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VMware vSAN V6.6 Part IV (HCI scaling ROBO and data centers today)

server storage I/O trends

VMware vSAN V6.6 Part IV (HCI scaling ROBO and data centers today)

In case you missed it, VMware announced vSAN v6.6 hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) software defined data infrastructure solution. This is the fourth of a five-part series about VMware vSAN V6.6. View Part I here, Part II (just the speeds feeds please) is located here, part III (reducing cost and complexity) located here, as well as part V here (VMware vSAN evolution, where to learn more and summary).

VMware vSAN 6.6
Image via VMware

For those who are not aware, vSAN is a VMware virtual Storage Area Network (e.g. vSAN) that is software-defined, part of being a software-defined data infrastructure (SDDI) and software-defined data center (SDDC). Besides being software-defined vSAN is HCI combining compute (server), I/O networking, storage (space and I/O) along with hypervisors, management, and other tools.

Scaling HCI for ROBO and data centers today and for tomorrow

Scaling with stability for today and tomorrow. This includes addressing your applications Performance, Availability, Capacity and Economics (PACE) workload requirements today and for the future. By scaling with stability means boosting performance, availability (data protection, security, resiliency, durable, FTT), effective capacity without one of those attributes compromising another.

VMware vSAN data center scaling
Image via VMware

Scaling today for tomorrow also means adapting to today’s needs while also flexible to evolve with new application workloads, hardware as well as a cloud (public, private, hybrid, inter and intra-cloud). As part of continued performance improvements, enhancements to optimize for higher performance flash SSD including NVMe based devices.

VMware vSAN cloud analytics
Image via VMware

Part of scaling with stability means enhancing performance (as well as productivity) or the effectiveness of a solution. Keep in mind that efficiency is often associated with storage (or server or network) space capacity savings or reductions. In that context then effectiveness means performance and productivity or how much work can be done with least overhead impact. With vSAN, V6.6 performance enhancements include reduced checksum overhead, enhanced compression, and deduplication, along with destaging optimizations.

Other enhancements that help collectively contribute to vSAN performance improvements include VMware object handling (not to be confused with cloud or object storage S3 or Swift objects) as well as faster iSCSI for vSAN. Also improved are more accurate refined cache sizing guidelines. Keep in mind that a little bit of NAND flash SSD or SCM in the right place can have a significant benefit, while a lot of flash cache costs much cash.

Part of enabling and leveraging new technology today includes support for larger capacity 1.6TB flash SSD drives for cache, as well as lower read latency with 3D XPoint and NVMe drives such as those from Intel among others. Refer to the VMware vSAN HCL for current supported devices which continue evolve along with the partner ecosystem. Future proofing is also enabled where you can grow from today to tomorrow as new storage class memories (SCM) among other flash SSD as well as NVMe enhanced storage among other technologies are introduced into the market as well as VMware vSAN HCL.

VMware vSAN and data center class applications
Image via VMware

Traditional CI and in particular many HCI solutions have been optimized or focused on smaller application workloads including VDI resulting in the perception that HCI, in general, is only for smaller environments, or larger environment non-mission critical workloads. With vSAN V6.6 VMware is addressing and enabling larger environment mission critical applications including Intersystem Cache medical health management software among others. Other application workload extensions including support for higher performance demanding Hadoop big data analytics, a well as extending virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) workspace with XenDesktop/XenApp, along with Photon 1.1 container support.

What about VMware vSAN 6.6. Packaging and License Options

As part of vSAN 6.6 VMware several solution bundle packaged options for the data center as well as smaller ROBO environment. Contact your VMware representative or partner to learn more about specific details.

VMware vSAN cloud analytics
Image via VMware

VMware vSAN cloud analytics
Image via VMware

Where to Learn More

The following are additional resources to find out more about vSAN and related technologies.

What this all means

Continue reading more about VMware vSAN 6.6 in part I here, part II (just the speeds feeds please) is located here, part III (reducing cost and complexity) located here as well as part V here (VMware vSAN evolution, where to learn more and summary).

Ok, nuff said (for now…).

Cheers
Gs

Greg Schulz – Microsoft MVP Cloud and Data Center Management, VMware vExpert (and vSAN). Author Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking (CRC Press), The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC Press), Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier) and twitter @storageio. Watch for the Spring 2017 release of his new book “Software-Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials” (CRC Press).

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

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VMware vSAN V6.6 Part V (vSAN evolution and summary)

server storage I/O trends

VMware vSAN V6.6 Part V (vSAN evolution and summary)

In case you missed it, VMware announced vSAN v6.6 hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) software defined data infrastructure solution. This is the fifth of a five-part series about VMware vSAN V6.6. View Part I here, Part II (just the speeds feeds please) is located here, part III (reducing cost and complexity) found here, part IV (scaling ROBO and data centers today) located here.

VMware vSAN 6.6
Image via VMware

For those who are not aware, vSAN is a VMware virtual Storage Area Network (e.g. vSAN) that is software-defined, part of being a software-defined data infrastructure (SDDI) and software-defined data center (SDDC). Besides being software-defined vSAN is HCI combining compute (server), I/O networking, storage (space and I/O) along with hypervisors, management, and other tools.

How has vSAN (formerly referred to as VSAN) Evolved

A quick recap of the VMware vSAN progression which first appeared as part of vSphere 5.5. (e.g. vSAN 5.5 can be thought of 1.0 in some ways) consists of several releases. Since vSAN is tightly integrated with VMware vSphere along with associated management tools, there is a correlation between enhancements to the underlying hypervisor, and added vSAN functionality. Keep in mind sometimes by seeing where something has been, helps to view where going.

Previous vSAN enhancements include:

  • 5.5 Hybrid (mixed HDD and flash)
  • 6.2 (2016) All flash (e.g. AFA) versions included data footprint reduction (DFR) technologies such as compression and dedupe along with performance Quality of Service (QoS) enhancements.
  • 6.5 Cross Cloud functionality including the announcement of container support, cloud-native apps, as well as upcoming vSphere, vSAN, NSX and other VMware software-defined data center (SDDC) and software-defined data infrastructure (SDDI) technology running natively on AWS (not on EC2) cloud infrastructure.
  • 6.6 Modern data infrastructure flexibility, scalability, resiliency, extensibility including performance, availability, capacity and economics (PACE).

V5.5

  • Distributed RAID
  • Per-VM SPBM
  • Set and change FTT via policy
  • In-kernel hyper-convergence engine
  • RVC and Observer

V6.0

  • All-flash architecture
  • Perf improvements (4xIOPS)
  • 64-node support
  • High-density storage blades
  • Fault domain awareness
  • Scalable snapshots and clones
  • Disk enclosure management

V6.1

  • Windows Failover Clustering
  • Oracle RAC support
  • HW checksum and encryption
  • 2-node ROBO mode
  • UltraDIMM and NVMe support
  • Stretch clusters
  • 5 min RPO (vSphere Rep)
  • SMP-FT support
  • Health Check, vROps, Log Insight

V6.2

  • IPv6 support
  • Software checksum
  • Nearline dedupe and compression on all-flash
  • Erasure coding on all-flash
  • QoS IOPS limits
  • Performance monitoring service

V6.5

  • iSCSI
  • 2-Node direct connect
  • PowerCLI
  • Public APIs and SDK
  • 512e support
  • All-Flash to all editions

Where to Learn More

The following are additional resources to find out more about vSAN and related technologies.

What this all means, wrap up and summary

VMware continues to extend the software-defined data center (SDDC) and Software-Defined Data Infrastructure (SDDI) ecosystem with vSAN to address the needs from smaller SMB and ROBO environments to larger SME and enterprise workloads. To me a theme with V6.6 is expanding resiliency, scalability with stability to expand vSAN upmarket as well as into new workloads similar to how vSphere has evolved.

With each new release, vSAN is increasing its feature, functionality, resiliency and extensiveness associated with traditional storage and non-CI or HCI solutions. Overall a good set of enhancements as vSAN continues its evolution looking back just a few years ago, to where it is today and will be in the future. If you have not looked at vSAN recently, take some time beyond reading this piece to learn some more.

Ok, nuff said (for now…).

Cheers
Gs

Greg Schulz – Microsoft MVP Cloud and Data Center Management, VMware vExpert (and vSAN). Author Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking (CRC Press), The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC Press), Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier) and twitter @storageio. Watch for the Spring 2017 release of his new book “Software-Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials” (CRC Press).

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

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March 2017 Server StorageIO Data Infrastructure Update Newsletter

Volume 17, Issue III

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

First a reminder world backup (and recovery) day is on March 31. Following up from the February Server StorageIO update newsletter that had a focus on data protection this edition includes some additional posts, articles, tips and commentary below.

Other data infrastructure (and tradecraft) topics in this edition include cloud, virtual, server, storage and I/O including NVMe as well as networks. Industry trends include new technology and services announcements, cloud services, HPE buying Nimble among other activity. Check out the Converged Infrastructure (CI), Hyper-Converged (HCI) and Cluster in Box (or Cloud in Box) coverage including a recent SNIA webinar I was invited to be the guest presenter for, along with companion post below.

In This Issue

Enjoy this edition of the Server StorageIO update newsletter.

Cheers GS

Data Infrastructure and IT Industry Activity Trends

Some recent Industry Activities, Trends, News and Announcements include:

Dell EMC has discontinued the NVMe direct attached shared DSSD D5 all flash array has been discontinued. At about the same time Dell EMC is shutting down the DSSD D5 product, it has also signaled they will leverage the various technologies including NVMe across their broad server storage portfolio in different ways moving forward. While Dell EMC is shutting down DSSD D5, they are also bringing additional NVMe solutions to the market including those they have been shipping for years (e.g. on the server-side). Learn more about DSSD D5 here and here including perspectives of how it could have been used (plays for playbooks).

Meanwhile NVMe industry activity continues to expand with different solutions from startups such as E8, Excelero, Everspin, Intel, Mellanox, Micron, Samsung and WD SANdisk among others. Also keep in mind, if the answer is NVMe, then what were and are the questions to ask, as well as what are some easy to use benchmark scripts (using fio, diskspd, vdbench, iometer).

Speaking of NVMe, flash and SSDs, Amazon Web Services (AWS) have added new Elastic Cloud Compute (EC2) storage and I/O optimized i3 instances. These new instances are available in various configurations with different amounts of vCPU (cores or logical processors), memory and NVMe SSD capacities (and quantity) along with price.

Note that the price per i3 instance varies not only by its configuration, also for image and region deployed in. The flash SSD capacities range from an entry-level (i3.large) with 2 vCPU (logical processors), 15.25GB of RAM and a single 475GB NVMe SSD that for example in the US East Region was recently priced at $0.156 per hour. At the high-end there is the i3.16xlarge with 64 vCPU (logical processors), 488GB RAM and 8 x 1900GB NVMe SSDs with a recent US East Region price of $4.992 per hour. Note that the vCPU refers to the available number of logical processors available and not necessarily cores or sockets.

Also note that your performance will vary, and while NVMe protocol tends to use less CPU per I/O, if generating a large number of I/Os you will need some CPU. What this means is that if you find your performance limited compared to expectations with the lower end i3 instances, move up to a larger instance and see what happens. If you have a Windows-based environment, you can use a tool such as Diskspd to see what happens with I/O performance as you decrease the number of CPUs used.

Chelsio has announced they are now Microsoft Azure Stack Certified with their iWARP RDMA host adapter solutions, as well as for converged infrastructure (CI), hyper-converged (HCI) and legacy server storage deployments. As part of the announcement, Chelsio is also offering a 30 day no cost trial of their adapters for Microsoft Azure Stack, Windows Server 2016 and Windows 10 client environments. Learn more about the Chelsio trial offer here.

Everspin (the MRAM Spintorque, persistent RAM folks) have announced a new Storage Class Memory (SCM) NVMe accessible family (nvNITRO) of storage accelerator devices (PCIe AiC, U.2). Whats interesting about Everspin is that they are using NVMe for accessing their persistent RAM (e.g. MRAM) making it easily plug compatible with existing operating systems or hypervisors. This means using standard out of the box NVMe drivers where the Everspin SCM appears as a block device (for compatibility) functioning as a low latency, high performance persistent write cache.

