Tag: AI

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How I saved money storing more data on aws s3 simple storage service #blogtobertech

How I saved money storing more data on aws s3 simple storage service #blogtobertech

How I saved money storing more data on aws s3 simple storage service

How I saved money storing more data on aws s3 simple storage service is an example of reducing cloud costs as opposed to merely cutting cloud costs. What this means is that instead of just cutting my cloud storage costs with a focus on how much I could save, I wanted to remove some costs while also storing more data without compromise. For example, since making the changes, storage capacity usage has almost doubled, yet prices are remaining 37% lower from two years ago before the changes were made.

How I saved money storing more data on aws s3?

Without adding any context, the typical reaction might be that I saved money storing more data on (or in) AWS S3 as opposed to locally on-site (on-prem). Another typical response would be that I moved all of my data from a different more expensive cloud service to AWS S3. Yet another common reaction would that I moved my AWS S3 data into AWS Glacier cold storage, or, deleted a large amount of data.

Some might even comment that I must have used some type of dedupe, compression or other data footprint reduction (DFR) technology. On the other hand, some might determine that I probably did all or some of the above, or, leveraged AWS tiered storage, aligning different storage classes to the type of data activity.

How I saved money storing more data in AWS S3 actually involved spending some money, to eventually save money by leveraging different S3 storage classes. As part of rebalancing or moving different data to its new storage class, some one-time charges were incurred which recouped after several months of savings. The costs pertained to EC2 compute instances and associated storage used for some of the data tiering, other fees were for access charges along with excessive API calls. For example, some of the data was in storage classes that had fees for early retrieval or deletions, or fees for access among others.

How I use different AWS S3 storage classes (tiers)

  • Standard – Frequently changing data, or data with frequent access
  • Infrequent Access (IA) – Data that does not change frequently or that is not routinely accessed. In the past before OZA, I had placed data that did not need to be in standard, yet to warm for Glacier in this storage class. After the migrations, I have fewer data stored in IA, with more in OZA as well as some in Standard.
  • One Zone Availability (OZA) – Data that is frequently accessed for reading, however, is static, not yet cold enough to move to Glacier or deep archive. A mix of backups, online and active archives. Note that I use OZA as an additional copy or location and not as a single, lowest cost place to store data. In other words, anything that I put into OZA has at least one additional copy somewhere else which may not be in the cloud.
  • Glacier – Very cold, seldom accessed, archives

Where to learn more

Learn more about Clouds and Data Infrastructure related trends, tools, technologies and topics via the following links:

Additional learning experiences along with common questions (and answers), as well as tips can be found in Software Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials book.

Software Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials Book SDDC

What this all means

I decreased my AWS monthly bill by balancing things around, there was a one-month period where my costs increased during the changes, then a subsequent reduction. However, while I saw my monthly AWS storage invoices decrease, I’m also storing more data per month. How I saved money storing more data on aws s3 simple storage service involved using different storage classes.

Ok, nuff said, for now.

Cheers Gs

Greg Schulz – Microsoft MVP Cloud and Data Center Management, VMware vExpert 2010-2018. Author of Software Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials (CRC Press), as well as Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking (CRC Press), The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC Press), Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier) and twitter @storageio. Courteous comments are welcome for consideration. First published on https://storageioblog.com any reproduction in whole, in part, with changes to content, without source attribution under title or without permission is forbidden.

All Comments, (C) and (TM) belong to their owners/posters, Other content (C) Copyright 2006-2024 Server StorageIO and UnlimitedIO. All Rights Reserved. StorageIO is a registered Trade Mark (TM) of Server StorageIO.

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Dont Stop Learning Expand Your Skills Experiences Everyday #blogtobertech

Dont Stop Learning Expand Your Skills Experiences Everyday #blogtobertech

Dont Stop Learning Expand Your Skills Experiences Everyday

Dont Stop Learning Expand Your Skills Experiences Everyday including moving beyond or outside our current tradecraft focus area. If you are an expert in a field or given focus area, learn something new about an area outside your expertise or comfort zone. Now if you are of the mind-set that there is nothing new to learn about, it’s all old, boring, perhaps its time to step back, look around, explore other areas.

