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September and October 2016 Server StorageIO Update Newsletter

Volume 16, Issue IX

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

In This Issue

  • Commentary in the news
  • Tips and Articles
  • StorageIOblog posts
  • Events and Webinars
  • Industry Activity Trends
  • Resources and Links
  • Connect and Converse With Us
  • About Us

    • Enjoy this edition of the Server StorageIO update newsletter.

    Cheers GS

    Industry Activity Trends

    Recent Industry Activates and Trends

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

     

    StorageIOblog Posts

    Recent and popular Server StorageIOblog posts include:

    View other recent as well as past StorageIOblog posts here

     

    StorageIO Commentary in the news

    Recent Server StorageIO industry trends perspectives commentary in the news.

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

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

     

    StorageIO Tips and Articles

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

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

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

     

    Events and Activities

    Recent and upcoming event activities.

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

    November 29-30, 2016 – Nijkerk Netherlands Workshop Seminar (Presenting)
    Organized by Brouwer Storage Consultancy
    Converged and Other Server Storage Decision Making

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

     

    Server StorageIO Industry Resources and Links

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

    Ok, nuff said, for now…

    Cheers
    Gs

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

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

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    Updated Software Defined Data Infrastructure Webinars and Fall 2016 events

    Software Defined Data Infrastructure Webinars and Fall 2016 events

    server storage I/O trends

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

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

    Hyper-Converged Infrastructure, HCI and CI Decision Making

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

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

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

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

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

    Organized by:
    Brouwer Storage Consultancy

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

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

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

    Organized by:
    Brouwer Storage Consultancy

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

    BC DR Cloud Backup and Data Protection

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

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

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

    Cloud Storage Decision Making

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

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

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

    Cloud Infrastructure and Hybrid Software Defined

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Attend and learn about:

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

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

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

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

    Cloud Storage Decision Making

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

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

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

    Cloud Storage Decision Making

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Where To Learn More

    What This All Means

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

    Ok, nuff said, for now…

    Cheers
    Gs

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

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

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    Gaining Server Storage I/O Insight into Microsoft Windows Server 2016

    Server Storage I/O Insight into Microsoft Windows Server 2016

    server storage I/O trends
    Updated 12/8/16

    In case you had not heard, Microsoft announced the general availability (GA, also known as Release To Manufacturing (RTM) ) of the newest version of its Windows server operating system aka Windows Server 2016 along with System Center 2016. Note that as well as being released to traditional manufacturing distribution mediums as well as MSDN, the Windows Server 2016 bits are also available on Azure.

    Microsoft Windows Server 2016
    Windows Server 2016 Welcome Screen – Source Server StorageIOlab.com

    For some this might be new news, or a refresh of what Microsoft announced a few weeks ago (e.g. the formal announcement). Likewise, some of you may not be aware that Microsoft is celebrating WIndows Server 20th Birthday (read more here).

    Yet for others who have participated in the public beta aka public technical previews (TP) over the past year or two or simply after the information coming out of Microsoft and other venues, there should not be a lot of surprises.

    Whats New With Windows Server 2016

    Microsoft Windows Server 2016 Desktop
    Windows Server 2016 Desktop and tools – Source Server StorageIOlab.com

    Besides a new user interface including visual GUI and Powershell among others, there are many new feature functionalities summarized below:

    • Enhanced time-server with 1ms accuracy
    • Nano and Windows Containers (Linux via Hyper-V)
    • Hyper-V enhanced Linux services including shielded VMs
    • Simplified management (on-premisess and cloud)
    • Storage Spaces Direct (S2D) and Storage Replica (SR) – view more here and here


    Storage Replica (SR) Scenarios including synchronous and asynchronous – Via Microsoft.com

    • Resilient File System aka ReFS (now default file system) storage tiering (cache)
    • Hot-swap virtual networking device support
    • Reliable Change Tracking (RCT) for faster Hyper-V backups
    • RCT improves resiliency vs. VSS change tracking
    • PowerShell and other management enhancements
    • Including subordinated / delegated management roles
    • Compliment Azure AD with on premise AD
    • Resilient/HA RDS using Azure SQL DB for connection broker
    • Encrypted VMs (at rest and during live migration)
    • AD Federation Services (FS) authenticate users in LDAP dir.
    • vTPM for securing and encrypting Hyper-V VMs
    • AD Certificate Services (CS) increase support for TPM
    • Enhanced TPM support for smart card access management
    • AD Domain Services (DS) security resiliency for hybrid and mobile devices

    Here is a Microsoft TechNet post that goes into more detail of what is new in WIndows Server 2016.

    Free ebook: Introducing Windows Server 2016 Technical Preview (Via Microsoft Press)

    Check out the above free ebook, after looking through it, I recommend adding it to your bookshelf. There are lots of good intro and overview material for Windows Server 2016 to get you up to speed quickly, or as a refresh.

    Storage Spaces Direct (S2D) CI and HCI

    Storage Spaces Direct (S2D) builds on Storage Spaces that appeared in earlier Windows and Windows Server editions. Some of the major changes and enhancements include ability to leverage local direct attached storage (DAS) such as internal (or external) dedicated NVMe, SAS and SATA HDDs as well as flash SSDs that used for creating software defined storage for various scenarios.