Something else interesting besides making the new memory compatible with existing servers CPU complex via PCIe, is how Everspin is demonstrating that NVMe as a general access protocol is not just exclusive to nand flash-based SSDs. What this means is that instead of using non-persistent DRAM, or slower NAND flash (or 3D XPoint SCM), Everspin nvNITRO enables high endurance write cache with persistent to compliment existing NAND flash as well as emerging 3D XPoint based storage. Keep an eye on Everspin as they are doing some interesting things for future discussions.

Google Cloud Services has added additional regions (cloud locations) and other enhancements.

HPE continued buying into server storage I/O data infrastructure technologies announcing an all cash (e.g. no stock) acquisition of Nimble Storage (NMBL). The cash acquisition for a little over $1B USD amounts to $12.50 USD per Nimble share, double what it had traded at. As a refresh, or overview, Nimble is an all flash shared storage system leverage NAND flash solid storage device (SSD) performance. Note that Nimble also partners with Cisco and Lenovo platforms that compete with HPE servers for converged systems.View additional perspectives here.

Riverbed has announced the release of Steelfusion 5 which while its name implies physical hardware metal, the solution is available as tin wrapped (e.g. hardware appliance) software. However the solution is also available for deployment as a VMware virtual appliance for remote office branch office (ROBO) among others. Enhancements include converged functionality such as NAS support along with network latency as well as bandwidth among other features.

Check out other industry news, comments, trends perspectives here.

Server StorageIOblog Posts

Recent and popular Server StorageIOblog posts include:

View other recent as well as past StorageIOblog posts here

Server StorageIO Commentary in the news

Recent Server StorageIO industry trends perspectives commentary in the news.

Via InfoStor: 8 Big Enterprise SSD Trends to Expect in 2017
Watch for increased capacities at lower cost, differentiation awareness of high-capacity, low-cost and lower performing SSDs versus improved durability and performance along with cost capacity enhancements for active SSD (read and write optimized). You can also expect increased support for NVMe both as a back-end storage device with different form factors (e.g., M.2 gum sticks, U.2 8639 drives, PCIe cards) as well as front-end (e.g., storage systems that are NVMe-attached) including local direct-attached and fiber-attached. This means more awareness around NVMe both as front-end and back-end deployment options.

Via SearchITOperations: Storage performance bottlenecks
Sometimes it takes more than an aspirin to cure a headache. There may be a bottleneck somewhere else, in hardware, software, storage system architecture or something else.

Via SearchDNS: Parsing through the software-defined storage hype
Beyond scalability, SDS technology aims for freedom from the limits of proprietary hardware.

Via InfoStor: Data Storage Industry Braces for AI and Machine Learning
AI could also lead to untapped hidden or unknown value in existing data that has no or little perceived value

Via SearchDataCenter: New options to evolve data backup recovery

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

Various Tips, Tools, Technology and Tradecraft Topics

Recent Data Infrastructure Tradecraft Articles, Tips, Tools, Tricks and related topics.

Via ComputerWeekly: Time to restore from backup: Do you know where your data is?
Via IDG/NetworkWorld: Ensure your data infrastructure remains available and resilient
Via IDG/NetworkWorld: Whats a data infrastructure?

Check out Scott Lowe @Scott_Lowe of VMware fame who while having a virtual networking focus has a nice roundup of related data infrastructure topics cloud, open source among others.

Want to take a break from reading or listening to tech talk, check out some of the fun videos including aerial drone (and some technology topics) at www.storageio.tv.

View more tips and articles here

Events and Activities

Recent and upcoming event activities.

May 8-10, 2017 – Dell EMCworld – Las Vegas

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

March 15, 2017 – Webinar – SNIA/BrightTalk – HyperConverged and Storage – 10AM PT

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

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


Cheers
Gs

Greg Schulz – Microsoft MVP Cloud and Data Center Management, VMware vExpert (and vSAN). Author Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking (CRC Press), The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC Press) and Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier) and twitter @storageio. Watch for the spring 2017 release of his new book Software-Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials(CRC Press).

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

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HPE Continues Buying Into Server Storage I/O Data Infrastructures

Storage I/O Data Infrastructures trends
Updated 1/16/2018

HPE expanded its Storage I/O Data Infrastructures portfolio buying into server storage I/O data infrastructure technologies announcing an all cash (e.g. no stock) acquisition of Nimble Storage (NMBL). The cash acquisition for a little over $1B USD amounts to $12.50 USD per Nimble share, double what it had traded at. As a refresh, or overview, Nimble is an all flash shared storage system leverage NAND flash solid storage device (SSD) performance. Note that Nimble also partners with Cisco and Lenovo platforms that compete with HPE servers for converged systems.

Earlier this year (keep in mind its only mid-March) HPE also announced acquisition of server storage Hyper-Converged Infrastructure (HCI) vendor Simplivity (about $650M USD cash). In another investment this year HPE joined other investors as part of scale out and software defined storage startups Hedvig latest funding round (more on that later). These acquisitions are in addition to smaller ones such as last years buying of SGI, not to mention various divestitures.

Data Infrastructures

What Are Server Storage I/O Data Infrastructures Resources

Data Infrastructures exists to support business, cloud and information technology (IT) among other applications that transform data into information or services. The fundamental role of data infrastructures is to give a platform environment for applications and data that is resilient, flexible, scalable, agile, efficient as well as cost-effective.

Technologies that make up data infrastructures include hardware, software, cloud or managed services, servers, storage, I/O and networking along with people, processes, policies along with various tools spanning legacy, software-defined virtual, containers and cloud.

HPE and Server Storage Acquisitions

HPE and its predecessor HP (e.g. before the split that resulted in HPE) was familiar with expanding its data infrastructure portfolio spanning servers, storage, I/O networking, hardware, software and services. These range from Compaq who acquired DEC which gave them the StorageWorks brand and product line up (e.g. recall EVA and its predecessors), Lefthand, 3PAR, IBRIX, Polyserve, Autonomy, EDS and others that I’m guessing some at HPE (along with customers and partners) might not want to remember.

In addition to their own in-house including via technology acquisition, HPE also partners for its entry-level and volume low-end MSA (Modular Storage Array) series with DotHill who was acquired by Seagate a year or so ago. In addition to the MSA, other HPE OEMs for storage include Hitachi Ltd. (e.g. parent of Hitachi Data Systems aka HDS) reselling their high-end enterprise class storage system as the XP7, as well as various other partner arrangements.

Keep in mind that HPE has a large server business from low to high-end, spanning towers to dense blades to dual, quad and cluster in box (CiB) configurations with various processor architectures. Some of these servers are used as platforms for not only HPE, also other vendors software defined storage, as well as tin wrapped software solutions, appliances and systems. HPE is also one of a handful of partners working with Microsoft to bring the software defined private (and hybrid) Azure Stack cloud stack as an appliance to market.

HPE acquisitions Dejavu or Something New?

For some people there may be a sense of Dejavu of what HPE and its predecessors have previously acquired, developed, sold and supported into the market over years (and decades in some cases). What will be interesting to see is how the 3PAR (StoreServ) and Lefthand based (StoreVirtual) as well as ConvergedSystem 250-HC product lines are realigned to make way for Nimble and Simplivity.

Likewise what will HPE do with MSA at the low-end, continue to leverage it for low-end and high-volume basic storage similar to Dell with the Netapp/Engenio powered MD series? Or will HPE try to move the Nimble down market and displace the MDS? What about in the mid-market, will Nimble be unleashed to replace StoreVirtual (e.g. Lefthand), or will they fence it in (e.g. being restricted to certain scenarios?
Will the Nimble solution be allowed to move up market into the low-end of where 3PAR has been positioned, perhaps even higher up given its all flash capabilities. Or, will there be a 3PAR everywhere approach?

Then there is Simplivity as the solution is effectively software running on an HPE server (or with other partners Cisco and Lenovo) along with a PCIe offload card (with Simplivity data services acceleration). Note that Simplivity leverages PCIe offload cards for some of their functionality, this too is familiar ground for HPE given its ASIC use by 3PAR.

Simplivity has the potential to disrupt some low to mid-range, perhaps even larger opportunities that are looking to go to a converged infrastructure (CI) or HCI deployment as part of their data infrastructure needs. One can speculate that Simplivity after repackaging will be positioned along current HPE CI and HCI solutions.

This will be interesting to watch to see if the HPE server and storage groups can converge not only from a technology point, also sales, marketing, service, and support perspective. With the Simplivity solution, HPE has an opportunity to move the industry thinking or perception that HCI is only for small environments defined by what some products can do.

What I mean by this is that HPE with its enterprise and SMB along with SME and cloud managed service provider experience as well as servers can bring hyper-scale out (and up) converged to the market. In other words, start addressing the concern I hear from larger organizations that most CI or HCI solutions (or packaging) are just for smaller environments. HPE has the servers, they have the storage from MSAs to other modules and core data infrastructure building blocks along with the robustness of the Simplivity software to enable hyper-scale out CI.

What about bulk, object, scale-out storage

HPE has a robust tape business, yes I know tape is dead, however tell that to the customers who keep buying products providing revenue along with margin to HPE (and others). Likewise HPE has VTLs as well as other solutions for addressing bulk data (e.g. big data, backups, protection copies, archives, high volume, and large quantity, what goes on tape or object). For example HPE has the StoreOnce solution.

However where is the HPE object storage story?

Otoh, does HPE its own object storage software, simply partner with others? HPE can continue to provide servers along with underlying storage for other vendors bulk, cloud and object storage systems, and where needed, meet in the channel among other arrangements.

On the other hand, this is where similar to Polyserve and Ibrix among others in the past have come into play, with HPE via its pathfinder (investment group) joining others in putting some money into Hedvig. HPE gets access to Hedvig for their scale out storage that can be used for bulk as well as other deployments including CI, HCI and CIB (e.g. something to sell HPE servers and storage with).

HPE can continue to partner with other software providers and software-defined storage stacks. Keep in mind that Milan Shetti (CTO, Data Center Infrastructure Group HPE) is no stranger to these waters given his past at Ibrix among others.

What About Hedvig

Time to get back to Hedvig which is a storage startup whose software can run on various server storage platforms, as well as in different topologies. Different topologies include in a CI or HCI, Cloud, as well as scale out with various access including block, file and object. In addition to block, file and object access, Hedvig has interesting management tools, data services, along with support for VMware, Docker, and OpenStack among others.

Recently Hedvig landed another $21.5M USD in funding bringing their total to about $52M USD. HPE via its investment arm, joins other investors (note HPE was part of the $21.5M, that was not the amount they invested) including Vertex, Atlantic Bridge, Redpoint, edbi and true ventures.

What does this mean for HPE and Hedvig among others? Tough to say however easy to imagine how Hedvig could be leveraged as a partner using HPE servers, as well as for HPE to have an addition to their bulk, scale-out, cloud and object storage portfolio.

Where to Learn More

View more material on HPE, data infrastructure and related topics with the following links.

  • Cloud and Object storage are in your future, what are some questions?
  • PCIe Server Storage I/O Network Fundamentals
  • If NVMe is the answer, what are the questions?
  • Fixing the Microsoft Windows 10 1709 post upgrade restart loop
  • Data Infrastructure server storage I/O network Recommended Reading
  • Introducing Windows Subsystem for Linux WSL Overview
  • IT transformation Serverless Life Beyond DevOps with New York Times CTO Nick Rockwell Podcast
  • HPE Announces AMD Powered Gen 10 ProLiant DL385 For Software Defined Workloads
  • AWS Announces New S3 Cloud Storage Security Encryption Features
  • NVM Non Volatile Memory Express NVMe Place
  • Data Infrastructure Primer and Overview (Its Whats Inside The Data Center)
  • January 2017 Server StorageIO Update Newsletter
  • September and October 2016 Server StorageIO Update Newsletter
  • HP Buys one of the seven networking dwarfs and gets a bargain
  • Did HP respond to EMC and Cisco VCE with Microsoft Hyper-V bundle?
  • Give HP storage some love and short strokin
  • While HP and Dell make counter bids, exclusive interview with 3PAR CEO David Scott
  • Data Protection Fundamental Topics Tools Techniques Technologies Tips
  • Hewlett-Packard beats Dell, pays $2.35 billion for 3PAR
  • HP Moonshot 1500 software defined capable compute servers
  • What Does Converged (CI) and Hyper converged (HCI) Mean to Storage I/O?
  • What’s a data infrastructure?
  • Ensure your data infrastructure remains available and resilient
  • Object Storage Center, The SSD place and The NVMe place

    • 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

    Generally speaking I think this is a good series of moves for HPE (and their customers) as long as they can execute in all dimensions.

