Server StorageIO November 2015 Update Newsletter

Volume 15, Issue XI – November 2015

Hello and welcome to this November 2015 Server StorageIO update newsletter. Winter has arrived here in the northern hemisphere, although technically its still fall until the winter solstice in December. Regardless of if summer or winter depending on which hemisphere you are, 2015 is about to wrap up meaning end of year (EOY) activities.

EOY activities can mean final shopping or acquisitions for technology and services or simply for home and fun. This is also that time of year where predictions for 2016 will start streaming out as well as reflections looking back at 2015 appear (lets save those for December ;). Another EOY activity is planning for 2016 as well as getting items ready for roll-out or launch in the new year. Needless to say there is a lot going on so with that, 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

In This Issue

Commentary in the news

Tips and Articles

StorageIOblog posts

Events and Webinars

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 commentary and industry trends perspectives about news, activities tips, and announcements.

TheFibreChannel.com: Industry Analyst Interview: Greg Schulz, StorageIO
EnterpriseStorageForum: Comments Handling Virtual Storage Challenges
PowerMore (Dell): Q&A: When to implement ultra-dense storage

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:

Virtual Blocks (VMware Blogs): EVO:RAIL Part II – Why And When To Use It?
This is the second of a multi-part series looking at Converged Infrastructures (CI), Hyper-Converged Infrastructures (HCI), Cluster in Box (CiB) and other unified solution bundles. There is a trend of industry adoption talking about CI, HCI, CiB and other bundled solutions, along with growing IT customer adoption and deployment. Different sized organizations are looking at various types of CI solutions to meet various application and workloads needs. Read more here and part I here.

TheFibreChannel.com: Industry Analyst Interview: Greg Schulz, StorageIO
In part one of a two part article series, Frank Berry, storage industry analyst and Founder of IT Brand Pulse and editor of TheFibreChannel.com, recently spoke with StorageIO Founder Greg Schulz about Fibre Channel SAN integration with OpenStack, why Rackspace is using Fibre Channel and more. Read more here

CloudComputingAdmin.com: Cloud Storage Decision Making – Using Microsoft Azure for cloud storage
Let’s say that you have been tasked with, or decided that it is time to use (or try) public cloud storage such as Microsoft Azure. Ok, now what do you do and what decisions need to be made? Keep in mind that Microsoft Azure like many other popular public clouds provides many different services available for fee (subscription) along with free trials. These services include applications, compute, networking, storage along with development and management platform tools. Read more here.

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

StorageIO Videos and Podcasts

StorageIO podcasts are also available via and at StorageIO.tv

StorageIO Webinars and Industry Events

Deltaware Emerging Technology Summit November 10, 2015

Dell Data Protection Summit Nov 4, 2015 7AM PT

Microsoft MVP Summit Nov 2-5, 2015

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

Server StorageIO Recommended Reading List

The following are various recommended reading including books, blogs and videos. If you have not done so recently, also check out the Intel Recommended Reading List (here) where you will also find a couple of my books.

In case you had not heard, Microsoft recently released the bits (e.g. software download) for Windows Server 2016 Technical Preview 4 (TP4). TP4 is the successor to Technical Preview 3 (TP3) that was released this past August and is the most recent public preview version of the next Windows Server. TP4 adds a new tiering capability where Windows and storage spaces can cache and migrate data between Hard Disk Drives (HDD) and Non-Volatile Memory (NVM) including flash SSD. The new tiering feature supports a mixed HDD and NVM with flash SSD (including NVM Express or NVMe), as well as an all NVM scenario. Yes, that is correct, tiering with all NVM is not a type, instead enables using lower latency faster NVM along with lower cost higher capacity flash SSD. Learn more about what’s in TP4 from a server and storage I/O perspective in this Microsoft post, as well as more about S2D in this Microsoft Technet post here and here. You can get the Windows Server 2016 TP4 bits here which are already running in the Server StorageIO lab.