Category: BC and DR

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NVMe Need for Performance Speed Performance

server storage I/O trends
Updated 1/12/2018

This is the third in a five-part mini-series providing a primer and overview of NVMe. View companion posts and more material at www.thenvmeplace.com.

How fast is NVMe?

It depends! Generally speaking NVMe is fast!

However fast interfaces and protocols also need fast storage devices, adapters, drivers, servers, operating systems and hypervisors as well as applications that drive or benefit from the increased speed.

A server storage I/O example is in figure 5 where a 6 Gbps SATA NVM flash SSD (left) is shown with an NVMe 8639 (x4) drive that were directly attached to a server. The workload is 8 Kbyte sized random writes with 128 threads (workers) showing results for IOPs (solid bar) along with response time (dotted line). Not surprisingly the NVMe device has a lower response time and a higher number of IOPs. However also note how the amount of CPU time used per IOP is lower on the right with the NVMe drive.

NVMe storage I/O performance
Figure 5 6 Gbps SATA NVM flash SSD vs. NVMe flash SSD

While many people are aware or learning about the IOP and bandwidth improvements as well as the decrease in latency with NVMe, something that gets overlooked is how much less CPU is used. If a server is spending time in wait modes that can result in lost productivity, by finding and removing the barriers more work can be done on a given server, perhaps even delaying a server upgrade.

In figure 5 notice the lower amount of CPU used per work activity being done (e.g. I/O or IOP) which translates to more effective resource use of your server. What that means is either doing more work with what you have, or potentially delaying a CPU server upgrade, or, using those extra CPU cycles to power software defined storage management stacks including erasure coding or advanced parity RAID, replication and other functions.

Table 1 shows relative server I/O performance of some NVM flash SSD devices across various workloads. As with any performance, the comparison takes them, and the following with a grain of salt as your speed will vary.

8KB I/O Size

1MB I/O size

NAND flash SSD

100% Seq. Read

100% Seq. Write

100% Ran. Read

100% Ran. Write

100% Seq. Read

100% Seq. Write

100% Ran. Read

100% Ran. Write

NVMe

IOPs

41829.19

33349.36

112353.6

28520.82

1437.26

889.36

1336.94

496.74

PCIe

Bandwidth

326.79

260.54

877.76

222.82

1437.26

889.36

1336.94

496.74

AiC

Resp.

3.23

3.90

1.30

4.56

178.11

287.83

191.27

515.17

CPU / IOP

0.001571

0.002003

0.000689

0.002342

0.007793

0.011244

0.009798

0.015098

12Gb

IOPs

34792.91

34863.42

29373.5

27069.56

427.19

439.42

416.68

385.9

SAS

Bandwidth

271.82

272.37

229.48

211.48

427.19

429.42

416.68

385.9

Resp.

3.76

3.77

4.56

5.71

599.26

582.66

614.22

663.21

CPU / IOP

0.001857

0.00189

0.002267

0.00229

0.011236

0.011834

0.01416

0.015548

6Gb

IOPs

33861.29

9228.49

28677.12

6974.32

363.25

65.58

356.06

55.86

SATA

Bandwidth

264.54

72.1

224.04

54.49

363.25

65.58

356.06

55.86

Resp.

4.05

26.34

4.67

35.65

704.70

3838.59

718.81

4535.63

CPU / IOP

0.001899

0.002546

0.002298

0.003269

0.012113

0.032022

0.015166

0.046545

Table 1 Relative performance of various protocols and interfaces

The workload results in table 1 were generated using a vdbench script running on a Windows 2012 R2 based server and are intended to be a relative indicator of different protocol and interfaces; your performance mileage will vary. The results shown below compare the number of IOPs (activity rate) for reads, writes, random and sequential across small 8KB and large 1MB sized I/Os.

Also shown in table 1 are bandwidth or throughput (e.g. amount of data moved), response time and the amount of CPU used per IOP. Note in table 1 how NVMe can do higher IOPs with a lower CPU per IOP, or, using a similar amount of CPU, do more work at a lower latency. SSD has been used for decades to help reduce CPU bottlenecks or defer server upgrades by removing I/O wait times and reduce CPU consumption (e.g. wait or lost time).

Can NVMe solutions run faster than those shown above? Absolutely!

Where To Learn More

View additional NVMe, SSD, NVM, SCM, Data Infrastructure and related topics via the following links.

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

Continue reading about NVMe with Part IV (Where and How to use NVMe) in this five-part series, or jump to Part I, Part II or Part V.

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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Different NVMe Configurations

server storage I/O trends
Updated 1/12/2018

This is the second in a five-part mini-series providing a primer and overview of NVMe. View companion posts and more material at www.thenvmeplace.com.

The many different faces or facets of NVMe configurations

NVMe can be deployed and used in many ways, the following are some examples to show you its flexibility today as well as where it may be headed in the future. An initial deployment scenario is NVMe devices (e.g. PCIe cards, M2 or 8639 drives) installed as storage in servers or as back-end storage in storage systems. Figure 2 below shows a networked storage system or appliance that uses traditional server storage I/O interfaces and protocols for front-end access, however with back-end storage being all NVMe, or a hybrid of NVMe, SAS and SATA devices.
NVMe as back-end server storage I/O interface to NVM
Figure 2 NVMe as back-end server storage I/O interface to NVM storage

A variation of the above is using NVMe for shared direct attached storage (DAS) such as the EMC DSSD D5. In the following scenario (figure 3), multiple servers in a rack or cabinet configuration have an extended PCIe connection that attached to a shared storage all flash array using NVMe on the front-end. Read more about this approach and EMC DSSD D5 here or click on the image below.

EMC DSSD D5 NVMe
Figure 3 Shared DAS All Flash NVM Storage using NVMe (e.g. EMC DSSD D5)

Next up in figure 4 is a variation of the previous example, except NVMe is implemented over an RDMA (Remote Direct Memory Access) based fabric network using Converged 10GbE/40GbE or InfiniBand in what is known as RoCE (RDMA over Converged Ethernet pronounced Rocky).

NVMe over Fabric RoCE
Figure 4 NVMe as a “front-end” interface for servers or storage systems/appliances

Where To Learn More

View additional NVMe, SSD, NVM, SCM, Data Infrastructure and related topics via the following links.

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

Watch for more topology and configuration options as NVMe along with associated hardware, software and I/O networking tools and technologies emerge over time.

Continue reading about NVMe with Part III (Need for Performance Speed) in this five-part series, or jump to Part I, Part IV or Part V.

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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Server StorageIO February 2016 Update Newsletter

Volume 16, Issue II

Hello and welcome to the February 2016 Server StorageIO update newsletter.