    Let’s see how they execute, and by this, I mean more than simply executing or terminating staff from recently acquired or earlier acquisitions. How will HPE craft go to the market message that leverages the portfolio to compete and hold or take share from other vendors, vs. cannibalize across its own lines (e.g. revenue prevention)? With that strategy and message, how will HPE assure existing customers will be taken care, be given a definite upgrade and migration path vs. giving them a reason to go elsewhere.

    Hopefully HPE unleashes the full potential of Simplivity and Nimble along with 3PAR, XP7 where needed, along with MSA at low-end (or as part of volume scale-out with servers for software defined), to mention sever portfolio. For now, this tells me that HPE is still interested in maintaining, expanding their data infrastructure business vs. simply retrenching selling off assets. Thus this looks like HPE is interested in continuing to invest in data infrastructure technologies including buying into server, storage I/O network, hardware, software solutions, while not simply clinging to what they already have, or previously bought.

    Everything is not the same in data centers and across data infrastructure, so why have a one size fits all approach for organization as large, diverse as HPE.

    Congratulations and best wishes to the folks at Hedvig, Nimble, Simplivity.

    Now, lets see how this all plays out.

    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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    Software Defined Cloud Bulk Object Storage News Trends

    Cloud, Software Defined, Scale-Out, Object Storage News Trends

    server storage I/O trends

    Updated 1/21/2018

    Welcome to the Cloud, Big Data, Software Defined, Bulk and Object Storage News Trends page.

    This page contains various links pertaining to Software Defined, scale-out, Cloud, Bulk and Object Storage News Trends and resources. Other resources pertaining to Software Defined, scale-out, Cloud, Bulk and Object Storage include:

  • www.objectstoragecenter.com
  • Software Defined, Cloud, Bulk and Object Storage Fundamentals
  • Software Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials book (CRC Press)

    • Software defined, Bulk, Cloud and Object Storage exist to support expanding and diverse application data demands. There are various types of cloud, bulk and object storage including public services such as Amazon Web Services (AWS) Simple Storage Service (S3), Google, Microsoft Azure, IBM Softlayer, Rackspace among many others. There are also solutions for hybrid and private deployment from Cisco, DDN, Dell EMC, Fujitsu, HDS, HPE, IBM, NetApp, Noobaa, OpenStack, Quantum, Rackspace, Scality, Seagate, Spectra, Storpool, Suse, Swift and WD among others.

    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

    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.



    Via InfoStor: Object Storage Is In Your Future
    Via FujiFilm IT Summit: Software Defined Data Infrastructures (SDDI) and Hybrid Clouds
    Via ChannelPartnersOnline: Selling Software-Defined Storage: Not All File Systems Are the Same
    Via ITProPortal: IBM kills off its first cloud storage platform
    Via MultiChannel: After ditching cloud business, Verizon inks Virtual Network Services deal with Amazon
    Via ITBusinessEdge: Time to Rein in Cloud Storage
    Via BusinessInsider: Kodiak Data Brings Enterprise Storage and Database Services to the Cloud Era with StorageCloud
    Via SerchCloudStorge: Ctera Networks’ file-sharing services gain intelligent cache
    Via StorageIOblog: Who Will Be At Top Of Storage World Next Decade?

    cloud object storage

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

    Via StorageIOblog: AWS EFS Elastic File System (Cloud NAS) First Preview Look
    Via CloudComputingAdmin: Cloud Storage Decision Making
    Via Wservernews: Cloud storage considerations
    Via PRNewsWire: Scality Accelerates Multi-Cloud Adoption with New Open-Source Release
    Via EnterpriseStorageForum: Top 10 Tips for Software-Defined Storage Deployment
    Via MultiChannel: Verizon Digital Media Services now offers integrated Microsoft Azure Storage
    Via BroadCstingCable: Quantum’s New StorNext 6 Delivers Unparalleled Combination of Best-in-Class 4K Performance and Advanced Data Management
    Via ShootOnLine: Morro Data Accelerates Media Collaboration With Cache and Sync Appliance
    Via TechCrunch: Backblaze drops download pricing for its B2 storage platform by 60%
    Via PRNewsWire: FileCloud Online Launches an All-In-One File Share, Sync and Backup SaaS Offering in a Challenge to Dropbox and Box

    cloud object storage

    Via HITInfrastructure: Benefits of Object Storage to Health IT Infrastructure
    Via ITBusinessedge: Growing Diversity of Cloud Storage Solutions
    Via Telecompaper: Interoute launches storage zones in Switzerland
    Via TradeCalls:
    Object Storage Market Size, Status and Forecast 2022
    Via OpenStack: Creating object storage container causes user to be logged out, OpenStack Dashboard (Horizon)
    Via RethinkResearch: Nokia claims a 40% cut in cloud DVR Capex, using new Skim Storage
    Via Cloudwards: A Beginner’s Guide on How Cloud Backup With Microsoft Azure Works
    Via ITProPortal: Lack of understanding of data inhibits move to the cloud

    cloud object storage

    Via InfoStor:Cloud Storage Concerns, Considerations and Trends
    Via StreetInsider: IBM Announces New Pricing Model for Cloud Storage and NetApp Object Storage Partnership

    Via StorageIOblog: AWS EFS Elastic File System (Cloud NAS) First Preview Look
    Via ComputerWeekly: Storage 101: Object storage vs block vs file
    Via StorageIOblog: AWS EFS Elastic File System (Cloud NAS) First Preview Look
    Via Yahoo Finance: SwiftStack Joins Google Cloud Technology Partner Program
    Via StorageIOblog: AWS EFS Elastic File System (Cloud NAS) First Preview Look

    Via StorageIOblog: HPE Continues Buying Into Server Storage I/O Data Infrastructures
    Via StorageIOblog: AWS EFS Elastic File System (Cloud NAS) First Preview Look
    Via TheStack:Google to launch nine new data centres over three new cloud regions
    Via StorageIOblog: AWS EFS Elastic File System (Cloud NAS) First Preview Look
    Via DigitalJournal:Global Business Cloud Storage market 2017 share, Segmentation and Industrial Overview forecasts to 2022
    Via StorageIOblog: AWS EFS Elastic File System (Cloud NAS) First Preview Look
    Via NextPlatform:How Microsoft Fell Hard for FPGAs
    Via StorageIOblog: AWS EFS Elastic File System (Cloud NAS) First Preview Look
    Via NextPlatform:Google Courts Enterprise For Cloud Platform

    cloud object storage

    Via IBM RedBooks: Cloud Object Storage as a
    Service – IBM Cloud Object Storage from Theory to Practice
    Via VentureBeat: Microsoft confirms Azure storage issues around the world
    Via Microsoft Azure: Azure status history
    Via NextPlatform: Windows Server Comes To ARM Chips, But Only For Azure
    Via NextPlatform: ARM And AMD X86 Server Chips Get Mainstream Lift From Microsoft
    Via ITBusinessEdge: Google Expands Enterprise Cloud Service Footprint
    Via ChannelWorld: Google announces three new cloud regions, contract discounts
    Via AWS: AWS Service Health Status
    Via AWS (S3 Feb 28 2017 Port mortem): Summary of the Amazon S3 Service Disruption
    Via SearchCloudStorage: Open source object storage startup OpenIO adds hardware

    cloud object storage

    Via InfoStor: Comments on Cloud Storage Pros and Cons
    Via CRN: StorageCraft Acquires Exablox
    Via TVtechglobal: Signiant CEO: The media industry isnt just one monolithic thing
    Via Computerweekly: Using the cloud as a storage tier
    Via SearchCloudStorage: OpenIO joins object storage cloud scrum
    Via CRN: Dell Partners With Scality On High-Density Object Storage
    Via BroadwayWorld: The World’s Smallest Object Storage Solution, ‘Ceph on Olive’, is Released
    Via SmartDataCollective: Why You Should Be Securing Big Data In The Cloud?
    Via Geekwire: Feds certify Amazon and Microsoft clouds to handle sensitive government data
    Via NewsFactor: SoftNAS Introduces File Services for NetApp StorageGRID
    Via Redmondmag: AWS Cloud Storage Service Turns 10
    Via DropBox Blog: Scaling to exabytes and beyond
    Via Computerworld: Dropbox quits Amazon cloud, takes back 500 PB of data
    Via HPCwire: Seagate Sets Sights on Broader HPC Market

    cloud object storage

    Via Channelnomics.com: Why Samsung’s Joyent buyout could frame its future
    Via GeekyGadgets: Google Drive Cloud Storage Is Now A Little Easier To Organize Thanks To New Tools
    Via ZDnet: Google doubles Cloud Compute local SSD capacity: Now it’s 3TB per VM
    Via AndroidPolice: Barracuda Is Shutting Down The Copy Cloud Storage Service On May 1st
    Via StorageSoup: EMC expands Elastic Cloud (object) Storage
    Via Cloud Review: Access Multiple Cloud Apps from a Unified Interface
    Via CyberSecurity: Cybersecurity and Accessible Storage Trends
    Via eWeek: Cloud Storage Spending Poised for Increase in 2016
    Via InfoStor: Object Storage Is In Your Future
    Via BioScienceTechnology: Six Reasons to Add Object Storage to Your Genomics Lexicon
    Via TechCrunch: Backblaze’s Low-Cost Cloud Storage Service Comes Out Of Beta
    Via CloudComputingAdmin: Cloud Storage Decision Making
    COSbench for cloud and object storage (Various): White Paper (CMU), PDF overview presentation, Get the bits (software) from Github
    Via AWS Blogs: AWS Storage Update – New Lower Cost S3 Storage Option & Glacier Price Reduction
    Via Techcrunch: IBM Acquires Cleversafe To Accelerate Hybrid Cloud Storage Strategy

    cloud object storage

    Via Techcrunch: Developers Can Now Import Data To Google Cloud Storage By Mailing In Their Hard Drives, Tapes And USB Flash Drives
    Via vCloud: VMware vCloud Air Object Storage
    Via SearchStorage: SwiftStack adds new features to object storage software solution
    Via TheVarGuy: Vendor consortium create Ceph advisory board
    Via OpenStack: Whats new in OpenStack Liberty
    Via Microsoft Azure: File access cloud storage in addition to blobs and object storage
    Via AWS: AWS Storage Update – New Lower Cost S3 Storage Option & Glacier Price Reduction
    Via VMware Blogs: Showcasing VMware vCloud Air Object Storage powered by EMC at EMC World!
    Via Venturebeat: Backblaze launches B2 object storage service at 1/4 of the cost of Amazon S3
    Via Techcrunch: Wuala, The Secure P2P Cloud Storage Service Acquired By LaCie, To Shut Down
    Via ChannelworldIN: 13 firms join to open up Ethernet, object-storage to everyone
    Via ITportal: The elephant in the room: The trust deficit issue with public clouds
    Via VCpost: Dropbox latest update: Cloud storage service provider now lets you drag and drop URLs with files
    Via NetworkAsia: HP’s new converged appliance offers a path to hybrid cloud
    Via Techtimes: Google Files For Patent To Search Your Desktop Files, Apps And Cloud Storage

    cloud object storage

    Via CloudTweaks: Questions To Ask Every Cloud Storage Provider
    Via MarketWatch: Linux Foundation Brings Together Industry Leaders to Advance Cloud Object Storage Technologies
    Via CBR: New Kinetic platform targets open source object storage
    Via Techcrunch: Seagate, Toshiba, Scality And Others Launch Kinetic Open Storage Platform For Smart, Low-Overhead Cloud Object Storage
    Via StorageIOblog: July 2015 Newsletter Focus on Content Solution Platforms
    Via ITnewsline: Hitachi Data Systems Announces New Enhancements to the Hitachi Content Platform Portfolio
    Via ITbusinessnet: Caringo Provides Only Software-Based Web-Scale Object Storage for Symantec Enterprise Vault
    Via ITbusinessnet: Caringo Provides Only Software-Based Web-Scale Object Storage for Symantec Enterprise Vault
    Via TopTechNews: Dropbox Adds USB Keys To Boost Security
    Via ZDnet: SUSE brings its management software to the cloud
    Via Forbes: Jumptuit Roadmap Video: A New Search Bar For Your Data At Facebook, Google and Dropbox
    Via Forbes: Panzura Global File System — Disrupting the Storage Industry
    Via TalkinCloud: Barracuda Launches Cloud Storage and Share Service CudaDrive
    Via ITnews: Researchers debut rival to AWS cloud storage
    Via NetworkAsia.net: HP launches new scale-out and scale-up Compute portfolios