Doing something new can be in an adjacent technology area, or something completely unrelated. For example, in a recent VMUG keynote presentation and blog post I discussed how Next Generation Hybrid Software Defined Data Infrastructures Are In Your Future.

Dont Stop Learning Expand Your Skills Experiences Everyday
Next Generation Data Infrastructures are in your future (if not already)

What tradecraft skills and experience do you need to have, expand or refresh to support next-generation hybrid software-defined data infrastructures? If you are a server person than you need to broaden your tradecraft skills experience to storage, I/O networking, cloud, virtual, container across hardware as well as software. Likewise, if you are storage or I/O and networking, you need to expand into other areas. If you are a VMware focused professional, then learn about Microsoft Hyper-V or vice versa. If you are an AWS focused person, learn about Google, Azure or vice versa, same applies across different technology domains.

On the other hand, if you know all there is to know, chances are they are other areas you need to learn more about, or, determine what you don’t know to address that. By chance, if you do happen to know everything, there is to know, how much time are you spending interacting with others to teach them, possibly learning something new yourself.

Invest Time into Your Tradecraft Skill set

If you are not spending at least an hour a day learning something new, you are missing out on the opportunity. Part of that hour should also be outside your comfort zone core focus area. For example, if you are a software pro, learn more about hardware, clouds, or something different. If you are a VMware focused person, learn Hyper-V, AWS, Azure, something else. If you are storage, learn server, network, cloud and beyond. If you are focused on data infrastructures, then learn about the upper-level business applications along with the users who use them and vice versa.

How I Continue to Learn Expanding My Tradecraft Skills Experience Every day

As part of expanding my tradecraft, I spend part of my day learning, refreshing on core data infrastructure focus areas (servers, storage, I/O networking, hardware, software, cloud, containers, converged, software-defined, data protection) and related topics. Learning involves vendor briefings, researching, talking with others, reading, hands-on technology trial to gain insight experience perspectives.

I also have expanded my tradecraft experiences by becoming an FAA Part 107 licensed commercial pilot of small unmanned aerial system (sUAS), small unmanned aerial vehicle (sUAV) or more commonly merely called drones. Besides being FAA licensed, I also expanded by becoming Minnesota sUAV/drone and aerial photography licensed. Drone flying has an adjacent to data infrastructures in that one of my drones’ records at 4K 60 frames per second (fps) meaning about 1 GByte of data every two minutes of video, plus telemetry. Note that the drones have internet capability and can be considered IoT for their video, as well as telemetry.


Above is a 4K video flights via my companion site www.picturesoverstillwater.com

Where to learn more

Learn more about learning, data infrastructures, tradecraft, drones as well as related trends, tools, technologies and topics via the following links:

Additional learning experiences along with common questions (and answers), as well as tips can be found in Software Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials book.

Software Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials Book SDDC

What this all means

What this means is that in addition to expanding as well as refreshing my data infrastructure related tradecraft skills, I’am also expanding my experiences into other adjacent areas. In other words, instead of just talking about big data, fast data, video, IoT, drones and related, I’am involved with it hands on.

Keep in mind, at some point the student becomes the teacher, and a teacher is a student. Leverage your pair of eyes and ears to see things in different ways, listen to and learn about items outside your primary focus area as you expand or refresh your tradecraft skill set experiences.

If you can’t learn something new every day, either you are not trying, or you are in trouble. Even experts and unicorns can learn something new every day, even if that is as simple as learning to listen to others.

With October being #blogtobertech there are plenty of opportunities to Don’t Stop Learning Expand Your Skills Experiences Everyday which also includes student becoming teacher, teacher being student.

Ok, nuff said, for now.

Cheers Gs

Greg Schulz – Microsoft MVP Cloud and Data Center Management, VMware vExpert 2010-2018. Author of Software Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials (CRC Press), as well as Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking (CRC Press), The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC Press), Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier) and twitter @storageio. Courteous comments are welcome for consideration. First published on https://storageioblog.com any reproduction in whole, in part, with changes to content, without source attribution under title or without permission is forbidden.

All Comments, (C) and (TM) belong to their owners/posters, Other content (C) Copyright 2006-2024 Server StorageIO and UnlimitedIO. All Rights Reserved. StorageIO is a registered Trade Mark (TM) of Server StorageIO.