    Scenarios include converged infrastructure (CI) disaggregated as well as aggregated hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) for Hyper-V among other workloads. Windows Server 2016 S2D nodes communicate (from a storage perspective) via a software storage bus. Data Protection and availability is enabled between S2D nodes via Storage Replica (SR) that can do software based synchronous and asynchronous replication.


    Aggregated – Hyper-Converged Infrastructure (HCI) – Source Microsoft.com


    Desegregated – Converged Infrastructure (CI) – Source Microsoft.com

    The following is a Microsoft produced YouTube video providing a nice overview and insight into Windows Server 2016 and Microsoft Software Defined Storage aka S2D.




    YouTube Video Storage Spaces Direct (S2D) via Microsoft.com

    Server storage I/O performance

    What About Performance?

    A common question that comes up with servers, storage, I/O and software defined data infrastructure is what about performance?

    Following are some various links to different workloads showing performance for Hyper-V, S2D and Windows Server. Note as with any benchmark, workload or simulation take them for what they are, something to compare that may or might not be applicable to your own workload and environments.

    • Large scale VM performance with Hyper-V and in-memory transaction processing (Via Technet)
    • Benchmarking Microsoft Hyper-V server, VMware ESXi and Xen Hypervisors (Via cisjournal PDF)
    • Server 2016 Impact on VDI User Experience (Via LoginVSI)
    • Storage IOPS update with Storage Spaces Direct (Via TechNet)
    • SQL Server workload (benchmark) Order Processing Benchmark using In-Memory OLTP (Via Github)
    • Setting up testing Windows Server 2016 and S2D using virtual machines (Via MSDN blogs)
    • Storage throughput with Storage Spaces Direct (S2D TP5 (Via TechNet)
    • Server and Storage I/O Benchmark Tools: Microsoft Diskspd (Part I)

    Where To Learn More

    For those of you not as familiar with Microsoft Windows Server and related topics, or that simply need a refresh, here are several handy links as well as resources.

    • Introducing Windows Server 2016 (Free ebook from Microsoft Press)
    • What’s New in Windows Server 2016 (Via TechNet)
    • Microsoft S2D Software Storage Bus (Via TechNet)
    • Understanding Software Defined Storage with S2D in Windows Server 2016 (Via TechNet)
    • Microsoft Storage Replica (SR) (Via TechNet)
    • Server and Storage I/O Benchmark Tools: Microsoft Diskspd (Part I)
    • Microsoft Windows S2D Software Defined Storage (Via TechNet)
    • Windows Server 2016 and Active Directory (Redmond Magazine Webinar)
    • Data Protection for Modern Microsoft Environments (Redmond Magazine Webinar)
    • Resilient File System aka ReFS (Via TechNet)
    • DISKSPD now on GitHub, and the mysterious VMFLEET released (Via TechNet)
    • Hyper-converged solution using Storage Spaces Direct in Windows Server 2016 (Via TechNet)
    • NVMe, SSD and HDD storage configurations in Storage Spaces Direct TP5 (Via TechNet)
    • General information about SSD at www.thessdplace.com and NVMe at www.thenvmeplace.com
    • How to run nested Hyper-V and Windows Server 2016 (Via Altaro and via MSDN)
    • How to run Nested Windows Server and Hyper-V on VMware vSphere ESXi (Via Nokitel)
    • Get the Windows Server 2016 evaluation bits here
    • Microsoft Azure Stack overview and related material via Microsoft
    • Introducing Windows Server 2016 (Via MicrosoftPress)
    • Various WIndows Server and S2D lab scripts (Via Github)
    • Storage Spaces Direct – Lab Environment Setup (Via Argon Systems)
    • Setting up S2D with a 4 node configuration (Via StarWind blog)
    • SQL Server workload (benchmark) Order Processing Benchmark using In-Memory OLTP (Via Github)
    • Setting up testing Windows Server 2016 and S2D here using virtual machines (Via MSDN blogs)
    • Hyper-V large-scale VM performance for in-memory transaction processing (Via Technet)
    • BrightTalk Webinar – Software-Defined Data Centers (SDDC) are in your Future (if not already here)
    • Microsoft TechNet: Understand the cache in Storage Spaces Direct
    • BrightTalk Weibniar – Software-Defined Data Infrastructures Enabling Software-Defined Data Centers
    • Happy 20th Birthday Windows Server, ready for Server 2016?
    • Server StorageIO resources including added links, tools, reports, events and more.

    What This All Means

    While Microsoft Windows Server recently celebrated its 20th birthday (or anniversary), a lot has changed as well as evolved. This includes Windows Servers 2016 supporting new deployment and consumption models (e.g. lightweight Nano, full data center with desktop interface, on-premises, bare metal, virtualized (Hyper-V, VMware, etc) as well as cloud). Besides how consumed and configured, which can also be for CI and HCI modes, Windows Server 2016 along with Hyper-V extend the virtualization and container capabilities into non-Microsoft environments specifically around Linux and Docker. Not only are the support for those environments and platforms enhanced, so to are the management capabilities and interfaces from Powershell to Bash Linux shell being part of WIndows 10 and Server 2016.

    What this all means is that if you have not looked at Windows Server in some time, its time you do, even if you are not a WIndows or Microsoft fan, you will want to know what it is that has been updated (perhaps even update your fud if that is the case) to stay current. Get your hands on the bits and try Windows Server 2016 on a bare metal server, or as a VM guest, or via cloud including Azure, or simply leverage the above resources to learn more and stay informed.