    cloud object storage

    Via Server StorageIO: May / June 2015 Newsletter Focus on server storage packaging
    Via Server StorageIO: April 2015 Newsletter Focus on Cloud and Object storage
    Via StudioDaily.com: At NAB, Vendors and Users Both Got Serious About 4K Workflow
    Via OpenSource.com: The unofficial guide to OpenStack Summit Vancouver
    Via InsideHPC: Deploying Hadoop on Lustre Storage: Lessons Learned and Best Practices
    Via Yahoo Engineering Blog: Yahoo Cloud Object Store – Object Storage at Exabyte Scale
    Via the Platform: Inside The Ceph Exascale Storage At Yahoo
    Via Swift Summit: Taking the Mystery out of Erasure Codes: A Swift Implementation
    Via GovTech: Storage Costs Cloud Police Cam Issue
    Via BostonHerald: Booting Up: Storage costs cloud police cam issue
    Via StorageIOblog: S3motion Buckets Containers Objects AWS S3 Cloud and EMCcode (with podcast)
    Via StorageIOblog: If focused on cost you might miss other cloud storage benefits
    Via ComputerWorld: Amazon offers network file storage in the cloud
    Via ComputerWeekly: HGST marries helium HDDs and Himalaya in object storage Active Archive
    Via GoogleCloudPlatform Blog: GCS Nearline Online storage at Offline price

    cloud object storage

    Via MarketWatch: Global Data Center Provider CyrusOne Announces Direct Connectivity to Google Cloud Platform
    Via PRNewsWire: Quantum Announces New Archive Solutions Designed To Reduce Unstructured Data Storage Costs
    Via Enterprise Storage Forum: Lustre buying guide
    Via StorageIOblog: AWS S3 Cross Region Replication storage enhancements
    Via StreetInsider: Western Digital (WDC) to Acquire Object Storage Software Amplidata
    Via Enterprise Storage Forum: Dell Invests in Object Storage Startup Exablox
    Via Enterprise Storage Forum: Introducing s3motion (S3 and object access docker based appliance)
    Via Computerworld: Quantum enhances their cloud and object storage management with new StorNext software version
    Via HealthIndustry: 2014 IDC MarketScape perspectives
    Via MarketWired: ScaleOut Software Releases Version 5.2 of Its In-Memory Computing Platform
    Via CRN: HP Inks Global Reseller Agreement With Object Storage Startup Scality
    Via NetApp: NetApp Introduces Software-Defined Object Storage for the Hybrid Cloud
    Via ZDnet: NetApp intros software-defined object storage for hybrid cloud adoption
    Via SearchCloudStorage: Are more than five nines of availability really possible?

    cloud object storage

    Via SearchCloudStorage: How do primary storage clouds and cloud for backup differ?
    Via SearchCloudStorage: What should I consider when using SSD cloud?
    Via SearchCloudStorage: Given outages, are you concerned with the security of the cloud?
    Via SearchCloudStorage: Is the cost of cloud storage really cheaper than traditional storage?
    Via HostReview: Panzura Collaborates With Microsoft Azure To Transform Cloud Storage Into A Globally Distributed NAS
    Via ITBusinessNet: Caringo Awarded Patent for Erasure Coding, Replication in Storage Cluster
    Via PRWeb: Western Digital Capital Makes Strategic Investment in Amplidata
    Via ITwire: Dovecot in for the long haul
    Via InfoStor: Top Tips for Object Storage
    Via Enterprise Storage ForumObject Storage Buying Guide
    Via Enterprise Networking Planet: Cloud Gateways 101
    Via eWeek: HP Unveils Smaller, Less Costly Helion Cloud Platform
    Via PCadvisor: CA Technologies, AWS and Riverbed bring mainframe Cloud to big four banks
    Via CMS wire: The Enterprise Cloud is Finally Moving Beyond Storage
    Via Edtech: Microsoft 365’s Massive Cloud Storage Is ‘Icing on Cake’ to University’s Upgrade

    cloud object storage

    Via CRN: Quantum Acquires Symform, Plans To Bring Cloud-Based Backups To Enterprise
    Via BusinessWire: OpenStack Object Storage (Swift) Adds Storage Policies for Enterprise Users and Cloud Operators
    Via SearchStorage: EMC ViPR and Data Services (including Object storage)
    Via Enterprise Storage Forum: Cloud Appliance Buying Guide
    Via Datacenter Dynamics: Verizon, Amplidata and Cloud Object Storage
    Via ZDnet: IBM drops SoftLayer cloud storage costs closer to its rivals
    Via YellowBricks: How long will VSAN rebuilding take with large drives? via Duncan Epping (@DuncanYB) and his Yellow-Bricks site. Note that VMware VSAN uses one of many different forms of object storage (e.g. its not S3 or Swift or CDMI) rather a means for storing VMware vSphere entities and items (e.g. various types of objects)
    Via Computerweekly: Object storage: An architecture for the petabyte era? Via Simon Robinson (@simonrob451) appearing at
    Via MarketWatch: Western Digital/HGST announce alternative to Seagate Kinetic HDD for object storage
    Via EMC: EMC Announces Elastic Cloud Storage Appliance via EMC
    Via TechCrunch: RedHat acquires InkTank provider of Ceph services
    Via CompueterWeekly: DataDirect Networks (DDN) WOS enhancements

    cloud object storage

    Hybrid Clouds: Bridging the Gap Between Public and Private Environments (Recorded for Playback: BrightTalk Webinar)
    Book review: Rethinking Enterprise Storage and Hybrid Clouds by Microsoft/Storsimple and Marc Farley aka (@Gofarley (or what ever name he is currently using ;))
    Goodbye 2013, hello 2014 predictions present and future
    Enterprises should just ignore OpenStack via Virtualizedgeek aka Keith Townsend (@virtualizedgeek)
    OpenStack Swift Object Storage for the Cloud Grows via The Var Guy (@thevarguy) aka Christopher Tozzi
    For Seagate Kinetic to fly…it’s gonna take an ecosystem (Via @Seagate The Storage Effect Blog)
    Object-defined storage (it’s not about object storage) (Via Enrico Signoretti @Juku)
    Seagate Kinetic Cloud and Object Storage I/O platform
    Why You Should Consider Object Storage (Via 21CIT)
    Object Storage Is in Your Future, Even if You Use Files (Via 21CIT)
    The Right Storage Option Is Important for Big Data Success (Via FedTech)
    Hybrid cloud storage with an object storage back end(Via Marc Farley aka @MicroFarley at Microsoft Technet Blogs)
    cloud object storage

    Via SearchStorage: EMC ViPR aimed at service providers, enterprise storage (Video)
    EMC ViPR virtual physical object and software defined storage
    EMC ViPR software defined object storage part II
    EMC ViPR software defined object storage part III
    The rise of cloud-integrated storage and EMC’s ViPR (Via Marc Farley of Microsoft aka @MicroFarley)
    ViPR: Under the covers (Via Chad Sakacc of EMC aka @sakacc)
    Introducing EMC ViPR (Via Chuck Hollis aka @Chuckhollis of EMC)
    EMC Tells their SDS story (e.g. ViPR) (Via the Solutions Architect aka Michael Letschin aka @mletschin)
    Object Paucity (Via Martin Glassborow aka @storagebod)
    Object Storage: You can call it NAS 2.0! (Via Enrico Signoretti aka @esignoretti)
    Object storage is the platform, gateways are the solution (Via Enrico Signoretti aka @esignorettii)
    Files Vs. Objects: the difference is in the value (Via Enrico Signoretti aka @esignorettii)
    Conversation with Justin Stottlemyer of Shutterfly and object storage discussion (Pod cast)

    cloud object storage

    Cloud conversations: AWS EBS, Glacier and S3 overview
    Ceph Day Amsterdam 2012 (Object and cloud storage)
    Ceph Day in Amsterdam and Sage Weil on Object Storage (Podcast)
    Mr. Backup (Curtis Preston) goes back to Ceph School (Video and Podcast)
    AWS (Amazon) storage gateway, first, second and third impressions

    cloud object storage

    Where to learn more

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

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

    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

    Wrap up and summary

    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 as well as on the main object storage center page including posts, presentations, pod casts, 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.

    Posted on

    Kevin Closson discusses SLOB Server CPU I/O Database Performance benchmarks

    Slilly Little Oracle Benchmark (SLOB) Database Server I/O Podcast

    server storage I/O trends

    In this Server StorageIO podcast episode, I am joined by @Kevinclosson who is an Oracle (along with other Databases) performance expert and creator of the Silly Little Oracle Benchmark (SLOB) tool. Not surprising our data infrastructure discussion involves server CPU, software, I/O, storage, performance, software, tools, best practices, fundamental tradecraft skills among other items.

    server storage I/O performance

    Kevin has been involved in database performance (and porting) optimization for decades which means CPU server, memory, I/O and storage issues, resources and tuning. Part of server, storage I/O a tuning is understanding the workloads, also the demands of software such as databases along with how they use CPU and its impact on resources. This means that somewhere in the technology stack, server CPUs are still needed, even in serverless environments.

    We also discuss metrics, gaining insight to resources uses, what they mean including how CPU wait may be costing your lost productivity with overhead, as well as benchmarks, simulations, and related themes. Check out Kevins website www.kevinclosson.net to learn more about Oracle, Databases, SLOB, tools and other content. Listen to the podcast discussion here (42 minutes) as well as on iTunes.

    Where to learn more

    Learn more about Oracle, Database Performance, Benchmarking along with other tools via the following links:

    What this all means and wrap-up

    Check out my discussion here with Kevin Closson where you may have some Dejavu, or learn something new on server, storage I/O, database performance, software, benchmark workloads as well as much more. Also available on 

    Ok, nuff said for now…

    Cheers
    Gs

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

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

    Posted on

    February 2017 Server StorageIO Update Newsletter

    Server and StorageIO Update Newsletter

    Volume 17, Issue II

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

    With world backup (and recovery) day coming up on March 31, it makes sense to plan, review, assess, remediate, test and prepare in advance, to avoid or prevent a disaster later. Some of the themes in this months newsletter thus have a data protection angle which includes availability, resiliency, security, and backup/restore along with associated topics. Keep in mind that there are many aspects to data protection, along with various tools, technologies, techniques along with tradecraft skills (experience).

    Speaking of tradecraft, the tips section has been expanded with more content to help refresh, or expand your fundamental data infrastructure skills and experiences. Watch for more about trade craft in future newsletters as well as elsewhere.

    Speaking of data protection, if you had not heard or forgot, some recent events included the Australian Tax Office (ATO) whose resiliency solution appears to not have been configured for, well, availability, resiliency along with durability. You can read more about the ATO, lessons learned as well as fall out doing a Google search such as "australian tax office disaster". Another recent disaster or disruption was Gitlab (not to be confused with Github) that lost around 300GB of data. Google something like "gitlab disaster" to see more.
    In the case of Gitlab, it seems that a DevOp admin accidentally did something like a rm -rf (e.g. recursive and force) that if you know what that means, you know it might not be good.

    As is the case with many disasters or near disasters and disruptions, they are usually the result of a chain of events, thus the mantra or isolate, contain faults to prevent snowballing into something worse. What’s concerning about Gitlab is that there are decades of lessons to be learned, known and preventable.

    Hopefully Gitlabs experiences will prompt others in or moving to so-called platform 3 or new DevOps environment to use things in new ways, as well as prevent old problems using known tradecraft skills, lessons, experiences.
    Also keep in mind that while technology can and will fail, hardware and software including clouds are defined by people, and when people are involved, human error is also present.

    In This Issue

  • Server StorageIO News Commentary
  • Trade craft Articles, Tips & Tricks Topics
  • Server StorageIOblog posts
  • Various Events and Webinars
  • IT Industry Activity Trends
  • Industry Resources and Links
  • Connect and Converse With Us
  • About Us

    • Enjoy this edition of the Server StorageIO update newsletter.