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Next Generation Hybrid Software Defined Data Infrastructures Are In Your Future #blogtobertech

Next Generation Hybrid Software Defined Data Infrastructures Are In Your Future #blogtobertech

A few weeks ago I was invited to present a keynote at the 1st annual Minnesota VMware User Group (VMUG) Super VMUG mega event in Minneapolis titled Next Generation Hybrid Software Defined Data Infrastructures Are In Your Future (download PDF presentation here).

Key themes of the presentation focused around data infrastructures (e.g. what’s inside physical data centers including server, storage, I/O networking, hardware, software, policies, procedures) along with industry trends including hybrid software defined clouds (and containers). Anther aspect of the presentation focused around building, refreshing and expanding our fundamental data infrasture tradecraft skills. Also keep in mind that everything is not the same across different environments, granted there are similarities that can be leveraged.


Data Infrasture’s are defined to support business applications information service delivery

Data Infrastructures

The fundamental role of data infrastructures is to provide a platform environment for applications and data that is resilient, flexible, scalable, agile, efficient as well as cost-effective. Put another way, data infrastructures exist to protect, preserve, process, move, secure and serve data as well as their applications for information services delivery. Technologies that makeup data infrastructures include hardware, software, cloud or managed services, servers, storage, I/O and networking along with people, processes, policies along with various tools spanning legacy, software-defined virtual, containers and cloud.

Depending on your role or focus, you may have a different view than somebody else of what is infrastructure, or what an infrastructure is. Generally speaking, people tend to refer to infrastructure as those things that support what they are doing at work, at home, or in other aspects of their lives. For example, the roads and bridges that carry you over rivers or valleys when traveling in a vehicle are referred to as infrastructure.

Similarly, the system of pipes, valves, meters, lifts, and pumps that bring fresh water to you, and the sewer system that takes away waste water, are called infrastructure. The telecommunications network. This includes both wired and wireless, such as cell phone networks, along with electrical generating and transmission networks are considered infrastructure. Even the airplanes, trains, boats, and buses that transport us locally or globally are considered part of the transportation infrastructure. Anything that is below what you do, or that supports what you do is considered infrastructure.

The following figure shows various layers or altitudes of encapsulation and abstraction of data infrastructures along with their underlying resources that are defined to support a business enablement outcome, as well as support information services delivery.


Data Infrastructure Stack Layers and Resources Defined To Support Business Information Services

The following figure shows evolution of data infrastructures from on-prem bare metal to software-defined virtual, cloud, containers, converged and hyper-converged packaging as well as emerging composable. Also shown below are a hybrid as well as multi-clouds including bare metal dedicated services in addition to virtual machine instances as well as container-based services.


Data Infrastructure and Resource Packaging Deployment Evolution

Hybrid Software Defined Industry Trends

Some of the trends discussed in the presentation include:

Clouds – Public, Private, Hybrid, Multi and hybrid clouds along with how they are being used, along with technology evolution including virtual machine (VM) instances, bare metal dedicated private servers (DPS) as well as metal as a service. Other cloud trends include data migration appliances such as AWS Snowball Edge, Microsoft Azure Databox among others, VMware on AWS, as well as fog and edge computing.

Other trend topics included converged, hyper-converged, serverless, containers, persistent memory (PMEM) also known as storage class memory (SCM) along with other server storage I/O topics. Additional trend topics included data protection, Azure Stack, security, NVMe as well as NVMe over Fabrics (NVMeoF) along with composable and Gen-Z.

Tradecraft Skills Experience

Expanding your data infrastructure tradecraft means evolving from your primary focus area, gaining insight into other technologies, tools, techniques in adjacent areas outside your comfort zone. For industry veterans with several years to many decades of experience, this means refreshing on what you know, think you know or need to know with what’s new or evolving. On other other hand, for those who are new, expanding your tradecraft means moving beyond learning to memorize to pass a certificate test, to gaining insight on how, when, where, why to apply different tools, technologies, trends to tasks at hand.

For example, developing tradecraft from knowing the different hardware, software, and services resources as well as tools, to what to use when, where, why, and how. Another dimension of expanding data infrastructure tradecraft skills is gaining the experience and insight to troubleshoot problems, gain insight awareness with dashboard or monitoring tools, as well as how to design and manage to cut or reduce the chance of things going wrong.

