have revenue shipped 36PB of flash complimenting over 3 Exabytes (EB) of storage while continuing to ship a large amount of SAS and SATA HDD’s.

    NetApp also previewed its future FlashRay storage system that should appear in beta later in 2013 and general availability in 2014.

    In addition to SSD and flash related announcements, NetApp also announced enhancements to its ONTAP FAS/V6200 series including the FAS/V6220, FAS/V6250 and FAS/V6290.

    Some characteristics of the NetApp EF540 and SANtricity include:

    • Two models with 12 or 24 x 6Gbs SAS 800GB MLC SSD devices
    • Up to 9.6TB or 19.2TB physical storage in a 2U (3.5 inch) tall enclosure
    • Dual controllers for redundancy, load-balancing and availability
    • IOP performance of over 300,000 4Kbyte random 100% reads under 1ms
    • 6GByte/sec performance of 512Kbyte sequential reads, 5.5Gbyte/sec random reads
    • Multiple RAID levels (0, 1, 10, 3, 5, 6) and flexible group sizes
    • 12GB of DRAM cache memory in each controller (mirrored)
    • 4 x 8GFC host server-side ports per controller
    • Optional expansion host ports (6Gb SAS, 8GFC, 10Gb iSCSI, 40Gb IBA/SRP)
    • Snapshots and replication (synchronous and asynchronous) including to HDD systems
    • Can be used for traditional IOP intensive little-data, or bandwidth for big-data
    • Proactive SSD wear monitoring and notification alerts
    • Utilizes SANtricity version 10.84

    Poll, Are large storage arrays day’s numbered?

    EMC and NetApp (along with other vendors) continue to sell large numbers of HDD’s as well as large amounts of SSD. Both EMC and NetApp are taking similar approaches of leveraging PCIe flash cards as cache adding software functionality to compliment underlying storage systems. The benefit is that the cache approach is less disruptive for many environments while allowing improved return on investment (ROI) of existing assets.

    EMC

    NetApp

    Storage systems with HDD and SSD

    VMAX, VNX

    FAS/V, E-Series

    Storage systems with SSD cache

    FastCache,

    FlashCache

    All SSD based storage

    VMAX, VNX

    EF540

    All new SSD system in development

    Project X

    FlashRay

    Server side PCIe SSD cache

    VFCache

    FlashAcell

    Partner ecosystems

    Yes

    Yes

    The best IO is the one that you do not have to do, however the next best are those that have the least cost or affect which is where SSD comes into play. SSD is like real estate in that location matters in terms of providing benefit, as well as how much space or capacity is needed.

    What does this all mean?
    The NetApp EF540 based on the E-Series storage system architecture is like one of its primary competitors (e.g. EMC VNX also available as an all-flash model). The similarity is that both have been competitors, as well as have been around for over a decade with hundreds of thousands of installed systems. The similarities are also that both continue to evolve their code base leveraging new hardware and software functionality. These improvements have resulted in improved performance, availability, capacity, energy effectiveness and cost reduction.

    Whats your take on RAID still being relevant?

    From a performance perspective, there are plenty of public workloads and benchmarks including Microsoft ESRP and SPC among others to confirm its performance. Watch for NetApp to release EF540 SPC results given their history of doing so with other E-Series based systems. With those or other results, compare and contrast to other solutions looking not just at IOPS or MB/sec (bandwidth), also latency, functionality and cost.

    What does the EF540 compete with?
    The EF540 competes with all flash-based SSD solutions (Violin, Solidfire, Purestorage, Whiptail, Kaminario, IBM/TMS, up-coming EMC Project “X” (aka XtremeIO)) among others. Some of those systems use general-purpose servers combined SSD drives, PCIe cards along with management software where others leverage customized platforms with software. To a lesser extent, competition will also be mixed mode SSD and HDD solutions along with some PCIe target SSD cards for some situations.

    What to watch and look for:
    It will be interesting to view and contrast public price performance results using SPC or Microsoft ESRP among others to see how the EF540 compares. In addition, it will be interesting to compare other storage based, as well as SSD systems beyond the number of IOPS. What will be interesting is to keep an eye on latency, as well as bandwidth, feature functionality and associated costs.

    Given that the NetApp E-Series are OEM or sold by third parties, let’s see if something looking similar or identical to the EF540 appear at any of those or new partners. This includes traditional general purpose and little-data environments, along with cloud, managed service provider, high performance compute and high productivity compute (HPC), super computer (SC), big data and big bandwidth among others.

    Poll, Have SSD been successful in traditional storage systems and arrays

    The EF540 could also appear as a storage or IO accelerator for large-scale out, clustered, grid and object storage systems for meta data, indices, key value stores among other uses either direct attached to servers, or via shared iSCSI, SAS, FC and InfiniBand (IBA) SCSI Remote Protocol (SRP).

