Server StorageIO March 2016 Update Newsletter

Volume 16, Issue III

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

Here in the northern hemisphere spring has officially arrived as of March 20th equinox along with warmer weather, more hours and minutes of day light, and plenty of things to do. In addition to the official arrival of spring here (fall in the southern hemisphere), it also means in the U.S. that March Madness and college basketball tournament playoff brackets and office (betting) pools are in full swing.

A couple of other things associated with spring is to move clocks forward which occurred recently here in the U.S. Spring is also a good time to check your smoke and dangerous gas detectors or other alarms. This means replacing batteries and cleaning the detectors.

Besides smoke and gas detectors, spring is also a good time do preventive maintenance on your battery backup uninterruptible power supplies (UPS), as well as generators and other standby power devices. For my part, I had a service tech out to do a tune up on my Kohler generator, as well as replaced some batteries in APC UPS devices.

Besides smoke and CO2 detectors, generators and UPS standby power systems, March madness basketball and other sports tournaments, something else occurs on March 31st (besides being the day before April 1st and April fools day). March 31st is World Backup (and Restore) Day meaning an awareness on making sure your data, applications, settings, configurations, keys, software and systems are backed up, and can be recovered.

Hopefully none of you are in the situation where data, applications, systems, computers, laptops, tablets, smart phones or other devices only get backed up or protected once a year, however maybe you know somebody who does.

March also marks the 10th anniversary of Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud services (more here), happy birthday AWS.

March wraps up on the 31st with World Backup Day which is intended to draw attention to the importance of data protection and your ability to recover applications and data. While backup are important, so to are testing to make sure you can actually use and recover from what was protected. Keep in mind that while some claim backup is dead, data protection is alive and as along as vendors and others keep referring to data protection as backup, backup will stay alive.

Join me and folks from HP Enterprise (HPE) on March 31st at 1PM ET for a free webinar compliments of HPE with a theme of Backup with Brains, emphasis on awareness and analytics to enable smart data protection. Click here to learn more and register.

Enjoy this edition of the Server StorageIO update newsletter and watch for new tips, articles, StorageIO lab report reviews, blog posts, videos and podcast’s along with in the news commentary appearing soon.

Cheers GS

This months feature theme and topics include backup (and restore) as part of data protection, more on clouds (public, private and hybrid) including how some providers such as DropBox are moving out of public cloud providers such as AWS building their own data centers.

Building off of the February newsletter there is more on Google including their use of Non-Volatile Memory (NVM) aka NAND Flash Solid State Devices (SSD). and some of their research. In addition to Google’s use of SSD, check out the posts and industry activity on NVMe as well as other news and updates including new converged platforms from Cisco and HPE among others.

Recent and popular Server StorageIOblog posts include:

• The Future of Ethernet – 2016 Roadmap released by Ethernet Alliance
  Ethernet technologies continue to be enhanced from consumer focused, Internet of Things (IoT) and Internet of Devices (IoD) to enterprise, data centers, IT and non-IT usage as well as cloud and managed service providers. At the lower end where there is broad adoption, the continued evolution of easier to use, lower cost, interoperable technologies and interfaces expands Ethernet adoption footprint while at the higher-end, all of those IoT, IoD, consumer and other devices aggregated (consolidate) into cloud and other services that have the need for speeds from 10GbE, 40GbE, 100GbE and 400GbE.
• Non-Volatile Memory (NVM) includes persistent memory such as NAND flash and other forms Solid State Devices (SSD). NVM express (NVMe) is a new server storage I/P protocol alternative to AHCI/SATA and the SCSI protocol used by Serial Attached SCSI (SAS). The key question with NVMe is not if, rather when, where, why, how and with what will it appear in your data center or server storage I/O data infrastructure.

  The following are a series of primer and NVMe overview posts along with links to where you can learn more including at www.thenvmeplace.com

  • NVMe overview and primer – Part I
  • Part II – NVMe overview and primer (Different Configurations)
  • Part III – Server StorageIO February 2016 Update Newsletter
  • Part IV – NVMe overview and primer (Where and How to use NVMe)
  • Part V – NVMe overview and primer (Where to learn more, what this all means)
• Server StorageIO February 2016 Update Newsletter

View other recent as well as past blog posts here

Some new Products Technology Services Announcements (PTSA) include:

The above is a sampling of some of the various industry news, announcements and updates for this March. Watch for more news and updates in April coming out of NAB and OpenStack Summit among other events.

View other recent news and industry trends here.

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