Even with an extra day during the month of February, there was a lot going on in a short amount of time. This included industry activity from servers to storage and I/O networking, hardware, software, services, mergers and acquisitions for cloud, virtual, containers and legacy environments. Check out the sampling of some of the various industry activities below.

Meanwhile, its now time for March Madness which also means metrics that matter and getting ready for World Backup Data on March 31st. Speaking of World Backup Day, check out the StorageIO events and activities page for a webinar on March 31st involving data protection as part of smart backups.

While your focus for March may be around brackets and other related themes, check out the Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) white paper listed below that looks at NAND flash SSD failures at Facebook. Some of the takeaways involve the importance of cooling and thermal management for flash, as well as wear management and role of flash translation layer firmware along with controllers.

Also see the links to the Google White Paper on their request to the industry for a new type of Hard Disk Drive (HDD) to store capacity data while SSD’s handle the IOP’s. The take away is that while Google uses a lot of flash SSD for high performance, low latency workloads, they also need to have a lot of high-capacity bulk storage that is more affordable on a cost per capacity basis. Google also makes several proposals and suggestions to the industry on what should and can be done on a go forward basis.

Backblaze also has a new report out on their 2015 HDD reliability and failure analysis which makes for an interesting read. One of the take away’s is that while there are newer, larger capacity 6TB and 8TB drives, Backblaze is leveraging the lower cost per capacity of 4TB drives that are also available in volume quantity.

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

  • StorageIOblog posts
  • Industry Activity Trends
  • New and Old Vendor Update
  • Events and Webinars

    • StorageIOblog Posts

    Recent and popular Server StorageIOblog posts include:

    • EMC DSSD D5 Rack Scale Direct Attached Shared SSD All Flash Array Part I
      and Part II – EMC DSSD D5 Direct Attached Shared AFA
      EMC announced the general availability of their DSSD D5 Shared Direct Attached SSD (DAS) flash storage system (e.g. All Flash Array or AFA) which is a rack-scale solution. If you recall, EMC acquired DSSD back in 2014 which you can read more about here. EMC announced four configurations that include 36TB, 72TB and 144TB raw flash SSD capacity with support for up to 48 dual-ported host client servers.
    • Various Hardware (SAS, SATA, NVM, M2) and Software (VHD) Defined Odd’s and Ends
      Ever need to add another GbE port to a small server, workstation or perhaps Intel NUC, however no PCIe slots are available? How about attaching a M2 form factor flash SSD card to a server or device that does not have an M2 port, or, for mirroring two M2 cards together with a RAID adapter? Looking for tool to convert a Windows system to a Virtual Hard Disk (VHD) while it is running? The following are a collection of odd’s and end’s devices and tools for hardware and software defining your environment.
    • Software Defined Storage Virtual Hard Disk (VHD) Algorithms + Data Structures
      For those who are into, or simply like to talk about software defined storage (SDS), API’s, Windows, Virtual Hard Disks (VHD) or VHDX, or Hyper-V among other related themes, have you ever actually looked at the specification for VHDX? If not, here is the link to the open specification that Microsoft published (this one dates back to 2012).
    • Big Files and Lots of Little File Processing and Benchmarking with Vdbench
      Need to test a server, storage I/O networking, hardware, software, services, cloud, virtual, physical or other environment that is either doing some form of file processing, or, that you simply want to have some extra workload running in the background for what ever reason?

    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)

    Some new Products Technology Services Announcements (PTSA) include:

  • Tegile – IntelliFlash HD Now Available To Enterprises Worldwide
  • Via Forbes – Competitors and Cash Bleed Put Pressure on Pure Storage
  • Via HealthCareBusiness – Philips and Amazon team up on cloud-based health record storage
  • Via Zacks – IBM Advances Hybrid Cloud Object Based Storage
  • DataONstorage expands Microsoft Hyper Converged Infrastructure platforms
  • Via ITBusinessEdge – Nimble updates All Flash Array (AFA) storage
  • Carnegie Mellon University – A Large-Scale Study of Flash Memory Failures
  • Cisco Buys Cliqr Cloud Orchestration
  • Backblaze – 2015 Hard Drive Reliability Reports and Analysis
  • Via BusinessCloudNews – Verizon Closing Down Its Public Cloud
  • Via BusinessInsider – US Government Approves Dell and EMC Deal
  • EMC and VMware announce new VCE VxRAIL Converged Solutions
  • EMC announces new IBM zSeries Mainframe enhancements for VMAX
  • EMC announces new DSSD D5 AFA and VMAX AFA enhancements
  • HPE announces enhancements to StoreEasy 1650 storage
  • Seagate now shipping worlds slimmest and fastest 2TB mobile HDD
  • Via VMblog – Oracle Scoops Up Ravello to Boosts Its Public Cloud Offerings
  • Via Investors – SSD and Chinese Investments in Western Digital
  • ATTO announces 32G (e.g. Gen 6) Fibre Channel adapters
  • Google to disk vendors: Make hard drives like this, even if they lose more data
  • Google Disk for Data Centers White Paper (PDF Here)

    • View other recent news and industry trends here

    Vendors you may not have heard of

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

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

    • SkySync – Enterprise File Sync and Share
    • SANblaze – Storage protocol emulation tools
    • OpenIT – DCIM and Data Infrastructure Management Tools
    • Infinit.sh – Decentralized Software Based File Storage Platform
    • Alluxio –
      Open Source Software Defined Storage Abstraction Layer
    • Genie9 –
      Backup and Data Protection Tools
    • E8 Storage – Software Defined Stealth Storage Startup

    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 Webinars and Industry Events

    EMCworld (Las Vegas) May 2-4, 2016

    Interop (Las Vegas) May 4-6 2016

    NAB (Las Vegas) April 19-20, 2016

    March 31, 2016 Webinar (1PM ET) – Smart Backup and World Backup Day

    February 25, 2016 Webinar (11AM PT) – Migrating to Hyper-V including from Vmware

    February 24, 2016 Webinar (11AM ET) – How To Become a Data Protection Hero

    February 23, 2016 Webinar (11AM PT) – Rethinking Data Protection

    January 19, 2016 Webinar (9AM PT) – Solve Virtualization Performance Issues Like a Pro

    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,
    objectstoragecenter.com, storageioblog.com/data-protection-diaries-main/,
    thenvmeplace.com, thessdplace.com and storageio.com/performance among others.

    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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    Software Defined Storage Virtual Hard Disk (VHD) Algorithms + Data Structures

    Software Defined Storage Virtual Hard Disk (VHD) Algorithms + Data Structures

    server storage I/O trends

    For those who are into, or simply like to talk about software defined storage (SDS), APIs, Windows, Virtual Hard Disks (VHD) or VHDX, or Hyper-V among other related themes, have you ever actually looked at the specification for VHDX? If not, here is the link to the open specification that Microsoft published (this one dates back to 2012).