    Cheers GS

    Data Infrastructure and IT Industry Activity Trends

    Some recent Industry Activities, Trends Announcements

    Cloud and object storage vendor Cloudian announced a new appliance (e.g. tin-wrapped software) that they claim give high density low (cloud service like) pricing.

    Check out iosafe who has a line of fire (and water) proof NAS and Windows Servers as part of availability data protection that can compliment clouds. For those of you who are also Synology fans (or users) take a look at what iosafe is doing for consumer, SOHO, ROBO, workgroup, SMB among other environments.

    Speaking of data protection, how are you going about wiping or digital bleaching your storage including nand flash SSDs? Particularly are you doing deep cleaning including those hard to reach persistent non-volatile memory (NVM) cell locations in SSDs? Check out what Blancco is doing for deep cleaning to wipe or digital bleach your storage including SSDs. Another aspect of data protection includes after your physical assets have been wiped clean (e.g. digital bleach), how will you safely dispose of the items? That’s where various vendors such as OceanTech among others come into play.

    Server StorageIOblog Posts

    Recent and popular Server StorageIOblog posts include:

    View other recent as well as past StorageIOblog posts here

    Server StorageIO Commentary in the news

    Recent Server StorageIO industry trends perspectives commentary in the news.

    Via SearchDataCenter: New options to evolve your data backup and recovery plan
    Via SmallBusinessComputing: Easy Storage for the Little Guy: Has the Time Come?
    Via InfoStor: 10 More Top Data Storage Applications
    Via Infostor: 10 Top Data Storage Applications

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

    Various Tips, Tools, Technology and Tradecraft Topics

    Recent Data Infrastructure Tradecraft Articles, Tips, Tools, Tricks and related topics.

    Via IDG/NetworkWorld:  Whats a data infrastructure?
    Via Computerweekly:  NVMe: What to use, PCIe card vs U.2 and M.2
    Via InfoStor:  Cloud Storage Concerns, Considerations and Trends
    Via InfoStor:  SSD Trends, Tips and Topics

    Check out Neil Anderson(@flackboxtv) flackbox.com site to view various video and tutorials about NetApp, Cisco along with VMware among others. Sharpen your data infrastructure server storage I/O tradecraft skills with the various labs and simulators that Neil has covered.

    Speaking of tradecraft skills and experience development, check out VMware Staff Architect William Lam (@lamw) virtuallyghetto.com site for a news software defined data center (SDDC) lab. This new lab focuses on automated deployment for vSphere 6.0u2 along with vSphere 6.5. In other related news, VMware has made generally available (GA) vSphere 6.0 Update 3 including enhancements to vSAN and vCenter. View more details here at Duncan Epping (@DuncanYB) of VMware Yellow Bricks site.

    If you are interested in Microsoft Azure, check out this piece on SQL Server failover clustering, along with other Windows Server, Hyper-V, Nano, Powershell and related topics here. Want to build a software defined data center (SDDC) or software-defined data infrastructure (SDDI) based on Microsoft Windows Server, Hyper-V and related technologies, check out this Github lab as well as this one for S2D among others.

    View more tips and articles here

    Events and Activities

    Recent and upcoming event activities.

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

    March 15, 2017 – Webinar – SNIA/BrightTalk – HyperConverged and Storage – 10AM PT

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

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

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

    Server StorageIO Industry Resources and Links

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

    Ok, nuff said

    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

    Data Infrastructure Server Storage I/O Tradecraft Trends

    Data Infrastructure Server Storage I/O Tradecraft Trends

    Updated 1/17/2018

    Data Infrastructure trends include server storage I/O network and associated tradecraft are your skills, experiences, insight as well as tricks of the trade, profession and job function (read more about what is a data infrastructure here).

    This is the second of a two-part series exploring data infrastructure along with serve storage I/O and related tradecraft. Read part one of this series here.

    Data Infrastructures
    Data Infrastructure and IT Infrastructure Layers

    As a refresher from part one, data infrastructure encompasses servers, storage, I/O and networking along with associated hardware, software, services and management tasks including data protection among others. Tradecraft is knowing about tools, technologies, and trends in your primary domain as well as adjacent focus areas. However, tradecraft is also about knowing how and when to use different technologies, tools with various techniques to address different scenarios.

    Tradecraft Trends
    Trends involving tradecraft include capturing existing experiences and skills from those who are about to retire or simply move on to something else, as well as learning for those new to IT or servers, storage, I/O, and data infrastructure hardware, software, and services. This means being able to find a balance of old and new tools, techniques, and technologies, including using things in new ways for different situations.

    Part of expanding your tradecraft skill set is knowing when to use different tools, techniques, and technologies from proprietary and closed to open solutions, from tightly integrated to loosely integrated, to bundled and converged, or to a la carte or unbundled components, with do-it-yourself (DIY) integration.

    Tradecraft also means being able to balance when to make a change of technology, tool, or technique for the sake of change vs. clinging to something comfortable or known, vs. leveraging old and new in new ways while enabling change without disrupting the data infrastructure environment or users of its services.

    A couple of other trends include the convergence of people and positions within organizations that may have been in different silos or focus areas in the past. One example is the rise of Development Operations (also known as DevOps), where instead of separate development, administration, and operations areas, they are a combined entity. This might be déja vu for some of you who grew up and gained your tradecraft in similar types of organizations decades ago; for others, it may be something new.

    Regarding fundamental tradecraft skills, if you are a hardware person it is wise to learn software; if you are a software person, it is advisable to acquire some hardware experience. Also, don’t be afraid to say “I do not know” or “it depends on on” when asked a question. This also means learning how information technology supports the needs of the business, as well as learning the technology the business uses.

    Put another way, in addition to learning server storage I/O hardware and software tradecraft, also learn the basic tradecraft of the business your information systems are supporting. After all, the fundamental role of IT is to protect, preserve, and serve information that enables the company or organization; no business exists just to support IT.

    Data Infrastructure Tool Box

    How to develop tradecraft?
    There are many ways, including reading this book along with the companion websites as well as other books, attending seminars and webinars, participating in forums and user groups, as well as having a test lab to learn and try things. Also, find a mentor you can learn from to help capture some of his or her tradecrafts, and if you are experienced, become a mentor to help others develop their tradecraft.

    Toolbox tips, reminders, and recommendations:

    • Create a virtual, software-defined, and physical toolbox.
    • Include tip sheets, notes, hints, tricks, and shortcuts.
    • Leverage books, blogs, websites, tutorials, and related information.
    • Implement a lab or sandbox to try things out
    • Do some proof of concepts (POC) and gain more experience

    Tradecraft Tips
    Get some hands-on, behind-the-wheel time with various technologies to gain insight, perspective, and appreciation of what others are doing, as well as what is needed to make informed decisions about other areas. This also means learning from looking at demos, trying out software, tools, services, or using other ways to understand the solution. Knowing about the tools and technology is important; however, so too is knowing how to use a tool (techniques) and when along with where or for what. This means knowing the tools in your toolbox, but also knowing when, where, why, and how to use a given tool (or technology), along with techniques to use that tool by itself or with multiple other tools.

    Additional tips and considerations include:

    • Expand your social and technical network into adjacent areas.
    • Get involved in user groups, forums, and other venues to learn and give back.
    • Listen, learn, and comprehend vs. only memorizing to pass a test.
    • Find a mentor to help guide you, and become a mentor to help others.
    • Collaborate, share, respect and be respected; the accolades will follow.
    • Evolve from focus on certificates or credentials to expansion of experiences.
    • Connect with others to expand your network

    Where to learn more

    Continue reading more and expanding your tradecraft experiences with the following among other resources:

    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 means

    Remember that tradecraft is skills, experiences, tricks, and techniques along with knowing what as well as how to use various related tools as part of what it is that you are doing. Your data infrastructure tradecraft is (or should be):

    • Essential skills and experiences spanning different technologies and focus areas
    • Knowing various techniques to use new and old things in new as well as hybrid ways
    • Expanding awareness into adjacent areas around your current focus or interest areas
    • Leveraging comprehension, understanding application of what you know
    • Evolving with new knowledge, experiences, and insight about tools and techniques
    • Hardware, software, services, processes, practices, and management
    • From legacy to software-defined, cloud, virtual, and containers

    Part of server storage I/O data infrastructure tradecraft is understanding what tools to use when, where, and why, not to mention knowing how to adapt with those tools, find new ones, or create your own.

    Remember, if all you have is a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail. On the other hand, if you have more tools than you know what to do with, or how to use them, perhaps fewer tools are needed along with learning how to use them by enhancing your skillset and tradecraft.

    In-between the known data infrastructure server, storage, I/O network, converged infrastructure (CI), hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI), Docker and other containers, cloud, hardware software-defined known, and unknown is your tradecraft. The narrow the gap between the known and the unknown as well as how to apply your experience is the diversity of your tradecraft.

    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.

    Posted on

    Server Storage I/O network Data Infrastructure Tradecraft Overview

    Server Storage I/O network Data Infrastructure Tradecraft Overview

    Updated 1/17/2018

    Data Infrastructure Tradecraft includes server storage I/O network and associated technology, technique, skills, experiences. Tradecraft includes insight as well as tricks of the trade, profession and job function (read more about what is a data infrastructure here). This is the first of a two-part series exploring data infrastructure along with serve storage I/O and related tradecraft. Read part two of this series here.

    Data Infrastructures Tradecraft Overview
    Data Infrastructure and IT Infrastructure Layers

    Data infrastructure encompasses servers, storage, I/O and networking along with associated hardware, software, services and management tasks including data protection among others. Tradecraft is knowing about tools, technologies, and trends in your primary domain as well as adjacent focus areas. However, tradecraft is also about knowing how and when to use different technologies, tools with various techniques to address different scenarios.

    What Is Your Tradecraft
    An example of expanding tradecraft is, for instance, an automobile technician who has learned how to change oil, check tire air pressure, or other essential entry-level functions. On the other hand, a master mechanic knows how to do more involved tasks, from the engine to transmission repair or rebuilding, bodywork, along with troubleshooting. A master mechanic not only knows what buttons, knobs, tools, and techniques to use for different tasks, he also knows how to diagnose problems, as well as what usually causes those problems to occur.

    There are many other examples, including salespeople who have the tradecraft of selling, including account as well as relationship building along with the ability to learn new tradecraft related to the trade or items they are or will be selling. Moreover, then there are pre-sales and systems engineers, technical marketing, product and program management, test and development, R&D engineering, IT and technology architects, among many others.
    IT Data Infrastructure Professionals

    Another example is engineers and architects (non-IT) who have basic design along with engineering discipline tradecraft, as well as specialties such as mechanical, electrical, heating ventilation air condition (HVAC), or environmental, among others. They can leverage their basic tradecraft while extending and enhancing it by gaining insight as well as experience in adjacent areas of focus.

    For IT and data infrastructure tradecraft this means expanding from basic tasks to being able to do more advanced things. For example, developing tradecraft from knowing the different hardware, software, and services resources as well as tools, to what to use when, where, why, and how. Another dimension of expanding data infrastructure tradecraft skills is gaining the experience and insight to troubleshoot problems, gain insight awareness with dashboard or monitoring tools, as well as how to design and manage to cut or reduce the chance of things going wrong.

    From Tools and Technologies to Techniques and Tricks of the Trade
    Expanding your awareness of new technologies along with how they work is important, so too is understanding application and organization needs. Developing your tradecraft means balancing the focus on new and old technologies, tools, and techniques with business or organizational application functionality.

    This is where using various tools that themselves are applications to gain insight into how your data infrastructure is configured and being used, along with the applications they support, is important.

    Data Infrastructure Tool Box

    Learning the Talk and Walking the Talk
    For some people their tradecraft is only learning the talk, so that they can talk the talk of trends, techniques, technology buzzwords to do their job (or get a job) and fit in. The next step is comprehending the talk, gaining more insight and experience ability of what to do (and not do) by walking the talk. Sometimes this means learning from mistakes (yours or others) to prevent them in the future.

    Expanding your tradecraft means learning the talk as well as how to walk the talk for adjacent areas. This can mean new skills, ability, tools, and technologies along with proper terminology. For your data infrastructure tradecraft, you need to acquire competencies in these different yet related areas.

    Even if your focus is to be a hardware or software or services person, there are opportunities to expand your tradecraft. For example extend into physical, virtualization, cloud, container, networking, storage, performance, data protection, or security, among others. This also means comprehending how the pieces work together to support the business applications, as well as the impact on each other (e.g. cause and effect).