From Tools and Technologies to Techniques and Tricks of the Trade

Expanding your awareness of new technologies along with how they work is important, so too is understanding application and organization needs. Developing your tradecraft means balancing the focus on new and old technologies, tools, and techniques with business or organizational application functionality.

This is where using various tools that themselves are applications to gain insight into how your data infrastructure is configured and being used, along with the applications they support, is important.

Data Infrastructure Tools Tradecraft
Data Infrastructure Toolbox (Hardware, Software, Scripts)

Next Generation Hybrid Software Defined Data Infrastructures What Next


Balance head in the clouds (thinking, strategy, vision) with feet on the ground (what you can do today)

The following are some additional tips, comments, recommendations to keep in mind for enabling your next generation hybrid software defined data infrastructure.

Where to learn more

Learn more about data infrastructures and tradecraft related trends, tools, technologies and topics via the following links:

Additional learning experiences along with common questions (and answers), as well as tips can be found in Software Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials book.

Software Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials Book SDDC

What this all means

Everything is not the same across different organizations, IT environments, application workloads and the data infrastructures that support them. Data Infrasture’s span from legacy on-prem to software-defined cloud (public, private, hybrid, multi-cloud), container, serverless, virtual, hybrid, converged and hyper-converged, as well as central, core and distributed edge or remote office branch office (ROBO). Even though everything is not the same, there are similarities across different environments, technologies and workloads that can be leveraged. Fundamental tradecraft skills and experiences are what enable you to know what to use when, where, why and how including using new as well as old things in new ways, while not making old mistakes in new ways.

Some other tips include avoid flying blind, particular in software defined and cloud environments, have situational awareness, end to end (E2E) insight leveraging metrics that matter, are relevant, timely, accurate and hold context to the data infrastructures as well as applications they support. Part of expanding your tradecraft skills is refreshing on what you know, also expanding into new adjacent areas getting out of your comfort zone. Also understand the context of different terms, technologies and tools. For example, SAS can be big data analytic statistical analysis software, serial attached SCSI storage device as well as shared access signature for Azure clouds among others.

Also keep in mind that while software defined things are popular and trendy with the industry, keep the focus on what is being defined to enable an outcome or business enablement In other words, the emphasis should not be on the software aspect per say, rather how something (hardware, software, service) is defined to enable something. Also keep in mind with software defined marketing and trends such as serverless, servers and software still need hardware (somewhere), and hardware still needs software from micro code to firmware to many other places in the data infrasture layers or stack. Meanwhile, keep in mind that it is #blogtobertech and Next Generation Hybrid Software Defined Data Infrastructures Are In Your Future.

Ok, nuff said, for now.

Cheers Gs

Greg Schulz – Microsoft MVP Cloud and Data Center Management, VMware vExpert 2010-2018. Author of Software Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials (CRC Press), as well as Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking (CRC Press), The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC Press), Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier) and twitter @storageio. Courteous comments are welcome for consideration. First published on https://storageioblog.com any reproduction in whole, in part, with changes to content, without source attribution under title or without permission is forbidden.

All Comments, (C) and (TM) belong to their owners/posters, Other content (C) Copyright 2006-2024 Server StorageIO and UnlimitedIO. All Rights Reserved. StorageIO is a registered Trade Mark (TM) of Server StorageIO.

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Server StorageIO 2018 VMworld Data Infrastructure Buzzword Bingo Puzzle

Server StorageIO 2018 VMworld Data Infrastructure Buzzword Bingo Puzzle

Server StorageIO 2018 VMworld Data Infrastructure Buzzword Bingo Puzzle

Following up from last years 2017 crossword puzzle for travel fun, here is the Server StorageIO 2018 VMworld Data Infrastructure Buzzword Bingo Puzzle (click on the below image for PDF version that includes answers). The Server StorageIO 2018 VMworld Data Infrastructure Buzzword Bingo Puzzle can be something to do while traveling, taking a break between (or during) sessions as well as keynotes. I wonder which buzzword term will get used the most, as well as new ones to be added to an updated version of this?

Server StorageIO 2018 VMworld Data Infrastructure Buzzword Bingo Puzzle

Where to learn more

Learn more about VMworld and data infrastructures related topics via the following links:

Additional learning experiences along with common questions (and answers), as well as tips can be found in Software Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials book.

