Server StorageIO August 2016 Update Newsletter

Volume 16, Issue VIII

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

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

Cheers GS

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…

Recent and popular Server StorageIOblog posts include:

• Happy 20th Birthday Windows Server, ready for Server 2016?
  In case you have not heard, Microsoft is celebrating the 20th birthday (or anniversary) of Windows Server. Microsoft has a nice site with info graphics and timelines of where Windows Server has been and accomplished over the past 20 years (view here). Some of you may remember from 20 years ago Windows Server with a different name aka Windows NT Server. Back in the day, if you recall (or read), server requirements were more in the 33 MHz vs. 3.3GHz range, 32MB of RAM Memory vs. 32GB to 320GB, 150MB HDD vs. 150GB SSD or 1.5TB HDD. Read more here.




• Server StorageIO June July 2016 Update Newsletter

View other recent as well as past StorageIOblog posts here