    Part of tradecraft is also understanding that various terms and acronyms have different context meaning. For example, SAS can mean big data statistical analysis software or Serial Attached SCSI among others. What this means is as your tradecraft expands, so too does awareness that different terms have various meaning along with the importance of asking for context.

    Another example of understanding context is Fabric. Fabric can also have different context and meaning. It can refer to a network of switches, directors, and routers tying together servers, storage, bridges, gateways, and other devices, but it can also be associated with higher-level application functions, or a cluster of servers or services, as well as data. Keep context in mind about fabric: whether it is referring to lower-level physical and logical networks, or applications and data, among others.

    Yet another context example includes that client can have different meanings, including software or applications that communicate with a server or service, local or in the cloud. A variation of client can also be a type of device, such as a tablet, laptop, mobile device or phone, as well as a workstation with varying software for accessing different data infrastructure as well as applications. Another context for client is the user, person, or thing such as IoT that accesses and interacts with client software or server and services of application or data resources. Yet another context for client is a consumer of lower-level data infrastructure resources or higher-level applications services.

    Where To Learn More

    View additional Data Infrastructure and tradecraft 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 SDDC Data Infrastructure Tradecraft Overview

    What this means

    Remember that tradecraft is skills, experiences, tricks, and techniques along with knowing what as well as how to use various related tools as part of what it is that you are doing.  Continue reading more about data infrastructure along with server storage I/O network hardware software as well as associated management tradecraft in part two of this series here.

    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.

    Posted on

    Data Infrastructure IT Industry Related Resource Links K to O

    Data Infrastructure IT Industry Related Resource Links K to O

    IT Data Center and Data Infrastructure Industry Resources

    Updated 2/20/2018

    Following are some useful Data Infrastructure IT Industry Resource Links K to O to cloud, virtual and traditional IT data infrastructure related web sites. The data infrastructure environment (servers, storage, IO and networking, hardware, software, services, virtual, container and cloud) is rapidly changing. You may encounter a missing URL, or a URL that has changed. This list is updated on a regular basis to reflect changes (additions, changes, and retirement).

    Disclaimer and note: URL’s submitted for inclusion on this site will be reviewed for consideration and to be in generally accepted good taste in regards to the theme of this site.

    Best effort has been made to validate and verify the data infrastructure URLs that appear on this page and web site however they are subject to change. The author and/or maintainer(s) of this page and web site make no endorsement to and assume no responsibility for the URLs and their content that are listed on this page.

    Software Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials Book SDDC

    Send an email note to info at storageio dot com that includes company name, URL, contact name, title and phone number along with a brief 40 character description to be considered for addition to the above data infrastructure list, or, to be removed. Note that Server StorageIO and UnlimitedIO LLC (e.g. StorageIO) does not sell, trade, barter, borrow or share your contact information per our Privacy and Disclosure policy. View related data infrastructure Server StorageIO content here, and signup for our free newsletter here.

    Links A-E
    Links F-J
    Links K-O
    Links P-T
    Links U-Z
    Other Links

    • kaminario.com    Scale out high performance database server
    • kanbox.com    Chineese cloud provider
    • kaseya.com    IT Infrastructure resource management tools
    • kashya.com    Data Protection Solutions (Bought by EMC)
    • kastenchase.com    Data and information security solutions
    • kazeon.com    eDiscovery, search, indexing, classification (Bought by EMC)
    • kcura.com    eDiscovery tools
    • Kerstor.com    Cloud storage
    • kickfire.com    Business analytics tools
    • kineticd.com    Storage and data protection solutions
    • Kingston.com    Memory manufacturer
    • KLSecurity.com    Data protection solutions
    • komnetworks.com    Archiving solutions
    • k-par.com    Archiving solutions
    • ksplice.com    Linux management tools
    • Kubisys.com    Virtualization management tools
    • KVH Co. Ltd.    AWS connect parter, Hosting/cloud/access services
    • kvsinc.com    Email archiving and compliance software
    • lacie.com    Consumer, SOHO and SMB NAS and DAS storage (Bought by Seagate)
    • laconicsecurity.com    Cloud security and storage
    • lampertz.com    Environmental and data center protection
    • laurustech.com    Managed services provider
    • lecroy.com    Analyzers, probes and diagnostics
    • lefthandnetworks.com    iSCSI clustered storage (Bought by HP)
    • legato.com    Storage management software (Bought by EMC)
    • Lenovo   Servers, storage, workstations
    • Level 3 Communications    AWS connect parter, Hosting/cloud/access services
    • lexar.com    Flash memory
    • liebert.com    Data center power and cooling systems (Bought by Emerson)
    • Lightower    AWS connect parter, Hosting/cloud/access services
    • lightsand.com    SAN connectivity
    • likewise.com    Open backup software for macs/Linux/windows
    • liquidcomputing.com    High density servers
    • liquidcoolsolutions.com    Liquid cooled servers
    • Liquidware Labs   Desktop management solutions
    • livedrive.com    Cloud storage and backup
    • www.liveoffice.com    Cloud and Email hosting
    • LiveVault.com    Online cloud backup service (Bought by IronMountain)
    • locknet-inc.com    Security and network management
    • Lockstep.com    Backup and data protection tools
    • logicube.com    Hard drive copy tools
    • LoginVSI   VDI Testing solutions
    • losttapes.org    Portal pertaining to lost magnetic tape information
    • lsi.com    Storage and networking chips and controllers (Bought by Avago)
    • lto-technology.com    Information about LTO tape media
    • lucent.com    Networking components
    • lumigent.com    Compliance management tools
    • luminex.com    S390 IBM Mainframe to open systems gateways
    • luxtera.com    High speed network and storage interconnects
    • m5data.com    VAR
    • MagePlace Backup    Backup and data protection solutions
    • Maginatics.com    Storage for virtual environments
    • magma.com    PCIe and storage solutions
    • mainline.com    VAR
    • Maintech    Infrastructure services
    • maintech.com    IT Servers and solutions
    • Maldivica    Cloud and object storage gateway
    • ManageEngine    DCIM, data center and networking management
    • maponics.com    Mapping data solutions
    • MAPR   Hadoop and Big Data Tools

    • maranti.com    Storage systems
    • marconi.com    Networking equipment
    • marvell.com    Data storage components
    • Masergy    AWS connect parter, Hosting/cloud/access services
    • Mathon.com    eDiscovery
    • maxava.com    HA tools for IBM iSeries
    • maxell.com    Data storage media
    • maxim-ic.com    Data storage components and solutions
    • maxiscale.com    Web infrastructure scale out file system
    • Maxta   Virtualization storage
    • maxtor.com    Disk drives (Bought by Seagate)
    • maxxan.com    Storage systems (Now Ciphermax)
    • mcdata.com    Switches, WAN gateways, software (Bought by Brocade)
    • mediagateusa.com    HD Video streaming appliance
    • Meditech.com    Medical information technology software
    • Megaport    AWS connect parter, Hosting/cloud/access services
    • mellanox.com    Ethernet and InfiniBand technology
    • Memeo.com    Data and content management tools
    • Mendocino.com    CDP and data protection (Missing in Action)
    • metalogix.net    Sharepoint archiving solutions
    • methode.com    Storage networking transceivers
    • mezeo.com    Cloud storage management tools
    • micron.com    SSD storage solutions
    • micronet.com    Storage solutions
    • microsoft.com    Hyper-V virtualizaiton, Windows Storage Server, Azure Cloud, Storsimple, SkyDrive (aka OneDrive) and more
    • midwave.com    Var
    • Mimecast email management including archiving
    • Mimosasystems.com    Email protection and archiving (Bought by Iron Mountain)
    • mindtree.com    Testing services
    • Mirantis    OpenStack tools, downloads, service and support
    • Miray HDClone    Storage clone and data protection tools
    • mirra.com    SMB storage sharing
    • mobiuspartners.com    VAR
    • Modius    DCIM power, cooling and monitoring
    • moka5.com    VDI tools
    • MongoDB    Open source document optimized database
    • Monitis.com    IT Monitoring and services (applications, systems, clouds and more)
    • Monosphere.com    Storage planning and usage software (Bought by Quest)
    • moonwalk.com    HSM, ILM and data management software
    • morphlabs.com    Dense converged server platforms
    • mosaictec.com    Value added reseller (VAR)
    • mosys.com    High density memory components
    • mpstor.com    Cloud storage and orchestration software
    • msiinet.com    VAR
    • mti.com    European VAR
    • mtron.net    Solid state storage devices
    • My Digital SSD    SSD solutions
    • NAKIVO    Backup and data protection tools
    • napatech.com    Network tools and analysis
    • naspa.org    System administrator’s user group
    • nasuni.com    Cloud storage access appliance
    • ncino.com    Banking and financial deployment platform
    • ncipher.com    Data protection and security solutions (Bought by Thales)
    • ncompass-inc.com    VAR and services firm
    • ncr.com    Servers and storage solutions
    • ndci.com    Data conversion services
    • ndmp.org    Trade organization for NDMP backup protocol
    • neartek.com    VTL software (Bought by EMC)
    • nebulassolutions.com    Security and data protection
    • NEC.com    Servers and storage
    • neopathnetworks.com    Network file management solutions (Bought by Cisco)
    • neoscale.com    Storage networking security (Assets Bought by nCipher)
    • nephoscale.com    Cloud and object storage
    • NeptunesCloud.net    Cloud IaaS solutions
    • www.neptuny.com    Performance and capacity planning tools
    • nerc.com    North American Electrical Reliability Council
    • netcelera.com    WAN File system caching and acceleration
    • netcomm.com.au    Broadband service provider
    • netdirectsystems.com    VAR
    • neterion.com    High performance iSCSI and Ethernet 10Gb technology Bought by Exar)
    • netex.com    IP compression and channel extension
    • netezza.com    Big Data – Data warehouse storage solutions (Bought by IBM)
    • Netgear.com    SOHO and SMB storage and networking
    • NetIQ    Data center, security, identify and data protection management
    • netlist.com    Memory solutions
    • netoptics.com    Network monitoring
    • netronome.com    Network and I/O optimization technology
    • netspi.com    Network security and digital forensics
    • networkappliance.com    Storage sub-systems, management software
    • networkgeneral.com    Network and application monitoring
    • networkinstruments.com    Network test and diagnostic and performance monitoring
    • netwrix.com    Enterprise systems management tools
    • netxen.com    High performance 10Gb Ethernet chips and NICs
    • neuwingenergy.com    Energy management organization
    • neuxpower.com    File compression and data reduction
    • Neverfailgroup.com    HA software
    • nevex.com    Caching and application acceleration
    • newboundary.com    IT policy management and IRM tools
    • newisys.com    Storage enclosures
    • newrelic.com    Web, cloud and application management
    • nexenta.com    ZFS based storage management solutions
    • nexgenstorage.com    Storage with PCIe flash card
    • nexsan.com    SAS/SATA and MAID storage subsystems (Bought by Imaiton)
    • nextio.com    SSD and application acceleration solutions
    • NexusMN / Computex    VAR (e.g. Formerly Nexus MN and Stratos – now Computex)
    • nfpa.org    National Fire Protection Association
    • nicira.com    Software defined networking and IOV (Bought by VMware)
    • nimblestorage.com    Converged iSCSI SAN, backup and DR
    • nimbula.com    Cloud and application orchestration management tools
    • Nimbusdata.com    iSCSI storage
    • nirvanix.com    Cloud storage provider (Ceased operations)
    • njvc.com    Cloud and technology service provider
    • Nylte    DCIM software tools
    • noggin.intel.com/rr/    Intel Recommended Reading List
    • noliosoft.com    Cloud application management tools
    • Norlight.com    Data communications and services
    • nortel.com    Networking products
    • nortelnetworks.com    Optical networking
    • northernsoft.com    Medical software
    • novastor.com    Backup and cloud data protection tools
    • Novell.com    Server software vendor (Bought by Attachmate)
    • Novuscg.com    Storage management and services (Bought by IBM)
    • Nomura Research Institute (NRI)    AWS connect parter, Hosting/cloud/access services
    • nsic.org    National Storage Industry Consortium
    • ntp.com    Storage Management Software
    • NTT Communications Corporation    AWS connect parter, Hosting/cloud/access services
    • numarasoftware.com    IT Resource management, asset tracking tools
    • numonyx.com    SSD memory solutions
    • nutanix.com    Converged server and storage VM platform
    • nvelo.com    Caching IO performance tools
    • nvidia.com    Graphics and visualization tools
    • ocarinanetworks.com    Data reduction and compression tools (Bought by Dell)
    • ocztechnology.com    SSD drives and PCIe cards (Bought by Toshiba after bankruptcy)
    • offsitebackups.com    Online and cloud backup solutions
    • olixir.com    Removable storage for backup and data protection
    • omneon.com    Archiving and fixed content storage solutions
    • onapp.com    Cloud, CDN and storage tools
    • onaro.com    Storage and Storage Network Management (Bought by NetApp)
    • onlinebackupsearch.com    Various online backup reviews
    • oblinecourses.com    Various online education courses for various topics
    • onpathtech.com    Physical layer networking
    • onstor.com    Clustered NAS storage including NAS gateways (Bought by LSI)
    • Ontrack.com    Email and data protection software
    • OO Software   Windows management and data protection tools
    • opalis.com    Virtual data center management tools
    • OpenCompute   OpenCompute consortium
    • opendatacenteralliance.org    Open Data Center Alliance
    • open-e.com    iSCSI and NAS storage
    • Open.IO    Application aware object and bulk scale out software defined storage
    • openfabrics.org    Open Fabric Alliance
    • OpenNebula    Open source cloud software
    • opennetworking.org    Open Networking Foundation
    • OpensourceSystems.com    Data storage solutions
    • OpenStack   Open source cloud compute and storage software
    • opnet.com    Application and network performance management
    • Opsware.com    Network and storage management (HP)
    • Optica Tech.    Server and storage connectivity including FICON
    • opticatech.com    Mainframe and ESCON encryption
    • oracle.com    Data management software, hardware and services (Bought Sun/STK and others)
    • Ortera.com    Performance monitoring and management
    • OSNEXUS   Quantstor ZFS based Storage management solutions
    • Outsource Data Recovery   Data Recovery services
    • overlandstorage.com    Tape and backup, data retention, NAS solutions
    • owncloud.org    Cloud infrastructure tools