    Microsoft VHDX specification document
    Click on above image to download the VHDX specification from Microsoft.com

    How about Algorithms + Data Structures = Programs by Niklaus Wirth, some of you might remember that from the past, if not, it’s a timeless piece of work that has many fundamental concepts for understanding software defined anything. I came across Algorithms + Data Structures = Programs back in Graduate School when I was getting my masters degree in Software Engineering at night, while working during the day in an IT environment on servers, storage, I/O networking hardware and software.


    Algorithms + Data Structures = Programs on Amazon.com

    In addition to the Amazon.com link above, here is a link to a free (legitimate PDF) copy.

    The reason I mention Software Defined, Virtual Hard Disk and Algorithms + Data Structures = Programs is that they are all directly related, or at a minimum can help demystify things.

    Inside a VHD and VHDX

    The following is an excerpt from the Microsoft VHDX specification document mentioned above that shows a logical view of how a VHDX is defined as a data structure, as well as how algorithms should use and access them.

    Microsoft VHDX specification

    Keep in mind that anything software defined is a collection of data structures that describe how bits, bytes, blocks, blobs or other entities are organized and then accessed by algorithms that are defined how to use those data structures. Thus the connection to Algorithms + Data Structures = Programs mentioned above.

    In the case of a Virtual Hard Disk (VHD) or VHDX they are the data structures defined (see the specification here) and then used by various programs (applications or algorithms) such as Windows or other operating systems, hypervisors or utilities.

    A VHDX (or VMDK or VVOL or qcow or other virtual disk for that matter) is a file whose contents are organized e.g. the data structures per a given specification (here).

    The VHDX can then be moved around like another file and used for booting some operating systems, as well as simply mounting and using like any other disk or device.

    This also means that you can nest putting a VHDX inside of a VHDX and so forth.

    Where to learn more

    Continue reading with the following links about Virtual Hard Disks pertaining to Microsoft Windows, Hyper-V, VMware among others.

  • Algorithms + Data Structures = Programs on Amazon.com
  • Microsoft Technet Virtual Hard Disk Sharing Overview
  • Download the VHDX specification from Microsoft.com
  • Microsoft Technet Hyper-V Virtual Hard Disk (VHD) Format Overview
  • Microsoft Technet Online Virtual Hard Disk Resizing Overview
  • VMware Developer Resource Center (VDDK for vSphere 6.0)
  • VMware VVOLs and storage I/O fundamentals (Part 1)

    • What this all means

    Applications and utilities or basically anything that is algorithms working with data structures is a program. Software Defined Storage or Software Defined anything involves defining data structures that describes various entities, along with the algorithms to work with and use those data structures.

    Sharpen, refresh or expand your software defined data center, software defined network, software defined storage or software defined storage management as well as software defined marketing game by digging a bit deeper into the bits and bytes. Who knows, you might just go from talking the talk to walking the talk, if nothing else, talking the talk better..

    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

    Posted on

    Server StorageIO January 2016 Update Newsletter

    Volume 16, Issue I – beginning of Year (BoY) Edition

    Hello and welcome to the January 2016 Server StorageIO update newsletter.

    Is it just me, or did January disappear in a flash like data stored in non-persistent volatile DRAM memory when the power is turned off? It seems like just the other day that it was the first day of the new year and now we are about to welcome in February. Needless to say, like many of you I have been busy with various projects, many of which are behind the scenes, some of which will start appearing publicly sooner while others later.

    In terms of what have I been working on, it includes the usual of performance, availability, capacity and economics (e.g. PACE) related to servers, storage, I/O networks, hardware, software, cloud, virtual and containers. This includes NVM as well as NVMe based SSD’s, HDD’s, cache and tiering technologies, as well as data protection among other things with Hyper-V, VMware as well as various cloud services.

    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 – Microsoft Nano, Server 2016 TP4 and VMware

    This months feature topic is virtual servers and software defined storage including those from VMware and Microsoft. Back in November I mentioned the 2016 Technical Preview 4 (e.g. TP4) along with Storage Spaces Direct and Nano. As a reminder you can download your free trial copy of Windows Server 2016 TP4 from this Microsoft site here.

    Three good Microsoft Blog posts about storage spaces to check out include:

    • Storage Spaces Direct in Technical Preview 4 (here)
    • Hardware options for evaluating Storage Spaces Direct in Technical Preview 4 (here)
    • Storage Spaces Direct – Under the hood with the Software Storage Bus (here)

    As for Microsoft Nano, for those not familiar, it’s not a new tablet or mobile device, instead, it is a very light weight streamlined version of the Windows Server 2016 server. How streamlined? Much more so then the earlier Windows Server versions that simply disabled the GUI and desktop interfaces. Nano is smaller from a memory and disk storage space perspective meaning it uses less RAM, boots faster, has fewer moving parts (e.g. software modules) to break (or need patching).

    Specifically Nano removes 32 bit support and anything related to the desktop and GUI interfaces as well as removing the console interface. That’s right, no console or virtual console to log into, Wow is gone, access is via Powershell or Windows Management Interface tools from remote systems. How small is it? I have a Nano instance built on a VHDX that is under a GB in size, granted, its only for testing. The goal of Nano is to have a very light weight streamlined version of Windows Server that can run hundreds (or more) VMs in a small memory footprint, not to mention supports lots of containers. Nano is part of WIndows TP4, learn more about Nano here in this Microsoft post including how to get started using it.

    Speaking of VMware, if you have not received an invite yet to their Digital Enterprise February 6, 2016 announcement event, click here to register.

    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)

    Some new Products Technology Services Announcements (PTSA) include:

    • EMC announced Elastic Cloud Storage (ECS) V2.2. A main theme of V2.2 is that besides being the 3rd generation of EMC object storage (dating back to Centera, then Atmos), is that ECS is also where the functionality of Centera, Atmos and other functionality converge. ECS provides object storage access along with HDFS (Hadoop and Hortonworks certified) and traditional NFS file access.

      Object storage access includes Amazon S3, OpenStack Swift, ATMOS and CAS (Centera). In addition to the access, added Centera functionality for regulatory compliance has been folded into the ECS software stack. For example, ECS is now compatible with SEC 17 a-4(f) and CFTC 1.3(b)-(c) regulations protecting data from being overwritten or erased for a specified retention period. Other enhancements besides scalability, resiliency and ease of use include meta data and search capabilities. You can download and try ECS for non-production workloads with no capacity or functionality limitations from EMC here.