    Ok, nuff said, for now…

    Cheers
    Gs

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

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

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    The Value of Infrastructure Insight – Enabling Informed Decision Making

    The Value of Infrastructure Insight – Enabling Informed Decision Making

    server storage I/O trends

    Join me and Virtual Instruments CTO John Gentry on October 27, 2016 for a free webinar (registration required) titled The Value of Infrastructure Insight – Enabling Informed Decision Making with Virtual Instruments. In this webinar, John and me will discuss the value of data center infrastructure insight both as a technology as well as a business and IT imperative.

    Software Defined Data Infrastructure
    Various Infrastructures – Business, Information, Data and Physical (or cloud)

    Leveraging infrastructure performance analytics is key to assuring the performance, availability and cost-effectiveness of your infrastructure, especially as you transform to a hybrid data center over the coming years. By utilizing real-time and historical infrastructure insight from your servers, storage and networking, you can avoid flying blind and give situational awareness for proactive decision-making. The result is faster problem resolution, problem avoidance, higher utilization and the elimination of performance slowdowns and outages.

    View the companion Server StorageIO Industry Trends Report available here (free, no registration required) at the Virtual Instruments web page resource center.

    xxxx

    The above Server StorageIO Industry Trends Perspective Report (click here to download PDF) looks at the value of data center infrastructure insight both as a technology as well as a business productivity enabler. Besides productivity, having insight into how data infrastructure resources (servers, storage, networks, system software) are used, enables informed analysis, troubleshooting, planning, forecasting as well as cost-effective decision-making.

    In other words, data center infrastructure insight, based on infrastructure performance analytics, enables you to avoid flying blind, having situational awareness for proactive Information Technology (IT) management. Your return on innovation is increased, and leveraging insight awareness along with metrics that matter drives return on investment (ROI) along with enhanced service delivery.

    Where To Learn More

    • Free Server StorageIO Industry Trends Report The Value of Infrastructure Insight – Enabling Informed Decision Making (PDF)
    • Register for the free webinar on October 27, 2016 1PM ET here.
    • View other upcoming and recent events at the Server StorageIO activities page here.

    What This All Means

    What this all means is that the key to making smart, informed decisions involving data infrastructure, servers, storage, I/O across different applications is having insight and awareness. See for yourself how you can gain insight into your existing information factory environment performing analysis, as well as comparing and simulating your application workloads for informed decision-making.

    Having insight and awareness (e.g. instruments) allows you to avoid flying blind, enabling smart, safe and informed decisions in different conditions impacting your data infrastructure. How is your investment in hardware, software, services and tools being leveraged to meet given levels of services? Is your information factory (data center and data infrastructure) performing at its peak effectiveness?

    How are you positioned to support growth, improve productivity, remove complexity and costs while evolving from a legacy to a next generation software-defined, cloud, virtual, converged or hyper-converged environment with new application needs?

    Data infrastructure insight benefits and takeaways:

    • Informed performance-related decision-making
    • Support growth, agility, flexibility and availability
    • Maximize resource investment and utilization
    • Find, fix and remove I/O bottlenecks
    • Puts you in control in the driver’s seat

    Remember to register and attend the October 27 webinar that you can register here.

    Btw, Virtual Instruments has been a client of Server StorageIO and that fwiw is a disclosure.

    Ok, nuff said, for now…

    Cheers
    Gs

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

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

    Posted on

    EMC is now Dell EMC, part of Dell Technologies and other server storage Updates

    EMC is now Dell EMC and other server storage Updates

    server storage I/O trends

    In case you missed it or did not hear, EMC is now Dell EMC and is future ready (one of their new tag lines).

    What this means is that EMC is no longer a publicly traded company instead now being privately held under the Dell Technologies umbrella. In case you did not know or had forgotten, one of the principal owners of Dell Technologies is Michael Dell aka the founder of Dell Computers which itself went private a few years ago. The Dell Server division which sells direct as well as via channels and OEMs is now part of the Dell EMC division (e.g. they sell Servers, Storage, I/O and Networking hardware, software and services).

    Dell EMC Storage Portfolio
    Dell EMC Storage Portfolio – Via emc.com

    Other related news and activities include:

    • Dell EMC sells Content Division (e.g. Documentum (bought in 2003), InfoArchive and LEAP) to OpenText for $1.62B USD
    • Dell is selling its Sonicwall and software division (e.g. what was a mix of Quest and other non-EMC related software) to a Private Equity group. The new company to be called Quest has ironically as one of its investors, activist PE firm Elliott Management. You might recall Elliott Management was the activist investor pushing for more value out of EMC for shareholders.
    • Expands Data Protection Portfolio For VMware Environments
    • Hybrid Cloud Platform Enhancements
    • XtremIO New Features and Management for Virtualized Environments
    • Combines DSSD and PowerEdge Servers for SAS (Software) Analytics
    • ScaleIO Ready Node Offers All-Flash Software-Defined
    • Expands Microsoft Support across Cloud and Converged Infrastructure
    • With approximately 140,000 employees worldwide post merger Dell EMC has announce some expected layoffs.