    Where To Learn More

    View additional NAS, NVMe, SSD, NVM, SCM, Data Infrastructure and HDD 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

    Visit the following additional data infrastructure and IT data center related links.

    Links A-E
    Links F-J
    Links K-O
    Links P-T
    Links U-Z
    Other Links

    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.

    Posted on

    Six plus data center software defined management dashboards tools

    Software defined data infrastructure management insight tools

    server storage I/O trends

    Updated 1/17/2018

    Managing data infrastructures involves using software defined management dashboards tools. Recently I found in my inbox a link to a piece 6 Dashboards for Managing Every Modern Data Center that caught my attention. I was hoping to see who the six different datacenter technologies, dashboard solutions tools were instead of finding list of dashboard considerations for modern data centers and data infrastructures.

    Turns out the piece was nothing more than a list of six items featured as part of the vendors (Sunbird) piece about what to look for in a dashboard (e.g. their product). Sure there were some of the usual key performance indicator (KPI) associated with or related to IT Service Management (ITSM), Data Center Infrastructure (Insight/Information) Management (DCIM), Configuration and Change management databases (CMDB), availability, capacity and Performance Management Databases (PMDB) among others.

    • Space
    • Inventory
    • Connectivity
    • Change
    • Environment
    • Power

    Dashboard Discussions

    Keep in mind however that there are many different types of dashboards (and consoles), some are active along with analytics including correlation, others are passive simply displaying. The focus area also various from physical data center facilities, to applications, to data infrastructures or components such as servers, storage, I/O networks, clouds, virtual, containers among others modern data centers.

    Data Infrastructures and SDDI, SDDC, SDI
    Data Infrastructures (hardware, software, services, servers, storage, I/O and networks)

    This is where some context comes into play as there are different types of dashboards for various audience, technology and focus areas (e.g. domains) across data infrastructure (and other entities). For example do a google search of “dashboard” and see what appears, or “IT dashboard”, “data center dashboard” vs. “datacenter dashboard” among others.

    Additional KPIs include:

    • Performance, availability, Capacity and Economic (PACE) attributes
    • Service Level Objectives (SLO), Service Level Agreements (SLAs)
    • Recovery Time Objectives (RTO), Recovery Point Objectives (SLO)
    • IT Service Management (ITSM) and Data Center Infrastructure Management (DCIM)
    • Configuration and Change Management (e.g. things part of CMDB)
    • Performance, availability and capacity (e.g. things part of PMDB)
    • Various focus and layers, cross domain functionality views
    • Costs management including subscriptions, licenses and others

    IT Data Center and Data Infrastructure Dashboard Options

    For those of you who have made it this far, while not a comprehensive list, the following are some examples of vendors, services or solutions that either are, or have an association with data center, as well as data infrastructure management. Some dashboards or tools are homogenous in that they only work within a given area of focus such as particular cloud, service provider, vendor or solution set. Others are heterogeneous or federated working across different services, solutions, vendors and domain focus areas. Think of these as software defined management (SDM), or, software defined data infrastructure (SDDI) management, software defined data center (SDDC) management among other variations for the modern information factory.

    There is a mix of tools that run on site (e.g. on premise) or via cloud services (e.g. manager your on site from the cloud). Likewise, some are for fee, others subscription and some are open source. In addition some of the tools are turnkey while others are do it yourself (DiY) or allow you to customize. Also keep in mind that depending on what your tradecraft (skills, experience, expertise) interest area is, these may or may not be applicable to you, while relevant to others. For example some such as Spiceworks tend to be more helpdesk focused while others on other data center or data infrastructure areas.

    There are dashboards for or from AWS, Canonical (Ubuntu), Dell including EMC, Google, HPE, IBM, Microsoft System Center and Azure, NetApp, OpenStack, Oracle, Rackspace, Redhat, Rightscale, Servicenow, Softlayer, Suse and VMware among others.

    Blue Medora (various data infrastructure monitoring)
    Cloudkitty (open source cloud rating and chargeback)
    Collectd (data infrastructure collection and monitoring)
    cPanel and whm (web and hosting dashboards)
    data infrastructure sddi cpanel

    Dashbuilder (customize your dashboard)
    Datadog (super easy to get access, download, install, configure and use)
    Domo (various data infrastructure monitoring tools)
    Extrahop (still waiting to be able to download and try their bits vs. watching a demo)
    Firescope (data infrastructure insight and awareness)
    Freezer (open source dashboard tools)
    Komprise (interesting solution, would like try, however lots of gated material)
    Nagios (data infrastructure monitoring)
    Openit (data infrastructure tracking, report, monitoring)
    Opvizor (data infrastructure monitoring and reporting)

    storageio datadog dashboard

    Panorama9 (various data infrastructure monitoring and reporting)
    Quest (various tools)
    Redhat Cloudforms (openstack and cloud management)
    Rrdtools (data collection, logging and display)
    Sisense (insight and awareness tools)
    Solarwinds Server Application Monitor (SAM) among other tools
    Teamquest (various monitoring, management, capacity planning tools)
    Turbomomic (software defined data infrastructure insight tools)
    Virtual Instruments (various monitoring and insight awareness along with analytics)

    In addition to the above, there are tools such as Splunk among others that also provide insight and awareness to help avoid flying blind while managing your data center or data infrastructure.

    Where to learn more

    Learn more via the following links.

  • Data Infrastructure Primer and Overview (Its Whats Inside The Data Center)
  • E2E Awareness and insight for IT environments
  • Server and Storage I/O Benchmarking and Performance Resources
  • Data Center Infrastructure Management (DCIM) and IRM
  • The Value of Infrastructure Insight – Enabling Informed Decision Making
  • More storage and IO metrics that matter
  • Whats a data infrastructure?

    • 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

    Without insight and awareness you are flying blind, how can you make informed decisions about your information factory, data infrastructures, data center along with applications. There are different focus areas for various audiences up and down the stack layers in data infrastructures and data centers. Key is having insight and awareness including knowing what are some different tool options.

    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.

    Posted on

    Some popular 2016 storageioblog posts

    Some popular 2016 storageioblog posts

    server storage I/O trends

    Big Files and Lots of Little File Processing and Benchmarking with Vdbench – Need to test, validate, compare, contrast or simply apply workload to file systems, NAS or other file-based access? Want the flexibility and simplicity to software define your benchmark workload to meet various needs? For example, millions of small files or thousands of large 5GB, 10GB, 15GB (or larger) files with various read, write size and access patterns spanning a single directory, or many with various depths? Do you want the flexibility for different platforms including Windows, *NIX, bare metal, container, virtual or cloud without a bulk tool using simple scripts that produce lots of insightful results? Then you will want to check this post out.

    Breaking the VMware ESXi 5.5 ACPI boot loop on Lenovo TD350 – Ever have a VMware host server go into a boot loop and purple screen of death (PSD) then displaying a message about ACPI or similar? After spending time searching and applying many filters to sift through the noise of false positive matches, finally found the simple fix (e.g. a BIOS setting) to break the VMware ESXi vSphere boot loop, or at least on a Lenovo server.

    Cloud and Object Storage

    Cloud conversations: AWS EBS, Glacier and S3 overview (Part I) – This is one of the perennial favorites that while new features have been added with others extended, the post series still provides a good overview, primer or refresher of various Amazon Web Services (AWS) services including how they work. Interesting in learning more about Microsoft and Azure, then check out this, this, this and this.

    Cloud Conversations: AWS EFS Elastic File System (Cloud NAS) – This is a companion to the above AWS as well as other cloud post series that looks at AWS Elastic File System. Note that other cloud service providers have also added NAS file access support, some are intra (e.g. inside AWS cloud), others are inter-cloud (e.g. inside and outside cloud) such as Azure (can work with external Windows Servers using SMB3). Even OpenStack has added NAS file with Manila folders and Ceph with CephFS among others. So when some people tell you that NAS and file access are dead particular for cloud, remind them of the increasing number of services and software stacks that are adding new services to allow their solution to be compatible with existing environments or applications.

    Server Storage I/O performance

    Collecting Transaction Per Minute from SQL Server and HammerDB – If you have used the free tool HammerDB (e.g. Hammora) for driving database workloads, simulations or benchmarks you should recall that the resulting statistics are rather lacking. Sure there is a nice GUI chart that shows current executing transactions per second (TPS) along with some very simple counters in the log. However compared to some other tools such as sysbench, Quest Benchmark Factory and YCSB among others, the Hammer metrics are rather lacking. In this post I show how you can collect some more metrics from SQL Server if you have to use HammerDB. View more server storage I/O performance benchmark and monitoring tools resources here.

    Windows Server 2016

    Gaining Server Storage I/O Insight into Microsoft Windows Server 2016 – Microsoft released into general availability Windows Server 2016 and this post looks at some of the new features along with functionality including Storage Spaces Direct (S2D), Storage Replica (SR) as well as other enhancements. With these new and enhanced features Windows Servers increase their interoperability with Azure, as well as supporting aggregated hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI), disaggregated converged (CI) as well as traditional workloads along with Hyper-V (and containers). One of the other new enhancements in Windows Server 2016 which now uses ReFS (Reliable File System) as its default file system that you can read more about here. RIP Windows SIS (Single Instance Storage), or at least in Server 2016 With Windows Server 2016 Microsoft removed single instance storage replacing with new capabilities that you can read more about in the this post.

    Garbage data in garbage data out

    Garbage data in, garbage information out, big data or big garbage? There is a classic IT expression of garbage data in results in garbage data (or information out) in that your algorithms and data structures (which equals programs e.g. Niklaus Wirth) are only as good as the data they work on. What this means then is that if there is a large amount of big data then there can also be a big garbage in and garbage out problem unless addressed.

    Hard product vs. soft product – Hard product refers to something such as hardware, software or a service resource that is obtained and then joined with other resources in a particular way to create a soft product. Not to be confused with software, the soft product is the result or how resources get defined that give some ability or benefit. Think of a soft product as for how airlines can use the same airplane, serve the same coca cola, have same seats, yet their soft product is the service experience of how those are delivered, as well as how you find and buy or use them. Another way of thinking about it is hard products are the ingredients for a recipe, the recipe defines how those ingredients result in some food dish.

    how many IOPs can an HDD or SSD do

    Part II: How many IOPS can a HDD, HHDD or SSD do with VMware? – This is part of a multi-post series looking at how many IOPs (or bandwidth) various HDD and SSDs can do handling different workloads. Of course, your results will vary with configuration settings, tools among other considerations. However, some of the older rules of thumb (RUT) about RPM and other considerations for HDDs have changed and continue to do so. As an example of how HDDs continue to evolve check out this popular post from the 2016 list Which Enterprise HDDs to use for a Content Server Platform.