    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. In case you missed them from last month:

    • TheFibreChannel.com: Industry Analyst Interview: Greg Schulz, StorageIO

    • EnterpriseStorageForum: Comments Handling Virtual Storage Challenges

    • PowerMore (Dell): Q&A: When to implement ultra-dense 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.

    • Datrium – DVX and NetShelf server software defined flash storage and converged infrastructure

    • DataDynamics – StorageX is the software solution for enabling intelligent data migration, including from NetApp OnTap 7 to Clustered OnTap, as well as to and from EMC among other NAS file serving solutions.

    • Paxata – Little and Big Data management solutions

    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:

    • InfoStor:  Data Protection Gaps, Some Good, Some Not So Good

    And in case you missed them from last month

    • IronMountain:  5 Noteworthy Data Privacy Trends From 2015

    • Virtual Blocks (VMware Blogs):  Part III EVO:RAIL – When And Where To Use It?

    • InfoStor:  Object Storage Is In Your Future

    • InfoStor:  Water, Data and Storage Analogy

    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

    EMCworld (Las Vegas) May 2-4, 2016

    Interop (Las Vegas) May 4-6 2016

    NAB (Las Vegas) April 19-20, 2016

    TBA – March 31, 2016

    Redmond Magazine Gridstore (How to Migrate from VMware to Hyper-V) February 25, 2016 Webinar (11AM PT)

    TBA – February 23, 2016

    Redmond Magazine and Dell Foglight – Manage and Solve Virtualization Performance Issues Like a Pro (Webinar 9AM PT) – January 19, 2016

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

    From StorageIO Labs

    Research, Reviews and Reports

    Quick Look: What’s the Best Enterprise HDD for a Content Server?
    Which enterprise HDD for content servers

    Insight for Effective Server Storage I/O decision-making
    This StorageIO® Industry Trends Perspectives Solution Brief and Lab Review (compliments of Seagate and Servers Direct) looks at the Servers Direct (www.serversdirect.com) converged Content Solution platforms with Seagate (www.seagate.com) Enterprise Hard Disk Drive (HDDs).

    I was given the opportunity to do some hands-on testing running different application workloads with a 2U content solution platform along with various Seagate Enterprise 2.5” HDDs handle different application workloads. This includes Seagate’s Enterprise Performance HDDs with the enhanced caching feature.

    Read more in this Server StorageIO industry Trends Perspective white paper and lab review.

    Looking for NVM including SSD information? Visit the Server StorageIO www.thessdplace.com and www.thenvmeplace.com micro sites. View other StorageIO lab review and test drive 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 mine as well as books from others. For this months recommended reading, it’s a blog site. If you have not visited Duncan Eppings (@DuncanYB) Yellow-Bricks site, you should, particular if you are interested in virtualization, high availability and related topical themes.

    Seven Databases in Seven Weeks guide to no SQL via Amazon.com

    Granted Duncan being a member of the VMware CTO office covers a lot of VMware related themes, however being the author of several books, he also covers non VMware related topics. Duncan recently did a really good and simple post about rebuilding a failed disk in a VMware VSAN vs. in a legacy RAID or erasure code based storage solution.

    One of the things that struck me as being important with what Duncan wrote about is avoiding apples to oranges comparisons. What I mean by this is that it is easy to compare traditional parity based or mirror type solutions that chunk or shard data on KByte basis spread over disks, vs. data that is chunk or sharded on GByte (or larger) basis over multiple servers and their disks. Anyway, check out Duncan’s site and recent post by clicking 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/performance.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

    Posted on

    RIP Windows SIS (Single Instance Storage), or at least in Server 2016

    RIP Windows SIS, or at least in Server 2016

    server storage I/O trends

    I received as a Microsoft MVP a partner communication today from Microsoft of a heads up as well as pass on to others that Single Instance Storage (SIS) has been removed from Windows Server 2016 (Read the Microsoft Announcement here, or below). Windows SIS is part of Microsoft’s portfolio of tools and technology for implementing Data Footprint Reduction (DFR).

    Granted Windows Server 2016 has not been released yet, however you can download and try out the latest release such as Technical Preview 4 (TP4), get the bits from Microsoft here. Learn more about some of the server and storage I/O enhancements in TP4 including storage spaces direct here.

    Partner Communication from Microsoft

    Partner Communication
    Please relay or forward this notification to ISVs and hardware partners that have used Single Instance Storage (SIS) or implemented the SIS backup API.

    Single Instance Storage (SIS) has been removed from Windows Server 2016
    Summary:   Single Instance Storage (SIS), a file system filter driver used for NTFS file deduplication, has been removed from Windows Server. In Dec 2015, the SIS feature has been completely removed from Windows Server and Windows Storage Server editions.  SIS was officially deprecated in Windows Server 2012 R2 in this announcement and will be removed from future Windows Server Technical Preview releases.

    Call to action:
    Storage vendors that have any application dependencies on legacy SIS functions or SIS backup and restore APIs should verify that their applications behave as expected on Windows Server 2016 and Windows Storage Server 2016. Windows Server 2012 included Microsoft’s next generation of deduplication technology that uses variable-sized chunking and hashing and offers far superior deduplication rates. Users and backup vendors have already moved to support the latest Microsoft deduplication technology and should continue to do so.

    Background:
    SIS was developed and used in Windows Server since 2000, when it was part of Remote Installation Services. SIS became a general purpose file system filter driver in Windows Storage Server 2003 and the SIS groveler (the deduplication engine) was included in Windows Storage Server. In Windows Storage Server 2008, the SIS legacy read/write filter driver was upgraded to a mini-filter and it shipped in Windows Server 2008, Windows Server 2012 and Windows Server 2012 R2 editions. Creating SIS-controlled volumes could only occur on Windows Storage Server, however, all editions of Windows Server could read and write to volumes that were under SIS control and could restore and backup volumes that had SIS applied.

    Volumes using SIS that are restored or plugged into Windows Server 2016 will only be able to read data that was not deduplicated. Prior to migrating or restoring a volume, users must remove SIS from the volume by copying it to another location or removing SIS using SISadmin commands.

    The SIS components and features:

    • SIS Groveler. The SIS Groveler searched for files that were identical on the NTFS file system volume. It then reported those files to the SIS filter driver.
    • SIS Storage Filter. The SIS Storage Filter was a file system filter that managed duplicate copies of files on logical volumes. This filter copied one instance of the duplicate file into the Common Store. The duplicate copies were replaced with a link to the Common Store to improve disk space utilization.
    • SIS Link. SIS links were pointers within the file system, maintaining both application and user experience (including attributes such as file size and directory path) while I/O was transparently redirected to the actual duplicate file located within the SIS Common Store.
    • SIS Common Store. The SIS Common Store served as the repository for each file identified as having duplicates. Each SIS-maintained volume contained one SIS Common Store, which contained all of the merged duplicate files that exist on that volume.
    • SIS Administrative Interface. The SIS Administrative Interface gave network administrators easy access to all SIS controls to simplify management.
    • SIS Backup API. The SIS Backup API (Sisbkup.dll) helped OEMs create SIS-aware backup and restoration solutions.