    Dell EMC Enahncements made today

    • Announced a new entry-level VMAX (200F) with very small physical footprint, affordable starter system price and flexibility to scale as you need to grow. Also announced were SRDF third site enhancements as well as VPLEX updates.
    • Data Domain enhancements including OS 6.0, flash and tiering across private, public and hybrid cloud
    • Unity mid-range storage (e.g. the successor to VNX) enhanced with all-flash and UnityOE software updates that include in-line compression along with cloud tiering. All-flash Unity models using 15.36TB SAS Flash SSD drives (3D NAND) can support up to 384TB in a 2U rack. Cloud tiering includes support for Virtustream, AWS and Microsoft Azure.

    Dell EMC VMAX storage family
    Dell EMC VMAX family and new 200F – Via emc.com

    Note that in-line compression on Unity and VMAX systems is available on all-flash based systems, while tiering is available on both all-flash as well as hybrid systems.

    Where To Learn More

    Dell Updates Storage Center Operating System 7 (SCOS 7)
    EMC DSSD D5 Rack Scale Direct Attached Shared SSD All Flash Array Part I
    Part II – EMC DSSD D5 Direct Attached Shared AFA
    EMCworld 2016 Getting Started on Dell EMC announcements
    EMCworld 2016 EMC Hybrid and Converged Clouds Your Way
    Dell-EMC: The Storage Ramifications
    VMware Targets Synergies in Dell-EMC Deal 
    Dell to Buy EMC for $67B; Sharpen Focus on Large Enterprises and High-End Computing
    Dell SAN strategy examined after move to go private
    EMC VxRack Neutrino Nodes launched for OpenStack cloud storage
    EMC Under Pressure To Spin Off VMware
    EMC Bridges Cloud, On-Premise Storage With TwinStrata Buy
    Top Ten Takeaways from EMC World
    When to implement ultra-dense server storage
    EMCworld 2015 How Do You Want Your Storage Wrapped?
    EMCworld 2015 How Do You Want Your Storage Wrapped?

    What This All Means

    For those that think (or wish) that now that EMC has gone private (e.g. granted under Dell ownership) that they have gone away and no longer relevant, time will tell what happens long term. However while they (EMC, now Dell EMC) are no longer a publicly held company, they are still very much in the public spotlight addressing legacy, current as well as emerging IT data infrastructure and software-defined data center, software defined storage and related topics spanning cloud, virtual, container among others.

    What this all means is that Dell EMC is following through with providing different types of data infrastructure along with associated server, storage and I/O solutions as well as associated software defined storage management and data protection tools to meet various needs. How do you want your storage wrapped? Do you want it software defined such as a ScaleIO, ECS (object), DataDomain (data protection), VIPR, or Unity among other virtual storage appliances (VSAs), or tin-wrapped as a physical storage system or appliance?

    With the VMAX 200F, Dell EMC is showing that they can scale-down the VMAX. Dell EMC is also showing they can scale VMAX up and out while making it affordable and physically practical for smaller environments who want, need or are required to have traditional enterprise class storage in a small footprint (price, physical space) with enterprise resiliency.

    Dell EMC Storage Portfolio
    Dell EMC Storage Portfolio – Via emc.com

    A question that comes up is what happens with the various competing Dell and EMC (pre-merger) storage product lines. If you look closely at the storage line up photo above, you will notice the Dell SC (e.g. Compellent) is shown along with all of the EMC solutions. This should or could prompt the question of what about the PS series (e.g. EqualLogic) or some MD. So far the answer I have received is that they remain available for sale which you can confirm via the Dell website. However, what will the future bring to those or others is still TBD.

    Needless to say there is more to see and hear coming out of Dell EMC in the weeks and months ahead, that is unless as some predict (or wishful thinking) they go away which I don’t see happening anytime soon. Oh, FWIW, Dell and EMC have been Server StorageIO clients direct and indirect via 3rd parties in the past (that’s a disclosure btw).

    Ok, nuff said, for now…

    Cheers
    Gs

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

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

    Posted on

    Back To Software Defined Data Infrastructure School, Webinar and Fall 2016 events

    Software Defined Data Infrastructure Webinars and Fall 2016 events

    server storage I/O trends

    Its September and that means back to school time, and not just for the kids. Here is the preliminary Server StorageIO fall 2016 back to school, webinar and event activities covering software defined data center, data infrastructure, virtual, cloud, containers, converged, hyper-converged server, storage, I/O network, performance and data protection among other topics.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Where To Learn More

    What This All Means

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

    Ok, nuff said, for now…

    Cheers
    Gs

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

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

    Posted on

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

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

    eagle standing tall server storage I/O trends

    Updated 1/28/2018

    A Eagle Standing Tall and Proud

    Like an Eagle Standing Tall and Proud

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

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

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

    Standing Tall and Proud

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

    Software Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials Book SDDC

    What This All Means

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

    Ok, nuff said, for now.

    Gs

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

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

    Posted on

    Server StorageIO August 2016 Update Newsletter

    Volume 16, Issue VIII

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

    In This Issue

  • Commentary in the news
  • Tips and Articles
  • StorageIOblog posts
  • Events and Webinars
  • Industry Activity Trends
  • Resources and Links

    • Enjoy this shortened summer edition of the Server StorageIO update newsletter.

