Server StorageIO October 2015 Update Newsletter

Volume 15, Issue X – Industry Trends, M&A, PTSA

Hello and welcome to this October 2015 Server StorageIO update newsletter. Fall has arrived here in the northern hemisphere which means its spring in the southern hemisphere, and getting colder here. While fall means cooler out-door temperature with winter just around the corner, in the IT/ITC industry, particular the data infrastructure sector (server, storage, I/O networking, hardware, software, cloud, physical, software defined virtual) things are very hot. Sure the various industry and vendor focused conferences, road shows and mini-events with associated new product, technology or services announcements (PTSA. There are also the various merger and acquisitions (M&A) that have occurred throughout the year including the recent Dell buying EMC, and Western Digital (WD) buying SANdisk among others.

This edition of the Server StorageIO update newsletter has a focus on industry trends perspectives including recent M&A and PTSA activity. In addition to industry fall industry M&A and PTSA activity, there also plenty of conference, seminars, workshops, webinars and other events some of which you can see here on the Server StorageIO events page.

On a slightly different note, for those interested and not aware of the European Union (EU) ruling earlier this month on data privacy (e.g. Safe Harbor), here and here are a couple of links to stories discussing the new ruling changes between the EU and US (among other countries). The EU data privacy rulings involve personal data being moved out of EU countries to US data centers such as cloud and application services firms.

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 topic theme is industry trends perspectives including M&A activity.

Some M&A, IPO and divestiture activity includes:

• Dell buying EMC for $67B USD while EMC and VMware create public cloud unit based on Virtustream that reports into VMware.
• HDD and SSD manufacturer WD buying SANdisk for $19B USD following their acquisition earlier this year of Amplidata (Object Storage) and earlier bought HDD and SSD manufacturer HGST along with SSD PCIe card vendor Virident and STEC among others.
• HDD and SSD manufacturer Seagate bought DotHill, keep in mind that Seagate last year bought Xyratex along with the LSI flash business from Avago who bought LSI.
• Intel buying Altera for $16B USD, Avago buys Broadcom and Skywords buying PMC Sierra (NVMe, PCIe, SAS controllers, switches, RAID cards e.g. Adaptec).
• IBM buys Cleversafe for cloud and object storage indicating the technology will be placed in its Softlayer cloud unit.
• HP and SANdisk partner on ReRAM for Storage Class Memory aka NVM. Meanwhile HP exiting public cloud market (e.g. shutting down Helion). Keep in mind that HP will also be splitting into two companies in November one focused on PCs and printers (e.g. HP Inc.) and one on enterprise solutions (e.g. HP Enterprise).
• Pure Storage (all flash array aka AFA SSD vendor) does an IPO (here and here).

Continue reading more about NVM, NVMe, NAND flash, SSD Server and storage I/O related topics at www.thessdplace.com as well as about I/O performance, monitoring and benchmarking tools at www.storageperformance.us.

Recent and popular Server StorageIOblog posts include:

• Dude, Dell is Getting (Buying) an EMC and VMware Deal
• Server StorageIO September 2015 Update Newsletter
• PACE your Server Storage I/O decision-making, its about application requirements
• Fall 2015 Server Storage I/O Cloud Virtual Seminars Going Dutch

View other recent as well as past blog posts here

Some new Products Technology Services Announcements (PTSA) include:

• Amazon Web Service (AWS) Simple Storage Service (S3) Infrequent Access (IA) storage class for inactive data with immediate access vs. Glacier cold or frozen (dormant) data with slow or time delayed access. AWS also announced Snowball bulk data import/export 50TB appliance service in addition to their earlier offered capabilities.
• EMC Rexray (part of EMCcode) and Mesosphere (for Mesos data center operating system) have joined to enable persistent Docker volumes for Mesos (e.g. data center operating system platform).
• Microsoft Azure recent enhancements include file access of cloud storage (on-premises and within Azure cloud) leveraging SMB interfaces. Here is a primer on Azure cloud storage service offerings. View other recent Azure Cloud Storage, Compute, Database and Data Analytics service offerings here. In addition to Microsoft Azure cloud offerings or Windows 10 desktop operating system, you can also download WIndows Server 2016 Technical Preview 3 (TP3) and see what’s new here. Some of the features include Storage Spaces Direct (e.g. DAS storage) and replication among other features.
• OpenStack scheduled release Liberty (release notes and what’s new).

View other recent news and industry trends here

Non-Volatile Memory (NVM) Express (NVMe) continues to evolve as a technology for enabling and improving server storage I/O for NVM including nand flash SSD storage. NVMe streamlines performance enabling more work to be done (e.g. IOPs), data to be moved (bandwidth) at a lower response time using less CPU. The above figure is a quick look comparing nand flash SSD being accessed via SATA III (6Gbps) on the left and NVMe (x4) on the right. As with any server storage I/O performance comparisons there are many variables and take them with a grain of salt. While IOPs and bandwidth are often discussed, keep in mind that with the new protocol, drivers and device controllers with NVMe that streamline I/O less CPU is needed. Learn more about NVM, NVMe, flash, SSD and related topics at www.thessdplace.com.

View other StorageIO lab review reports here