    References:
    https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/aa362538(v=vs.85).aspx
    https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/aa362512(v=vs.85).aspx
    https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dexter.functioncatall.sis(v=vs.90).aspx
    https://blogs.technet.com/b/filecab/archive/2012/05/21/introduction-to-data-deduplication-in-windows-server-2012.aspx
    https://blogs.technet.com/b/filecab/archive/2006/02/03/single-instance-store-sis-in-windows-storage-server-r2.aspx

    What this all means

    Like it or not, SIS is being removed from Windows 2016 replaced by the new Microsoft deduplication or data footprint reduction (DFR) technology.

    You have been advised…

    RIP Windows SIS

    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

    Posted on

    Server StorageIO November 2015 Update Newsletter


    Server and StorageIO Update Newsletter

    Volume 15, Issue XI – November 2015

    Hello and welcome to this November 2015 Server StorageIO update newsletter. Winter has arrived here in the northern hemisphere, although technically its still fall until the winter solstice in December. Regardless of if summer or winter depending on which hemisphere you are, 2015 is about to wrap up meaning end of year (EOY) activities.

    EOY activities can mean final shopping or acquisitions for technology and services or simply for home and fun. This is also that time of year where predictions for 2016 will start streaming out as well as reflections looking back at 2015 appear (lets save those for December ;). Another EOY activity is planning for 2016 as well as getting items ready for roll-out or launch in the new year. Needless to say there is a lot going on so with that, 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

  • Commentary in the news
  • Tips and Articles
  • StorageIOblog posts
  • Events and Webinars
  • Recommended Reading List
  • Resources and Links

    • StorageIOblog Posts

    Recent and popular Server StorageIOblog posts include:

    View other recent as well as past blog posts 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.

    • TheFibreChannel.com: Industry Analyst Interview: Greg Schulz, StorageIO
    • EnterpriseStorageForum: Comments Handling Virtual Storage Challenges
    • PowerMore (Dell): Q&A: When to implement ultra-dense storage

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

     

    StorageIO Tips and Articles

    Recent Server StorageIO articles appearing in different venues include:

    • Virtual Blocks (VMware Blogs):  EVO:RAIL Part II – Why And When To Use It?
      This is the second of a multi-part series looking at Converged Infrastructures (CI), Hyper-Converged Infrastructures (HCI), Cluster in Box (CiB) and other unified solution bundles. There is a trend of industry adoption talking about CI, HCI, CiB and other bundled solutions, along with growing IT customer adoption and deployment. Different sized organizations are looking at various types of CI solutions to meet various application and workloads needs. Read more here and part I here.
    • TheFibreChannel.com:  Industry Analyst Interview: Greg Schulz, StorageIO
      In part one of a two part article series, Frank Berry, storage industry analyst and Founder of IT Brand Pulse and editor of TheFibreChannel.com, recently spoke with StorageIO Founder Greg Schulz about Fibre Channel SAN integration with OpenStack, why Rackspace is using Fibre Channel and more. Read more here
    • CloudComputingAdmin.com:  Cloud Storage Decision Making – Using Microsoft Azure for cloud storage
      Let’s say that you have been tasked with, or decided that it is time to use (or try) public cloud storage such as Microsoft Azure. Ok, now what do you do and what decisions need to be made? Keep in mind that Microsoft Azure like many other popular public clouds provides many different services available for fee (subscription) along with free trials. These services include applications, compute, networking, storage along with development and management platform tools. 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

    Dell Data Protection Summit Nov 4, 2015 7AM PT

    Microsoft MVP Summit Nov 2-5, 2015

    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.

    In case you had not heard, Microsoft recently released the bits (e.g. software download) for Windows Server 2016 Technical Preview 4 (TP4). TP4 is the successor to Technical Preview 3 (TP3) that was released this past August and is the most recent public preview version of the next Windows Server. TP4 adds a new tiering capability where Windows and storage spaces can cache and migrate data between Hard Disk Drives (HDD) and Non-Volatile Memory (NVM) including flash SSD. The new tiering feature supports a mixed HDD and NVM with flash SSD (including NVM Express or NVMe), as well as an all NVM scenario. Yes, that is correct, tiering with all NVM is not a type, instead enables using lower latency faster NVM along with lower cost higher capacity flash SSD. Learn more about what’s in TP4 from a server and storage I/O perspective in this Microsoft post, as well as more about S2D in this Microsoft Technet post here and here. You can get the Windows Server 2016 TP4 bits here which are already running in the Server StorageIO lab.

    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.com
    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

    Posted on

    Water, Data and Storage Analogy

    Water, Data and Storage Analogy

    server storage I/O trends

    Recently I did a piece over at InfoStor titled "Water, Data and Storage Analogy". Besides being taken for granted and all of us being dependent on them, several other similarities exist between water, data, and storage. In addition to being a link that piece, this is a companion with some different images to help show the similarities between water, data and storage if for no other reason to have a few moments of fun. Read the entire piece here.

    Water, Data and Storage Similarities

    Water can get cold and freeze, data can also go cold becoming dormant and a candidate for archiving or cold cloud storage.

    Like data and storage water can be frozen
    Like data and storage water can be frozen

    Various types of storage devices
    Various types of storage drives (HDD & SSD)

    different tiers of frozen water storage containers
    Different types and tiers of frozen water storage containers

    Data, like water, can move or be dormant, can be warm and active, or cold, frozen and inactive. Water, data and storage can also be used for work or fun.

    Kyak fishing
    Fishing on water vs. phishing for data on storage

    Eagle fly fishing on st croix river
    Eagle fly fishing on water over st croix river

    Data can be transformed into 3D images and video, water transformed into Snow can also be made into various virtual images or things.

    Data on storage can be transformed like water
    Data on storage can be transformed like water (e.g. snow)

    Data, like water, can exist in clouds, resulting in storms that if not properly prepared for, can cause problems.

    Data and storage can be damaged including by water, water can also be damaged by putting things into it or the environment.