    Cheers GS

    Industry Activity Trends

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Ok, nuff said, for now…

     

    StorageIOblog Posts

    Recent and popular Server StorageIOblog posts include:

    View other recent as well as past StorageIOblog posts here

     

    StorageIO Commentary in the news

    Recent Server StorageIO industry trends perspectives commentary in the news.

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

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

     

    StorageIO Tips and Articles

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

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

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

    StorageIO Webinars and Industry Events

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

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

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

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

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

    September 29: TBA Webinar – 10AM PT

    September 27-28 – NetApp – Las Vegas

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

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

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

    August 29-31: VMworld Las Vegas

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

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

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

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

     

    Server StorageIO Industry Resources and Links

    Check out these useful links and pages:

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

    Ok, nuff said

    Cheers
    Gs

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

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

    Posted on

    Server StorageIO May 2016 Update Newsletter

    Volume 16, Issue V

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

    In This Issue

  • Commentary in the news
  • Tips and Articles
  • StorageIOblog posts
  • Events and Webinars
  • Industry Activity Trends
  • Resources and Links

    • Enjoy this shortened edition of the Server StorageIO update newsletter, watch for more tips, articles, lab report test drive reviews, blog posts, videos and podcast’s and in the news commentary appearing soon.

    Cheers GS

    StorageIOblog Posts

    Recent and popular Server StorageIOblog posts include:

    View other recent as well as past blog posts here

     

    StorageIO Commentary in the news

    Recent Server StorageIO industry trends perspectives commentary in the news.

    Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking: Various comments and discussions

    StorageIOblog: Additional comments and perspectives

    SearchCloudStorage: Comments on OpenIO joins object storage cloud scrum

    SearchCloudStorage: Comments on EMC VxRack Neutrino Nodes and OpenStack

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

     

    StorageIO Tips and Articles

    Recent Server StorageIO articles appearing in different venues include:

    Via Micron Blog (Guest Post): What’s next for NVMe and your Data Center – Preparing for Tomorrow Today

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

    StorageIO Webinars and Industry Events

    Brouwer Storage (Nijkerk Holland) June 10-15, 2016 – Various in person seminar workshops

    June 15: Software Defined Data center with Greg Schulz and Fujitsu International

    June 14: Round table with Greg Schulz and John Williams (General manager of Reduxio) and Gert Brouwer. Discussion about new technologies with Reduxio as an example.

    June 10: Hyper converged, Converged , and related subjects presented Greg Schulz

    Simplify and Streamline Your Virtual Infrastructure – May 17 webinar

    Is Hyper-Converged Infrastructure Right for Your Business? May 11 webinar

    EMCworld (Las Vegas) May 2-4, 2016

    Interop (Las Vegas) May 4-6 2016

    Making the Cloud Work for You: Rapid Recovery April 27, 2016 webinar

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

     

    Server StorageIO Industry Resources and Links

    Check out these useful links and pages:

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

    Ok, nuff said

    Cheers
    Gs

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

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

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    Dell Updates Storage Center Operating System 7 (SCOS 7)

    Dell Updates Storage Center Operating System 7 (SCOS 7)

    server storage I/O trends

    In case you missed it, Dell recently announced Storage Center Operating System 7 (SCOS 7) with several enhancements for their SC series storage systems (e.g. Compellent). For those who are under maintenance agreements, the new features are no charge upgrades. Most of the SCOS 7 features should be generally available now (or soon) for the SC9000 series with other platform support phased in over time.

    Summary of Dell SC07 enhancements features

    • Block level dedupe in addition to previous file dedupe
    • Enhanced compression as a companion to dedupe of HDD and SSD data
    • Single volumes or LUN can span across HDD and SSD tiers
    • Live migration and volume management with load balancing
    • Ability to move volumes between arrays
    • Quality of Service (QoS) for performance across volumes and volume groups
    • QoS set by IOPs, bandwidth and latency of standard volumes and VMware VVOL
    • New Storage Manager replaces SC Enterprise Manager for unified management
    • Delivers on promise of a unified SC and FS NAS management
    • Ability to replicate data between PS (EqualLogic) and SC (Compellent)
    • HTML 5 interface and non-disruptive implementation

    Where To Learn More

    Learn more about Dell SC Series enhancements here and here.

    What This All Means

    Dell is following through on its previous commitments to both PS (e.g. EqualLogic) and SC (e.g. Compellent) customers with enhancements to increase functionality along with simplify management. These features will become more important to add continued to value to the SC and PS platforms independently of the impending Dell acquisition of EMC (e.g. Dell EMC). The elephant in the room discussion is with the impending Dell acquisition of EMC, and the new Dell EMC division (e.g. essentially the existing EMC plus the Dell Server group) what happens with the midrange storage products from both parties.

    Dell has the SC and PS as well as lower end direct attached storage (DAS) based Powervault series as well as the Exanet based Fluid file System among other technologies including Ocarina based data footprint reduction (DFR). If you recall, the Ocarina technology acquired by Dell enables not only dedupe, also compression and other DFR (here and here) capabilities. Meanwhile EMC has the VNX and Unity (announced in May 2016) among other offerings.

    Both Dell and EMC will need to continue to articulate the value of their midrange solutions prior to the acquisition closing. Likewise once the deal closes, the joint entities need to be crystal clear on where the different technologies fit for various markets or customer segments, as well as their future.