    Part II: What I did with Lenovo TS140 in my Server and Storage I/O Review – This is a popular post series of some things I have done with a Lenovo TS140 including defining with various software as well as hardware. This is a great price performer value system that several years ago after testing one Lenovo sent me, I returned that to Lenovo and bought several of them to join my other systems.

    Server and Storage I/O Benchmarking and Performance Resources – This is a collection of various server, storage I/O and networking hardware, software as well as services tools, techniques as well as tips for benchmarking, comparing, simulation, testing, gaining insight across cloud, virtual, container and legacy resources. Server and Storage I/O Benchmark Tools: Microsoft Diskspd (Part I) – This is one of the tools found on the server, storage I/O benchmarking and performance resources page. Diskspd is a tool developed by Microsoft as an alternative to using Iometer, vdbench, fio.exe, SQLIO among many others, plus, it is on github.

    server storage I/O nvme and ssd

    The NVM (Non Volatile Memory) and NVMe Place – Interesting and adoption in nand flash, nvram, 3D XPoint among other SSD and Non-volatile Memory (NVM) continues. Another popular post that you can find at thenvmeplace.com is this NVMe overview and primer – Part I. There is a growing interest, awareness and deployment adoption around NVM Express (NVMe) the new protocol for accessing NVMs and SSDs. Some of the common conversations and questions I encounter is confusion between NVM and NVMe, too which the answer is one (the former) are the media or devices, the other is the access method alternative to using AHCI/SATA or SCSI (e.g. SAS, iSCSI, FCP, SRP) among others.

    VMware VVOLs and storage I/O fundamentals (Part 1) – VMware Virtual Volumes (VVOL) continue to gain adoption and this post is part of an overview and primer. If you want to go deeper into VVOL as well as see some adoption insights check out Eric Sieberts post here over at vsphere-land.com

    Welcome to the Object Storage Center page – This is a micro site that has a primer and overview of cloud as well as object storage along with an expanding list of links to various resources, tips, technologies, tools, trends and industry activity.

    Where To Learn More

    www.storageio.com particular if you have not been there for awhile to check out the new streamlined look and navigation to various content including Server StorageIO update newsletters (free subscription) among other resources.

    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 and wrapping up

    Some of the popular posts for 2016 are perennial favorites and based on experience will probably appear on the 2017 list. However there are also several new posts that appeared in 2016 that I suspect will also appear on the 2017 version of the above list, along with new content from 2017.

    Thank you to all of you who frequent StorageIOblog.com as well as StorageIO.com along with our various micro sites including server storage I/O performance and benchmarking resources, thenvmeplace.com, thessdplace.com, cloud and objectstoragecenter.com, data protection diaries among others.

    Also thank you for viewing various partner venues and syndicates with extra ones appearing throughout 2017. Watch for more content in the coming weeks, months and throughout 2017 on software defined data infrastructures (SDDI) along with server, storage I/O, networking, hardware, software, cloud, container, data protection and related topics, trends, technologies, tools and tips.

    Again, thank you

    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.

    Posted on

    Data Infrastructure Primer Overview (Its Whats Inside The Data Center)

    Data Infrastructure Primer Overview

    Data Infrastructure Primer Overview

    Updated 1/17/2018

    Data Infrastructure Primer Overview looks at the resources that combine to support business, cloud and information technology (IT) among other applications that transform data into information or services. The fundamental role of data infrastructures is to provide a platform environment for applications and data that is resilient, flexible, scalable, agile, efficient as well as cost-effective. Put another way, data infrastructures exist to protect, preserve, process, move, secure and serve data as well as their applications for information services delivery. Technologies that make up data infrastructures include hardware, software, cloud or managed services, servers, storage, I/O and networking along with people, processes, policies along with various tools spanning legacy, software-defined virtual, containers and cloud.

    Various Types and Layers of Infrastructures

    Depending on your role or focus, you may have a different view than somebody else of what is infrastructure, or what an infrastructure is. Generally speaking, people tend to refer to infrastructure as those things that support what they are doing at work, at home, or in other aspects of their lives. For example, the roads and bridges that carry you over rivers or valleys when traveling in a vehicle are referred to as infrastructure.

    Similarly, the system of pipes, valves, meters, lifts, and pumps that bring fresh water to you, and the sewer system that takes away waste water, are called infrastructure. The telecommunications network. This includes both wired and wireless, such as cell phone networks, along with electrical generating and transmission networks are considered infrastructure. Even the airplanes, trains, boats, and buses that transport us locally or globally are considered part of the transportation infrastructure. Anything that is below what you do, or that supports what you do is considered infrastructure.

    Software Defined Data Infrastructure overview

    Figure 1 Business, IT Information, Data and other Infrastructures

    This is also the situation with IT systems and services where, depending on where you sit or use various services, anything below what you do may be considered infrastructure. However, that also causes a context issue in that infrastructure can mean different things. For example in figure 1, the user, customer, client, or consumer who is accessing some service or application may view IT in general as infrastructure, or perhaps as business infrastructure.

    Those who develop, service, and support the business infrastructure and its users or clients may view anything below them as infrastructure, from desktop to database, servers to storage, network to security, data protection to physical facilities. Moving down a layer (lower altitude) in figure 1 is the information infrastructure which, depending on your view, may also include servers, storage, and I/O hardware and software.

    To help make a point, let’s think of the information infrastructure as the collection of databases, key-value stores, repositories, and applications along with development tools that support the business infrastructure. This is where you may find developers who maintain and create real business applications for the business infrastructure. Those in the information infrastructure usually refer to what’s below them as infrastructure. Meanwhile, those lower in the stack shown in figure 1 may refer to what’s above them as the customer, user, or application, even if the real user is up another layer or two.

    Whats inside a data infrastructure
    Context matters in the discussion of infrastructure. So for our of server storage I/O fundamentals, the data infrastructures support the databases and applications developers as well as things above, while existing above the physical facilities infrastructure, leveraging power, cooling, and communication network infrastructures below.

    SDDI and Data Infrastructure building blocks

    Figure 2 Data Infrastructure fundamental building blocks (hardware, software, services).

    Figure 2 shows the fundamental pillars or building blocks for a data infrastructure, including servers for computer processing, I/O networks for connectivity, and storage for storing data. These resources including both hardware and software as well as services and tools. The size of the environment, organization, or application needs will determine how large or small the data infrastructure is or can be.

    For example, at one extreme you can have a single high-performance laptop with a hypervisor running OpenStack; along with various operating systems along with their applications leveraging flash SSD and high-performance wired or wireless networks powering a home lab or test environment. On the other hand, you can have a scenario with tens of thousands (or more) servers, networking devices, and hundreds of petabytes (PBs) of storage (or more).

    In figure 2 the primary data infrastructure components or pillar (server, storage, and I/O) hardware and software resources are packaged and defined to meet various needs. Software-defined storage management includes configuring the server, storage, and I/O hardware and software as well as services for use, implementing data protection and security, provisioning, diagnostics, troubleshooting, performance analysis, and other activities. Server storage and I/O hardware and software can be individual components, prepackaged as bundles or application suites and converged, among other options.

    Figure 3 shows a deeper look into the data infrastructure shown at a high level in figure 2. The lower left of figure 2 shows the common-to-all-environments hardware, software, people, processes, and practices that include tradecraft (experiences, skills, techniques) and “valueware”. Valueware is how you define the hardware and software along with any customization to create a resulting service that adds value to what you are doing or supporting. Also shown in figure 3 are common application and services attributes including performance, availability, capacity, and economics (PACE), which vary with different applications or usage scenarios.

    Data Infrastructure components

    Figure 3 Data Infrastructure server storage I/O hardware and software components.

    Applications are what transform data into information. Figure 4 shows how applications, which are software defined by people and software, consist of algorithms, policies, procedures, and rules that are put into some code to tell the server processor (CPU) what to do.

    SDDI and SDDC server storage I/O

    Figure 4 How data infrastructure resources transform data into information.

    Application programs include data structures (not to be confused with infrastructures) that define what data looks like and how to organize and access it using the “rules of the road” (the algorithms). The program algorithms along with data structures are stored in memory, together with some of the data being worked on (i.e., the active working set). Additional data is stored in some form of extended memory storage devices such as Non-Volatile Memory (NVM) solid-state devices (SSD), hard disk drives (HDD), or tape, among others, either locally or remotely. Also shown in figure 4 are various devices that do input/output (I/O) with the applications and server, including mobile devices as well as other application servers.

    Bringing IT All Together (for now)

    Software Defined Data Infrastructure overview

    Figure 5 Data Infrastructure  fundamentals “big picture”

    A fundamental theme is that servers process data using various applications programs to create information; I/O networks provide connectivity to access servers and storage; storage is where data gets stored, protected, preserved, and served from; and all of this needs to be managed. There are also many technologies involved, including hardware, software, and services as well as various techniques that make up a server, storage, and I/O enabled data infrastructure.

    Server storage I/O and data infrastructure fundamental focus areas include:

    • Organizations: Markets and industry focus, organizational size
    • Applications: What’s using, creating, and resulting in server storage I/O demands
    • Technologies: Tools and hard products (hardware, software, services, packaging)
    • Trade craft: Techniques, skills, best practices, how managed, decision making
    • Management: Configuration, monitoring, reporting, troubleshooting, performance, availability, data protection and security, access, and capacity planning

    Where To Learn More

    View additional 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

    Whether you realize it or not, you may already be using, rely upon, affiliated with, support or otherwise involved with data infrastructures. Granted what you or others generically refer to as infrastructure or the data center may, in fact, be the data infrastructure. Watch for more discussions and content about as well as related technologies, tools, trends, techniques and tradecraft in future posts as well as other venues, some of which involve legacy, others software-defined, cloud, virtual, container and hybrid.

    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.

    Posted on

    Cloud and Object storage are in your future, what are some questions?

    Cloud and Object storage are in your future, what are some questions?

    server storage I/O trends

    IMHO there is no doubt that cloud and object storage are in your future, what are some questions?

    Granted, what type of cloud and object storage or service along with for work or entertainment are some questions.

    Likewise, what are your cloud and object storage concerns (assuming you already have heard the benefits)?

    Some other questions include when, where for different applications workload needs, as well as how and with what among others.

    Keep in mind that there are many aspects to cloud storage and they are not all object, likewise, there are many facets to object storage.

    Recently I did a piece over at InfoStor titled Cloud Storage Concerns, Considerations and Trends that looks at the above among other items including:

    • Is cloud storage cheaper than traditional storage?
    • How do you access cloud object storage from legacy block and file applications?
    • How do you implement on-site cloud storage?
    • Is enterprise file sync and share (EFSS) safe and secure?
    • Does cloud storage need to be backed up and protected?
    • What geographic location requirements or regulations apply to you?

    When it comes to cloud computing and, in particular, cloud storage, context matters. Conversations are necessary to discuss concerns, as well as discuss various considerations, options and alternatives. People often ask me questions about the best cloud storage to use, concerns about privacy, security, performance and cost.

    Some of the most common cloud conversations topics involve context :

    • Public, private or hybrid cloud; turnkey subscription service or do it yourself (DIY)?
    • Storage, compute server, networking, applications or development tools?
    • Storage application such as file sync and share like Dropbox?
    • Storage resources such as table, queues, objects, file or block?
    • Storage for applications in the cloud, on-site or hybrid?

    Continue reading Cloud Storage Concerns, Considerations and Trends over at InfoStor.

    Where To Learn More

    Additional related content can be found at:

    What This All Means

    As I mentioned above, cloud and object storage are in your future, granted your future may not rely on just cloud or object storage. Take a few minutes to check out some of the conversation topics, tips and trends in my piece over at InfoStor Cloud Storage Concerns, Considerations and Trends along with more material at www.objectstoragecenter.com.

    Btw, what are your questions, comments, concerns, claims or caveats as part of cloud and object storage conversations?

    Ok, nuff said, for now…

    Cheers
    Gs

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

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