    Keep an eye on how the startups that have been primarily Just a Bunch Of SSD (JBOS) in a box start talking about adding new features and functionality such as snapshots, replication or price reductions. Also, keep an eye and ear open to what EMC does with project “X” along with NetApp FlashRay among other improvements.

    For NetApp customers, prospects, partners, E-Series OEMs and their customers with the need for IO consolidation, or performance optimization for big-data, little-data and related applications the EF540 opens up new opportunities and should be good news. For EMC competitors, they now have new competition which also signals an expanding market with new opportunities in adjacent areas for growth. This also further signals the need for diverse ssd portfolios and product options to meet different customer application needs, along with increased functionality vs. lowest cost for high capacity fast nand SSD storage.

    Some related reading:

    Disclosure: NetApp, Engenio (when LSI), EMC and TMS (now IBM) have been clients of StorageIO.

    Ok, nuff said

    Cheers gs

    Greg Schulz – Author Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking (CRC Press, 2011), The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC Press, 2009), and Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier, 2004)

    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

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    Speaking of SSDs (with poll)

    StorageIO Industry trends and perspectives image

    In the spirit of solid state devices (SSD) including DRAM and nand flash, not to mention emerging phase chance memory (PCM) among others that help to boost productivity and cut latency, here are a couple of quick notes and links.

    Here are a some more pieces to have a quick look at:
    SSD & Real Estate: Location, Location, Location matters
    SSD Is in Your Future: Where, When & With What Are the Questions
    Storage & IO trends for 2013 and beyond

    SSD, flash and DRAM, DejaVu or something new?

    Storage I/O ssd timeline image

    Is SSD only for performance?
    Have SSDs been unsuccessful with storage arrays (with poll)?
    End the Hardware Numbers Game

    Desum poll planned SSD use image
    Image via 21cit (desum): The SSD hardware numbers game

    What’s your take on SSD in storage arrays, cast your vote and see results here.

    Also check out here what Micron has in mind with merging nand flash with the DDR4 (e.g. DRAM socket) memory bus for servers in a year or two.

    Ok, nuff said.

    Cheers gs

    Greg Schulz – Author Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking (CRC Press, 2011), The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC Press, 2009), and Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier, 2004)

    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

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    VMware buys virsto, is it about storage hypervisors?

    StorageIO Industry trends and perspectives image

    Yesterday VMware announced that it is acquiring the IO performance optimization and acceleration software vendor Virsto for an undisclosed amount.

    Some may know Virsto due to their latching and jumping onto the Storage Hypervisor bandwagon as part of storage virtualization and virtual storage. On the other hand, some may know Virsto for their software that plugs into server virtualization Hypervisor  such as VMware and Microsoft Hyper-V. Then there are all of those who either did not or still don’t know of Virsto or their solutions yet they need to learn about it.

    Unlike virtual storage arrays (VSAa), or virtual storage appliances, or storage virtualization software that aggregates storage, the Virsto software address the IO performance aggravation caused by aggregation.

    Keep in mind that the best IO is the IO that you do not have to do. The second best IO is the one that has the least impact and that is cost effective. A common approach, or preached best practice by some vendors server virtualization and virtual desktop infrastructures (VDI) that result in IO bottlenecks is to throw more SSD or HDD hardware at the problem.

    server virtualization aggregation causing aggravation

    Turns out that the problem with virtual machines (VMs) is not just aggregation (consolidation) causing aggravation, it’s also the mess of mixed applications and IO profiles. That is where IO optimization and acceleration tools come into play that are plugged into applications, file systems, operating systems, hypervisor’s or storage appliances.

    In the case of Virsto (read more about their solution here), their technology plugs into the hypervisor  (e.g. VMware vSphere/ESX or Hyper-V) to group and optimize IO operations.

    By using SSD as a persistent cache, tools such as Virsto can help make better use of underlying storage systems including HDD and SSD, while also removing the aggravation as a result of aggregation.

    What will be interesting to watch is to see if VMware continues to support other hypervisor’s such as Microsoft Hyper-V or close the technology to VMware only.

    It will also be interesting to see how VMware and their parent EMC can leverage Virsto technology to complement virtual SANs as well as VSAs and underlying hardware from VFcache to storage arrays with SSD and SSD appliances as opposed to compete with them.

    With the Virsto technology now part of VMware, hopefully there will be less time on talking about storage hypervisor’s and more around server IO optimization and enablement to create broader awareness for the technology.

    Congratulations to VMware (and EMC) along with Virsto.

    Ok, nuff said.

    Cheers gs

    Greg Schulz – Author Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking (CRC Press, 2011), The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC Press, 2009), and Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier, 2004)

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