    Overall a good set of enhancements for the Dell SC (and PS) series.

    Ok, nuff said, for now…

    Cheers
    Gs

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

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

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    2016 Going Dutch Cloud Virtualization Server Storage I/O Seminars

    2016 Going Dutch Cloud Virtualization Server Storage I/O Seminars

    server storage I/O trends

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

    Brouwer Consultancy

    Cloud Virtualization Server Storage I/O Seminars

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

    Brouwer and Server StorageIO Seminar Sessions

    Agenda, How To Register and Where To Learn More

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

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

    Thursday June 9th – Server StorageIO Trends and Updates

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

    Thursday June 10th – Converged Day

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

    Brouwer and Server StorageIO Seminar Sessions De Roode Schuur

    Tuesday June 14th – Round Table Vendor Session with Reduxio

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

    Wednesday June 15th – Software Defined Data Center Symposium Workshop

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

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

    Brouwer and Server StorageIO Sessions Ampt van Nijkerk

    What This All Means

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

    Brouwer Consultancy

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

    Ok, nuff said, for now…

    Cheers
    Gs

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

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

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    Participate in Top vBlog 2016 Voting Now

    Participate in Top vBlog 2016 Voting Now

    server storage I/O trends

    It’s that time of the year when Eric Siebert (@ericsiebert) hosts his annual top virtual Blog (vBlog) voting via his great vsphere-land site (check it out if you are not familiar). The voting is now open until May 27th after which the results tabulated, will be announced.

    While the focus is virtualization, rest assured there are other categories including scripting, storage, independent, new, video and podcast among others. For example my blog is listed under StorageIO (Greg Schulz) and included in storage and independent among some other categories.

    Granted it is an election year here in the US and hopefully those participating in the top vBlog 2016 voting process are doing so based on content vs. simply popularity or what their virtual Popularity Action Committees (vPAC) tells them to do, that is vPACs actually exist or if they are simply vUrban Myths ;). In other words I’m not going to tell you who to vote for, or who I voted for other than that it is based on useful I found those sites and their content contributions.

    Who Is Eligible To Vote

    Anybody can vote, granted you can only vote once. Of course you can get your friends, family, co-workers, sales and marketing department, community or club, customers, clients, basically anything with an IP address and email address in theory including IoT and IoD could vote. However that would be like buying twitter followers, Facebook likes, click for view or pay for view results to game the system which if that is your game, so be it.

    How Did People Get On The List (Ballot)

    Eric puts out a call (tweets, posts here, here and here) that gets amplified for people to submit new blogs to be included, as well as then to self-nominate their site, as well as for what categories. If people do not take the initiative to get on the list, they don’t get included. If the list if important enough to be included on, then it should be important enough to to know or remember to self-nominate to be included.

    I know this from experience in that a few years ago I forgot to nominate my blog in the categories of storage, independent thus was not included in the voting for those categories. However since I had previously notified Eric to include my blog, it was in the general category and thus included. Note to bloggers, if it is important for you to be included, then notify Eric that you should be added to his lists, as well as take the time to nominate yourself to be included in the future. Simply help others help you.

    What Is The Voting Criteria

    Eric for this years top vBlog voting has culled the list to those who besides self nominating in different categories, also had at least 50 posts in the past year.

    In addition, Eric suggests focus on the content, creative and contribution (Longevity, Length, Frequency, Quality) vs. simply being a popularity contest or driven by virtual Popularity Action Committees (e.g. vPAC).

    Following are my paraphrase:

    • Longevity – How long has the blog existed and continued to be maintained vs. one started a long time ago and had not been updated in months or years.
    • Length – Are there lots of very short basically expanded micro twitter posts, recopy press releases or curation of other news, real content and analysis that requires some thought along with creative. These could be short, long or a series of short to medium size posts.
    • Frequency – How often do posts appear, daily, weekly, monthly, yearly. There’s a balance between frequency, length and content along with time effort to create something.
    • Quality – Some can be rehashed with more perspectives, inputs, hints and tips along with analysis, insight or experiences of existing, or new items. The key is what is the value add to the topic, theme or conversation vs. simply reposting or amplifying what’s already out there. In other words, is there new or unique content, perspectives, thought analysis, insight, experiences or simply repeat and amplify those of others.

    Call To Action, Get Out and Vote

    Simple, get out and vote and thanks in advance by using this link to Eric’s site.

    Where To Learn More

    • Voting now open for Top vBlog 2016
    • Link to actual voting page

    What This All Means

    Support and say thanks, give an "atta boy" or "atta girl" to those who take time to create content to share with you on various virtualization related topics from servers, storage, I/O networking, scripting, tools, techniques, clouds, containers and more via blogs, podcast’s and webinars. This includes both the independents like myself and others as well as the vendors, press and media who give the content you consume.

    So take a few moments to jump on over to Eric’s site and cast your vote and if you have found my content to be useful, I humbly appreciate your vote and say thank you for your support, as well as that for others.

    Ok, nuff said and thank you for supporting StorageIOblog.

