September 2017 Server StorageIO Data Infrastructure Update Newsletter

Volume 17, Issue IX (September 2017)

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

With September being generally known as back to school month, the two September event bookends were VMware VMworld and Microsoft Ignite with many other things in between. Needless to say, a lot has happened in and around data infrastructure topic areas since the August newsletter (here if you missed it). Here is a post covering some of the things that I participated with during September including presentations at events in Las Vegas (VMworld), New York City (Wipro SDx Summit), SNIA SDC in Santa Clara, Fujifilm Executive Summitt in Seattle, Minneapolis/St. Paul CMG along with other activities.

One of the activities I participated in with while at VMworld in Las Vegas was a book signing event at the VMware bookstore of my new book Software Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials (CRC Press) available at Amazon.com and other global venues.

September has been a busy month pertaining data infrastructure including server storage I/O related trends, activities, news, perspectives and related topics, so let’s have a look at them.

Enjoy this edition of the Server StorageIO data infrastructure update newsletter.

Cheers GS

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

The month started out with VMworld in Las Vegas (e.g. one of the event bookends for the month). Rather than a long list of announcements in this newsletter, check out this StorageIOblog post covering VMworld, VMware and Dell EMC and related news. As part of VMworld, VMware and Amazon Web Services (AWS) announced news about their partnership. AWS also had several other enhancements and new product announcements during september that can be found in this StorageIOblog post here.

AWS, Dell EMC and VMware were not the only ones making news or announcements during September. Startup NVMe based storage startup Apeiron has announced a Splunk appliance to boost log and analytics processing performance. Gigamon has extended its public cloud monitoring, insight awareness and analytics capabilities including support for Microsoft Azure.

For those looking for the latest new emerging data infrastructure vendors to watch, add Vexta to your list of NVMe based storage systems. Vexta talks a lot about NVMe particular for their backend (e.g. where data stored on NVM based devices accessed via NVMe), access of their storage system is via traditional Fibre Channel (FC) or emerging NVMe over fabric.

Long time data infrastructure server and storage vendor HDS (Hitachi Data Systems) is no more (at least in name) having re branded themselves as Vantara focusing on IoT and Cloud analytics besides their traditional data center focus. Vantara combines what was HDS, Hitachi Insight Group and Pentaho into a single unit effectively based in what was HDS as a new, repackaged, refocused business unit.

Another longtime data infrastructure solution and service provider IBM announced a new Linux only zSeries (ZED) mainframe solution. Some might think the Mainframe is dead, others that it can only run Linux as a virtual guest in a virtual machine. On the other hand some might recall that there are native Linux implementations on the ZED including Ubuntu among others.

Also note that while IBM zOS mainframe operating systems use FICON for storage access, native ZED Linux systems can use open systems based Fibre Channel (FC) e.g. SCSI command set protocols. Is the ZED based Linux for everybody or every environment? Probably not, however for those who have large-scale Linux needs, it might be worth a look to do a total cost of ownership analysis. If nothing else, do your homework, play your cards right and you might have some leverage with the x86 based server crowd when it comes to negotiating leverage.

Cloud storage gateway vendor Nasuni has landed another $38 Million USD in funding, hopefully that will enable them to start landing some new and larger customer revenues growing their business. Meanwhile storage startup Qumulo has announced extending their global file fabric name space to include spanning AWS.

Attala Systems has announced next generation software defined storage for data infrastructures for Telco environments. Percona has added an experimental release of their MySQL engine enhancing performance for high volume, write intensive workloads along with improved cost effectiveness.

Software defined storage vendor Datacore announced enhancements to support fast databases for online transaction processing (OLTP) along with analytics. Meanwhile Linux provider SUSE continues to expand its software defined storage story based around Ceph. Panasas has enhanced its scale out high performance cluster file system global name space for HPC environments with 20 PByte support. Another longtime storage vendor X-IO (formerly known as Xiotech) announced their 4th generation of their Intelligent Storage Element (ISE).

September wrapped up with Microsoft Ignite conference along with many updated, enhancements and new features for Azure, Azure Stack, Windows among others. Read more about those and other Microsoft September announcements here in this StorageIOblog post.

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

Recent and popular Server StorageIOblog posts include:

• Getting Caught Up, What Happened to September
  Seems like just yesterday it was the end of August with the start of VMworld, now its the end of September and Microsoft Ignite in Orlando is wrapping up. Microsoft has made several announcements this week at Ignite including Azure cloud-related, AI, IoT, Windows platforms, O365 among others. More about Microsoft Azure, Azure Stack, Windows Server, Hyper-V and related data infrastructure topics in future posts.
  Read more here.
• Amazon Web Service AWS September 2017 Updates
• Microsoft September 2017 Updates
• Dell EMC VMware September 2017 Updates

In Case You Missed It #ICYMI

• If Answer is NVMe, what are the questions?
• Hot Popular New Trending Data Infrastructure Vendors To Watch
• Get in the NVMe SSD game (if you are not already)
• NVMe Wont Replace Flash By Itself They Complement Each Other
• Chelsio Storage over IP and other Networks Enable Data Infrastructures
• Announcing Software Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials Book
• Travel Fun Crossword Puzzle For VMworld 2017 Las Vegas
• Trick or treat and vendor fun games
• Who Will Be At Top Of Storage World Next Decade?
• August 2017 Server StorageIO Data Infrastructure Update Newsletter

View other recent as well as past StorageIOblog posts here