Software Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials Book SDDC

What this all means

Next week is VMworld 2018 in Las Vegas which means for some traveling and long week. Feel free to suggest additions as there could be a revision, update or two between now and VMworld. Have fun, safe travels, hope to see you next week in the meantime enjoy the Server StorageIO 2018 VMworld Data Infrastructure Buzzword Bingo Puzzle.

Ok, nuff said, for now.

Cheers Gs

Greg Schulz – Microsoft MVP Cloud and Data Center Management, VMware vExpert 2010-2018. Author of Software Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials (CRC Press), as well as Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking (CRC Press), The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC Press), Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier) and twitter @storageio. Courteous comments are welcome for consideration. First published on https://storageioblog.com any reproduction in whole, in part, with changes to content, without source attribution under title or without permission is forbidden.

All Comments, (C) and (TM) belong to their owners/posters, Other content (C) Copyright 2006-2024 Server StorageIO and UnlimitedIO. All Rights Reserved. StorageIO is a registered Trade Mark (TM) of Server StorageIO.

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Dell EMC PowerEdge MX 7000 Kinetic Based Data Infrastructure Architecture

Dell EMC PowerEdge MX 7000 Kinetic Based Data Infrastructure Architecture

Dell EMC PowerEdge MX 7000 Kinetic Based Data Infrastructure Architecture

Dell EMC today announced with a tag line IT Unbound their new PowerEdge MX 7000 Kinetic Based Data Infrastructure Architecture slated for general availability September 21, 2018. Previewed earlier this year at Dell Technology World in Las Vegas, PowerEdge MX 7000 is a new family of modular, scalable servers for various data infrastructure roles.

What is different with PowerEdge MX 7000 compared to other new 14th generation (Gen 14) Dell servers is the finer granularity of resource allocation based around the new Kinetic composable infrastructure. Also previewed at Dell Technology World earlier this year in Las Vegas, Kinetic (not to be confused the Seagate Kinetic object storage key value drive initiative) is a new composable architecture.

Dell EMC PowerEdge MX 7000 Kinetic What Was Announced

  • First instantiation of Kinetic composable based data infrastructure resources
  • OpenManage Enterprise Modular Edition
  • PowerEdge MX 7000 modular data infrastructure server

Dell EMC PowerEdge MX 7000 and Kinetic Architecture
Dell EMC PowerEdge MX 7000 and Kinetic Architecture Image via Dell.com

Dell EMC Kinetic Composability What Is It

By being a composable data infrastructure resource and server, Dell EMC Kinetic based solutions can be decomposed with finer granularity than previous servers. What this means is that in the past, memory, I/O network, physical storage devices, compute sockets and cores were assigned to a single image instance. The only image instance could be an operating system (OS) such as Linux or Windows based, a hypervisor such as KVM, Microsoft Hyper-V, Nitro (AWS), Oracle, VMware vSphere ESXi, or Xen among others, as well as proprietary decomposition and aggregation software (and hardware) technology (ScaleMP among others).

With a composable based solution, instead of the entire server, or motherboard(s) and its resources allocated to a single OS as a bare metal (BM) or Metal as a Service (MaaS) instance, or to a hypervisor, different resources can be allocated to various instances. On the surface it would be easy to say that sounds a lot like what hypervisors such as those from Microsoft, VMware, and others are doing, particular with clusters.

Dell EMC Kinetic Data Infrastructure Architecture
Dell EMC Kinetic Data Infrastructure Architecture Image via Dell.com

However, the difference is that with hypervisors, all of a server’s physical resources (compute, memory, I/O, storage devices, GPU, FPGA/ASIC) are allocated to the OS, hypervisor, or composition software, that then creates vCPU, vRAM, and related resources. Emphasis is on enabling more granular resource allocation as well as scaling out. The business or organizational outcome is what is essential which means, better allocation and effective use of resources to boost productivity vs. merely driving up utilization and efficiency.

Dell EMC PowerEdge MX 7000 Eliminates traditional hardware-based mid-plane with an internal fabric connector per node that can also be exposed outside of the physical MX enclosure. By using an industry standard connector on the edge of server motherboard resource nodes, different server I/O connectivity can be leveraged as it becomes available or improves. For example, IMHO it is not too complicated to envision a time in the not so distant future when Kinetic enabled resources (e.g., server nodes) evolve to support the emerging Gen-Z server I/O connectivity protocol.