    Water can destroy things, data and storage can be destroyed
    Water can destroy things, data and storage can be destroyed

    There are data lakes, data pools, data ponds, oceans of storage and seas of data as well as data centers.

    inside a data center
    Rows of servers and storage in a data center

    An indoor water lake (e.g. not an indoor data lake)
    An indoor water lake (e.g. not an indoor data lake)

    As water flows downstream it tends to increase in volume as tributaries or streams adding to the volume in lakes, reservoirs, rivers and streams. Another similarity is that water will tend to flow and seek its level filling up space, while data can involve a seek on an HDD in addition to filling up space.

    Flood of water vs. flood of data
    Flood of water vs. flood of data (e.g. need for Data Protection)

    There are also hybrid uses (or types) of water, just like hybrid technologies for supporting data infrastructures.

    Amphicar hybrid automobile
    Hybrid Automobile on water

    What this all means

    We might take water, data and storage for granted, yet they each need to be managed, protected, preserved and served. Servers utilize storage to support applications for managing water; water is used for cooling and powering storage, not to mention for making coffee for those who take care of IT resources.

    When you hear about data lakes, ponds or pools, keep in mind that there are also data streams, all of which need to be managed to prevent the flood of data from overwhelming you.

    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

    Posted on

    Server StorageIO October 2015 Update Newsletter


    Server and StorageIO Update Newsletter

    Volume 15, Issue X – Industry Trends, M&A, PTSA

    Hello and welcome to this October 2015 Server StorageIO update newsletter. Fall has arrived here in the northern hemisphere which means its spring in the southern hemisphere, and getting colder here. While fall means cooler out-door temperature with winter just around the corner, in the IT/ITC industry, particular the data infrastructure sector (server, storage, I/O networking, hardware, software, cloud, physical, software defined virtual) things are very hot. Sure the various industry and vendor focused conferences, road shows and mini-events with associated new product, technology or services announcements (PTSA. There are also the various merger and acquisitions (M&A) that have occurred throughout the year including the recent Dell buying EMC, and Western Digital (WD) buying SANdisk among others.

    This edition of the Server StorageIO update newsletter has a focus on industry trends perspectives including recent M&A and PTSA activity. In addition to industry fall industry M&A and PTSA activity, there also plenty of conference, seminars, workshops, webinars and other events some of which you can see here on the Server StorageIO events page.

    On a slightly different note, for those interested and not aware of the European Union (EU) ruling earlier this month on data privacy (e.g. Safe Harbor), here and here are a couple of links to stories discussing the new ruling changes between the EU and US (among other countries). The EU data privacy rulings involve personal data being moved out of EU countries to US data centers such as cloud and application services firms.

    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 – TBD

    This months feature topic theme is industry trends perspectives including M&A activity.

    Some M&A, IPO and divestiture activity includes:

    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)

    Some new Products Technology Services Announcements (PTSA) include:

    • Amazon Web Service (AWS) Simple Storage Service (S3) Infrequent Access (IA) storage class for inactive data with immediate access vs. Glacier cold or frozen (dormant) data with slow or time delayed access. AWS also announced Snowball bulk data import/export 50TB appliance service in addition to their earlier offered capabilities.
    • EMC Rexray (part of EMCcode) and Mesosphere (for Mesos data center operating system) have joined to enable persistent Docker volumes for Mesos (e.g. data center operating system platform).
    • Microsoft Azure recent enhancements include file access of cloud storage (on-premises and within Azure cloud) leveraging SMB interfaces. Here is a primer on Azure cloud storage service offerings. View other recent Azure Cloud Storage, Compute, Database and Data Analytics service offerings here. In addition to Microsoft Azure cloud offerings or Windows 10 desktop operating system, you can also download WIndows Server 2016 Technical Preview 3 (TP3) and see what’s new here. Some of the features include Storage Spaces Direct (e.g. DAS storage) and replication among other 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.

    • NetworkComputing: Dell buying EMC: The Storage Ramifications
    • EnterpriseTech: VMware Targets Synergies in Dell EMC Deal 
    • HPCwire: Dell to Buy EMC for $67B
    • EnterpriseStorageForum: Data Storage: Do We Really Need to Store Everything?
    • EnterpriseStorageForum: Why Hard Drives Are Here to Stay (For Now)
    • 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.

    • Hedvig – Converged server storage software management tools
    • Infinidat – Another Moshe Yanai Storage System Startup
    • Mesosphere – Mesos Data Center Operating System management tools
    • Plexxi – Networking startup with former EMC executive Rich Napolitano as CEO
    • ScaleMP – Scale-out server aggregation 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:

    • Virtual Blocks (VMware Blogs):  EVO:RAIL – What Is It And Why Does It Matter?
      This is the first of a multi-part series looking at Converged Infrastructures (CI), Hyper-Converged Infrastructures (HCI), Cluster in Box (CiB) and other unified solution bundles. There is a trend of industry adoption talking about CI, HCI, CiB and other bundled solutions, along with growing IT customer adoption and deployment. Different sized organizations are looking at various types of CI solutions to meet various application and workloads needs. Read more here.
    • WServerNews.com:  Cloud (Microsoft Azure) storage considerations
      Let’s say that you have been tasked with, or decided that it is time to use (or try) public cloud storage such as Microsoft Azure. Ok, now what do you do and what decisions need to be made? Keep in mind that Microsoft Azure like many other popular public clouds provides many difference services available for fee (subscription) along with free trials. These services include applications, compute, networking, storage along with development and management platform tools. Read more here.
    • NetworkComputing:  Selecting Storage: Buzzword Bingo
      The storage industry is rife with buzzwords. Here are some of the popular ones storage buyers need to navigate carefully to find storage products that truly meet their needs. Read more here.

    • InfoStor:  What’s The Best Storage Benchmark? It Depends…

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

    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

    Dell Data Protection Summit Nov 4, 2015 7AM PT

    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.

    From StorageIO Labs

    Research, Reviews and Reports

    Quick Look: SATA and NVMe Flash SSD Performance
    SATA and NVMe flash SSD performance

    Non-Volatile Memory (NVM) Express (NVMe) continues to evolve as a technology for enabling and improving server storage I/O for NVM including nand flash SSD storage. NVMe streamlines performance enabling more work to be done (e.g. IOPs), data to be moved (bandwidth) at a lower response time using less CPU. The above figure is a quick look comparing nand flash SSD being accessed via SATA III (6Gbps) on the left and NVMe (x4) on the right. As with any server storage I/O performance comparisons there are many variables and take them with a grain of salt. While IOPs and bandwidth are often discussed, keep in mind that with the new protocol, drivers and device controllers with NVMe that streamline I/O less CPU is needed. Learn more about NVM, NVMe, flash, SSD and related topics at www.thessdplace.com.

    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.