    Cheers
    Gs

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

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

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    EMCworld 2016 Getting Started on Dell EMC announcements

    EMCworld 2016 Getting Started on Dell EMC announcements

    server storage I/O trends

    It’s the first morning of EMCworld 2016 here in Las Vegas with some items already announced today, and more in the wings. One of the underlying themes and discussions besides what’s new or who’s doing what, is that this is for all practical purpose the last EMCworld with the upcoming Dell acquisition. What’s not clear is will there be a renamed and repackaged Dell/EMCworld?

    With current EMC President Jeremy Burton who used to be the Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) at EMC slated to become the CMO across all of Dell, my bet is that there will be some type of new event picking up and moving to a new level of where EMCworld and Dellworld have been. More on the future of EMC and Dell in future posts, however for now, lets see what has unfolded so far today.

    Today’s EMCworld theme is modernize the data center which means a mix of hardware, software and services announcements spanning physical, virtual, cloud among others (e.g. how do you want your servers, storage and data infrastructure wrapped). While the themes are still EMC as the Dell acquisition has yet to be completed, however there is a Dell presence, including Michael Dell here in person (more on Dell later).

    The first wave of announcements include:

    • Unity All Flash Array (AFA) for small, entry-level environments
    • EMC Enterprise Copy Data Management software tools portfolio
    • ViPR Version 3.0 Controller
    • Virtustream global hyper-scale Storage Cloud for data protection and cloud native object
    • MyService360

    • Datadomain virtual edition and long-term archive

    What About The Dell Deal

    Michael Dell who is here at EMCworld announced on the main stage that Dell Technologies will be the name of the families of business.

    This family of business includes the joint Dell, EMC, VMware, Pivotal, Secureworks, RSA and Virtustream. The Dell client focused business will be called Dell leveraging

    that Brand, while the new joint Dell and EMC enterprise business will be called Dell EMC leveraging both of those brands. As a reminder, the Dell servers business unit will be moving into the existing EMC business as part of the enterprise business unit.

    Lets move onto the technology announcements from today.

    Unity AFA (and Hybrid)

    The new Unity all flash array (AFA) is a dual controller storage system optimized for Nonvolatile Memory (NVM) flash SSD, with unified (block and file) access. EMC is positioning Unity as an entry-level AFA starting around $18K USD for a 2U solutions (much capacity that includes is not yet known, more on that in a future post). As well as having a low entry cost, EMC is positioning Unity for a broad, mass market, volume distribution that can be leveraged by their partners, including Dell. More on Unity in future posts. While Unity is new and modern, it comes from the same group who has created the VNXe leveraging that knowledge and skills base.

    Note that Unity is positioned for small, mid-sized, remote office branch office (ROBO), departmental and specialized AFA situations, where EMC NVMe based DSSD D5 is positioned for higher-end shared direct attached server flash, while XtremIO and VMAX also positioned for higher-end, higher performance and workload consolidation scenarios.

    • Simple, flexible, easy to use in a 2U packaging that scale up to 80TB of NVM flash SSD storage
    • Scalable up to 3PB of storage for larger expanded configurations
    • Affordable ($18K USD starting price, $10K entry-level hybrid)
    • Modern AFA storage for entry, small, mid-sized, workgroup, departments and specialized environments
    • Unified file, block, and VMware VVOL support for storage access
    • Also available in hybrid, as well as software defined virtual and converged configurations
    • Higher performance (EMC indicates 300,000 IOPs) for given entry-level systems
    • Available in all-flash array, hybrid array, software-defined and converged configurations
    • Native controller based encryption with synchronous and asynchronous replication
    • VMware VASA 2.0, VAAI, VVols and VMware integration
    • Tight integration with EMC Data Protection portfolio tools

    Read more about Unity here.

    Copy Data Management

    Enterprise Copy Data Management (eCDM) spans data copies from data protection including backup, BC, DR as well as for operational, analytics, test, dev, devops among other uses. Another term is Enterprise Copy Data Analytics (eCDA) which includes monitoring and management along with insight, awareness and of course analytics. These new offerings and initiatives tie together various capabilities across storage platforms and software defined storage management. Watch for more activity in and around eCDM and general copy data management. Read more here.

    ViPR Controller 3.0

    ViPR controller enhancements build on previous announcements, include automation as well as fail over with native replication to a standby ViPR controller. Note that there can actually be two standby controllers that are synchronized asynchronous with software built-in to ViPR. This means that there is no need for RecoverPoint or other products to do the replication of the ViPR controllers. To be clear, this is for high availability of the ViPR controllers themselves and not a replacement for HA or replication of upper layer applications, storage servers or underlying storage services. Also note that ViPR is available via open source (CoprHD via Github here). Read more here.

    MyService360

    MyService360 is a cloud based dashboard and data infrastructure monitoring management platform. Read more here.

    Virtustream Storage Cloud

    Viutustream cloud services and software tools compliments EMC (and others) storage systems as back-end for cool, cold or other bulk data storage needs. Focus is to sell primary storage to customers, then leverage back-end public cloud services for backup, archive, copy data management and other applications. This also means that the Virtustream storage cloud is not just for data protection such as archiving, backup, BC, DR it’s also for other big fast data including cloud and object native applications. Does this mean Virtustream is an alternative to other cloud and object storage services such as AWS S3, Google GCS among others? Yup. Read more here.