    Seven Databases in Seven Weeks guide to no SQL via Amazon.com

    The Human Face of Big Data book review. To say this is a big book would be an understatement, then again, big data is a big topic with a lot of diversity if you open your eyes and think in a pragmatic way, which once you open and see the pages you will see. This is physically a big book (11x 14 inches) with lots of pictures, texts, stories, factoids and thought stimulating information of the many facets and dimensions of big data across 224 pages. The Human Face of Big Data is more than a coffee table or picture book as it is full of with information, factoids and perspectives how information and data surround us every day. Open up a copy of The Human Face of Big Data and you will see examples of how data and information are all around us, and our dependence upon it. 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

    Posted on

    Dude, Dell is Getting (Buying) an EMC and VMware Deal

    Storage I/O trends

    Dude, Dell is Getting (Buying) an EMC and VMware Deal

    Some of you might remember the marketing campaign "Dude you’re getting a Dell" to show somebody buying a Dell computer.

    Today, Dell as in Michael Dell and his corporation Dell along with partner Silver Lake investment announced a $67B USD deal that they are acquiring EMC along with their stake in VMware which will stay an independently public traded company. Dell brings strength in small and medium-mid market strength and supplier to cloud and other managed service providers, Dell financing combines with EMC strength and enterprise portfolio. This deal also reunites the two parties who before had a strong storage joint venture with Dell OEMing EMC storage for about a decade before going their separate ways in the late 2000s.

    Dell buying EMC

    Key points

    • Privately held Dell is acquiring EMC and its various business units
    • VMware will stay independent public company with Dell as major owner
    • EMC based in Hopkinton Massachusetts will be headquarters for new Dell Systems Business Unit
    • Dell Systems Business Unit will also be headquarters for Dell servers
    • New Dell Systems Business Unit joint with EMC is expected to be a $30B USD plus sized entity
    • Dell see’s revenue synergies of about 3x over 1x cost of the combined entities
    • Dell see’s ability to generate cash to service debt coming from increased revenue growth
    • EMC global support, professional services, consulting to complement Dell capabilities
    • Ability for both partners to leverage their best of strengths from SMB to enterprise to cloud

    What this means big picture

    Basically EMC has gone private under the Dell umbrella while VMware remains an independent publicly traded company, granted with EMC and now Dell being the primary shareholder of that entity. Dell went private back in 2013 with its founder Michael Dell along with Silver Lake Partners as key investors. EMC has been under pressure from activist investors to sell off its investment in VMware to increase shareholder and was rumored to have been in acquisition discussions with other organizations such as HP. Now EMC (e.g. the non-VMware part) is effectively a private held company as the Dell Systems Business Unit to be initially headquartered in Hopkinton Massachusetts (EMC Headquarters) while Dell Corporation headquarters will remain in Austin Texas.

    The server business will be based in Hopkinton, which will be targeted at around a $30B USD business. Ironic that Massachusetts used to be a focus for server vendors from Dell (acquired by Compaq and then HP), Wang, DG (acquired by EMC) among others. This transaction puts Massachusetts back on the map as the Dell System Business Unit will also now be home to Dell servers. As of the announcement, there is an expectation that the Hopkinton headquarters will grow vs. shrink. Granted., some consolidation can be expected.

    Some questions that exist (among many others)

    What about Pivotal?

    One of the questions I have is that during the announcement discussions, not much if anything has been said about Pivotal and its future role or how it will be folded in, or set up as a tracking stock or similar activity. Also something to keep in mind as food for thought, or speculation, is that GE is an investor in Pivotal and GE has made noise about becoming more prominent player in software, just saying. In the meantime, let’s wait and see what happens with Pivotal.

    What about Lenovo relationship?

    After the last Dell breakup, EMC established a partnership and initiative with Lenovo to jointly produce servers that had been being sourced from Dell or others, as well as EMC moving its Iomega SMB storage business into the Lenovo initiative. Note that about a year ago Lenovo bought the former IBM x86 server business. What will become of that partnership for servers, as well as for Iomega moving forward?

    How will product rationalization occur?

    There is some product overlap in the storage business, as well as backup/data protection among some other areas. However looking at the bigger picture, there is not much if any overlap. Where there is overlap, one near-term approach that might (this is speculation) occur is to segment potential competing products into Enterprise and Systems business vs. SMB or entry-level. This could occur for storage products such as Dell Compellent, Exanet based Fluid NAS, EqualLogic and MD (OEM from NetApp) vs. those from EMC such as VMAX, VNX, Isilon, XtremIO, Datadomain among others. Likewise, there will need to be some rationalization for backup and data protection products such as EMC Networker, Avamar vs. Dell AppAssure, vRanger, NetVault as well as their OEM partners Commvault and Symantec among others.

    VCE gets leveraged as part of go to market?

    EMC took over ownership of VCE in 2014 with Cisco still involved, in fact if a product has Vblock in its name, it will be a Cisco server and network. However look for other VCE solutions to appear as well as the VxRACK announced earlier this year. I would expect new converge infrastructure (CI), hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) and Cluster-in-Box (CiB) solutions from VCE that would include Dell servers in the future leveraging different software (VMware among others).

    How will Dell OEM business drive things?

    Dell has had a server OEM business that has supplied technology to others, including in the past EMC. This business moves in under the new System Business Unit as part of what is or was EMC. Beyond servers, it will be interesting to see how that business unit can also move other technologies into the OEM or high volume market including to cloud and managed service providers who buy in bulk.

    Will this cause Cisco an EMC partner to buy another storage vendor?

    Maybe, that depends on what Cisco wants to do moving forward in addition to remaining a partner with EMC. Of course, if Cisco were to go storage shopping, who would that be? Perhaps DDN, Nimble or NetApp?

    With Michael Dell now having done one of, if not the largest tech deals in history, how will Larry Ellison of Oracle react?

    It has been said that the difference between God and Larry Ellison is that God was not interested in becoming Larry Ellison, however, is Larry Ellison still interested in industry bragging rights meaning will he want to do a big block buster deal involving Oracle to get some headlines, or enjoy his semi-retirement, perhaps buying a bankrupt country or something?

    Where to read, watch and learn more

    Storage I/O trends

    What this all means and wrap up

    Certainly there are many more questions about server, storage, I/O networking, cloud, virtual, software, hardware, security and management tools along with service and support that will get addressed in follow-up discussions.

    Near term, the combined entity needs to get out front and sell to customers, partners and prospects that EMC is not going away, or that Dell is going to get in the way of existing business. The two need to run as is pursuing and closing each others respective business making sure that competitors do not create barriers to deals closing and disrupting revenue. In other words, neither Dell nor EMC can afford to foster a revenue prevention department now, nor can either afford to allow any other competitor to become a revenue prevention department as a service (e.g. costing either EMC or Dell revenue).