    Where To Learn More

    • Session Streaming For video of keynotes, general sessions, backstage sessions, and EMC TV coverage, click here
    • Social: Follow @EMCWorld,  @EMCCorp, @EMC_News and @EMCStorage, and join conversations with  #EMCWORLD, and like EMC on Facebook
    • Photos: Access event photos via  Flickr and EMC Pulse Blog or visit the special EMC World News microsite here
    • Reflections: Read Core Technologies President, Guy Churchward’s Reflections post on today’s announcements here
    • Visit the EMC Store, the EMC Community Network Site and The Core Blog

    What This All Means

    With the announcement of Unity and impending Dell deal, some of you might (or should) have a Dejavu moment of over a decade or so ago when Dell and EMC entered into OEM agreement around the then Clariion mid range storage arrays (e.g. predecessors of VNX and VNXe). Unity is being designed as a high performance, easy to use, flexible, scalable, cost-effective storage solutions for a broad high-volume sales and distribution channel market.

    What does Unity mean for EMC VNX and VNXe as well as XtremIO? Unity will position near where the VNXe has been positioned, along with some of the competing solutions from Dell among others. There might be some overlap with other EMC solutions, however if executed properly, Unity should open up some new markets, perhaps at the hands of some of the newer popular startups that only offer AFA vs. hybrids. Likewise I would expect Unity to appear in future converged solutions such as those via the EMC Converged business unit (e.g. VCE).

    Even with the upcoming Dell acquisition and integration, EMC continues to evolve and innovate in many areas.

    Watch for more announcements later today and throughout the week

    Ok, nuff said

    Cheers
    Gs

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

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

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    Which Enterprise HDD for Content Server Platform

    Which Enterprise HDD to use for a Content Server Platform

    data infrastructure HDD server storage I/O trends

    Updated 1/23/2018

    Which enterprise HDD to use with a content server platform?

    Insight for effective server storage I/O decision making
    Server StorageIO Lab Review

    Which enterprise HDD to use for content servers

    This post is the first in a multi-part series based on a white paper hands-on lab report I did compliments of Equus Computer Systems and Seagate that you can read in PDF form here. The focus is looking at the Equus Computer Systems (www.equuscs.com) converged Content Solution platforms with Seagate Enterprise Hard Disk Drive (HDD’s). I was given the opportunity to do some hands-on testing running different application workloads with a 2U content solution platform along with various Seagate Enterprise 2.5” HDD’s handle different application workloads. This includes Seagate’s Enterprise Performance HDD’s with the enhanced caching feature.

    Issues And Challenges

    Even though Non-Volatile Memory (NVM) including NAND flash solid state devices (SSDs) have become popular storage for use internal as well as external to servers, there remains the need for HDD’s Like many of you who need to make informed server, storage, I/O hardware, software and configuration selection decisions, time is often in short supply.

    A common industry trend is to use SSD and HDD based storage mediums together in hybrid configurations. Another industry trend is that HDD’s continue to be enhanced with larger space capacity in the same or smaller footprint, as well as with performance improvements. Thus, a common challenge is what type of HDD to use for various content and application workloads balancing performance, availability, capacity and economics.

    Content Applications and Servers

    Fast Content Needs Fast Solutions

    An industry and customer trend are that information and data are getting larger, living longer, as well as there is more of it. This ties to the fundamental theme that applications and their underlying hardware platforms exist to process, move, protect, preserve and serve information.

    Content solutions span from video (4K, HD, SD and legacy streaming video, pre-/post-production, and editing), audio, imaging (photo, seismic, energy, healthcare, etc.) to security surveillance (including Intelligent Video Surveillance [ISV] as well as Intelligence Surveillance and Reconnaissance [ISR]). In addition to big fast data, other content solution applications include content distribution network (CDN) and caching, network function virtualization (NFV) and software-defined network (SDN), to cloud and other rich unstructured big fast media data, analytics along with little data (e.g. SQL and NoSQL database, key-value stores, repositories and meta-data) among others.

    Content Solutions And HDD Opportunities

    A common theme with content solutions is that they get defined with some amount of hardware (compute, memory and storage, I/O networking connectivity) as well as some type of content software. Fast content applications need fast software, multi-core processors (compute), large memory (DRAM, NAND flash, SSD and HDD’s) along with fast server storage I/O network connectivity. Content-based applications benefit from having frequently accessed data as close as possible to the application (e.g. locality of reference).

    Content solution and application servers need flexibility regarding compute options (number of sockets, cores, threads), main memory (DRAM DIMMs), PCIe expansion slots, storage slots and other connectivity. An industry trend is leveraging platforms with multi-socket processors, dozens of cores and threads (e.g. logical processors) to support parallel or high-concurrent content applications. These servers have large amounts of local storage space capacity (NAND flash SSD and HDD) and associated I/O performance (PCIe, NVMe, 40 GbE, 10 GbE, 12 Gbps SAS etc.) in addition to using external shared storage (local and cloud).

    Where To Learn More

    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

    Fast content applications need fast content and flexible content solution platforms such as those from Equus Computer Systems and HDD’s from Seagate. Key to a successful content application deployment is having the flexibility to hardware define and software defined the platform to meet your needs. Just as there are many different types of content applications along with diverse environments, content solution platforms need to be flexible, scalable and robust, not to mention cost effective.

    Continue reading part two of this multi-part series here where we look at how and what to test as well as project planning.

    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.