    Overall this deal has some interesting upside synergies and potential, granted, we will need to see how things unfold.

    Disclosure: Dell and EMC have been Server StorageIO clients, and StorageIO uses Dell as well as Lenovo servers among others technologies including VMware.

    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

    Posted on

    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

    Posted on

    Fall 2015 Server Storage I/O Cloud Virtual Seminars Going Dutch

    Storage I/O trends

    Fall 2015 Server Storage I/O Cloud Virtual Seminars Going Dutch

    StorageIO events, object storage, ssd cloud, virtualization and big data

    It’s that time of the year again where the fall 2015 events and activities are underway which also includes a week of sessions in Holland October 13-16. I will be participating in four days of workshop seminars being organized by Brouwer Storage Consultancy in Nijkerk covering server storage decision-making, converged and bulk storage options, software defined storage management, data center infrastructure management and data protection along with industry trends and update sessions.

    Brouwer Storage Consultnacy

    October 13th: Symposium – Software Defined Storage Management

    09:00 -17:00

    DOWNLOAD FLYER (Dutch)

    REGISTER HERE

    FREE Session! Access for end-users only, through invitation or contacting BSC.

    Event Location: Hotel & Gasterij De Roode Schuur, Oude Barneveldseweg 98, 3862PS Nijkerk – www.deroodeschuur.nl

    Brouwer Storage Making Decision Seminar Workshops

    October 14th: Server Storage I/O Fundamental Trends V2.015 – What’s New, What’s the buzz, what you need to know about.

    09:00 -17:00

    DOWNLOAD Abstract/Agenda

    REGISTER HERE

    Event Location: Golden Tulip Ampt van Nijkerk Hotel, Berencamperweg 4, 3861MC, Nijkerk – www.goldentulipamptvannijkerk.com/en

    Brouwer Storage Making Decision Seminar Workshops

    October 15th: Symposium – Data Center Infrastructure Management

    09:00 -17:00

    DOWNLOAD Abstract / Agenda

    REGISTER Here

    FREE Session! Access, through invitation or contacting BSC.

    Event Location: Hotel & Gasterij De Roode Schuur, Oude Barneveldseweg 98, 3862PS Nijkerk – www.deroodeschuur.nl

    Going Dutch Storage Seminars

    October 16th: "Converged Day" Server and Storage Decision making – How do you want or need your storage packaged?

    09:00 -17:00

    DOWNLOAD Abstract / Agenda

    REGISTER HERE

    Event Location: Golden Tulip Ampt van Nijkerk Hotel, Berencamperweg 4, 3861MC, Nijkerk – www.goldentulipamptvannijkerk.com/en

    Going Dutch Server Storage I/O

    Brouwer Storage Consultnacy

    Learn more at the Brouwer Storage Consultancy site here, or getting in touch with them to reserve your seat at these events.

    Office: Olevoortseweg 43
    3861 MH Nijkerk
    The Netherlands

    T +31-33-246-6825
    C +31-652-601-309
    F +31-33-245-8956
    E info@brouwerconsultancy.com

    Where to read, watch and learn more

    Watch for more events, seminars, live video, webinars and virtual trade shows by visiting the StorageIO events page.

    StorageIO events, object storage, ssd cloud, virtualization and big data

    What this all means and wrap up

    Smart server and storage for cloud, virtual and physical or legacy environments starts with being informed, knowing your requirements, options and having insight into industry trends that are applicable to your environment. These sessions are vendor and technology neutral held off-site at hotel venues in Nijkerk Netherlands so no need to worry about the sales teams coming in to sell you something during the breaks or lunch which are provided. There are also opportunities throughout the workshops for engagement, discussion and interaction with other attendees that includes your peers from various commercial, government and service providers among others. Hope to see in Nijkerk to discuss server stowage I/O cloud virtual and other industry trends, technologies, techniques in October.

    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 2006-2023 Server StorageIO(R) and UnlimitedIO All Rights Reserved

    Posted on

    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

    Posted on

    Some August 2015 Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure Cloud Updates

    Storage I/O trends

    Some August 2015 Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure Cloud Updates

    Cloud Services Providers continue to extend their feature, function and capabilities and the following are two examples. Being a customer of both Amazon Web Services (AWS) as well as Microsoft Azure (among others), I receive monthly news updates about service improvements along with new features. Here are a couple of examples involving recent updates from AWS and Azure.

    Azure enhancements

    Microsoft Azure customer update

    Azure Premium Storage generally available in Japan East

    Solid State Device (SSD) based Azure Premium Storage is now available in Japan East region. Add up to 32 TB and more than 64,000 IOPs (read operations) per virtual machine with  Azure Premium Storage. Learn more about Azure storage and pricing here.

    Azure Data Factory generally available

    Data Factory is a cloud based data integration service for automated management as well as movement and transformation of data, learn more and view pricing options here.

    AWS Partner Updates

    Recent Amazon Web Services (AWS) customer update included the following pertaining to partner storage solutions.

    AWS partner updates

    AWS Partner Network APN

    Learn more about AWS Partner Network (APN) here or click on the above image.

    AWS APN competency programs include:

    • Storage
    • Healthcare
    • Life Sciences
    • SAP Solutions
    • Microsoft Solutions
    • Oracle Solutions
    • Marketing and Commerce
    • Big Data
    • Security
    • Digital Media

    AWS Partner Network (APN) Solutions for Storage include:

    Archiving to AWS Glacier

  • Commvault
  • NetApp (AltaVault)

    • Backup to AWS using S3

  • CloudBerry Lab
  • Commvault
  • Ctera
  • Druva
  • NetApp (AltaVault)

    • Primary Cloud File and NAS storage complementing on-premises (e.g. your local) storage

  • Avere
  • Ctera
  • NetApp (Cloud OnTap)
  • Panzura
  • SoftNAS
  • Zadara

    • Secure File Transfer

  • Aspera
  • Signiant

    • Note that the above are those listed on the AWS Storage Partner Page as of this being published and subject to change. Likewise other solutions that are not part of the AWS partner program may not be listed.

    Where to read, watch and learn more

    Storage I/O trends

    What this all means and wrap up

    Cloud Service Providers (CSP) continue to enhance their capabilities, as well as their footprints as part of growth. In addition to technology, tools and number of regions, sites and data centers, the CSPs are also expanding their partner networks both about how many partners, also in the scope of those partnerships. Some of these partnerships are in the scope of the cloud as a destination, others are for enabling hybrid where public clouds become an extension complementing traditional IT. Everything is not the same in most environments and one type of cloud approach does not have to suit or fit all needs, hence the value of hybrid cloud deployment and usage.

    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