What is Gen-Z

Does PowerEdge MX 7000 and Kinetic use Gen-Z today? Not yet, however, Dell has been showing demos and technology proof of concepts at various events.

Why bring up Gen-Z now? Simple, it’s something that will be part of many data infrastructure, the server I/O, storage, networking, hardware and software-defined discussions in the not so distant future.

As a refresher or primer, Gen-Z is a new server I/O fabric interface that supports access of and by CPU sockets along with their cores or memory including DRAM as well as emerging SCM as well as PMEM. In addition to server memory access. Gen-Z also enables local as well as remote access to memory, storage, GPU, FPGA, ASIC among other resources. For backward compatibility as well as investment protection, Gen-Z is intended to work with existing PCIe, Ethernet, Fibre Channel, SAS, SATA, NVMe, InfiniBand among another server I/O interconnects and protocols.

Does this mean Gen-Z is a challenger for Ethernet and another IP-based general LAN networking? IMHO no, at least not in the foreseeable future, granted like PCIe, Fibre Channel, InfiniBand, Ethernet and some others that have joined the where are they now list of technologies that promised to be the end all network for everything, near-term Gen-Z is focused on inside a modular enclosure or perhaps within a rack. Read more about Gen-Z here, as well as Dell EMC blog The Gen-Z Journey road to composability.

Dell OpenManage Enterprise
Dell OpenManage Management Interface Image via Dell.com

OpenManage Enterprise Modular Edition

Management for PowerEdge MX 7000 utilizes OpenManage Enterprise Modular Edition that is an HTML5 REST based with API tool. Management capabilities include workflow’s for simplicity of operation and lifecycle management. OpenManage Enterprise Module Edition besides being HTML5 REST API is also RedFish inspired for further interoperability. Note that PowerEdge MX 7000 is also integrated with Dell iDRAC physical machine level management interface provides unified management from a single to multiple server groups spanning towers to racks.

Dell EMC PowerEdge MX 7000
Dell EMC PowerEdge MX 7000 Image via Dell.com

Dell EMC PowerEdge MX 7000 Kinetic Based Data Infrastructure Server

The new Dell EMC PowerEdge MX 7000 is the first installment of their new Kinetic based composable architecture. The new Dell EMC PowerEdge MX 7000 components consist of a 7U chassis with power and cooling fans, along with compute sled, storage sled, I/O connectivity and inner fabric, along with management tools.

Dell EMC PowerEdge MX 7000 Modules
Dell EMC PowerEdge MX 7000 Modules Image via Dell.com

Dell EMC PowerEdge MX 7000 Server Compute modules

Dell EMC PowerEdge MX 7000 Compute sleds include MX740c (single width) and MX840c (double width) that are two and four socket modules with local on-board NVMe (e.g., U.2 8639 small form factor SFF) drives (per module). These initial compute modules support Intel Xeon processors and up to six (6) TBytes of memory. The MX740c supports up to six (6) local NVMe, SAS or SATA drives (e.g., 8639 connectors), while the MX840c supports up to eight (8) local drives. Note that these local onboard drives can be shared with other sled modules, as well as compute sleds can access the shared storage sled-based drives.

Dell EMC PowerEdge MX 7000 Server Storage modules

Dell EMC PowerEdge MX 7000 Storage sled consists of MX5016s holding up to 16 hot-pluggable SAS HDD, up to seven MX5016s sleds can be configured per MX chassis for up to 112 direct attached storage (DAS) drives. Each of the drives can be individually mapped to one or more servers supporting aggregated (e.g., HCI) as well as disaggregated (CI and legacy) deployment topologies.

Dell EMC PowerEdge MX 7000 Server I/O Networking Modules

Initial server I/O modules for the new Dell EMC PowerEdge MX include 25GbE and 32G Fibre Channel (GFC) host connectivity along with 100GbE and 32 GFC uplink capabilities with the top of rack (ToR)support built in along with Open Networking OS10EE software enabled. The server I/O modules provide both north-south, as well as east-west connectivity inside and outside the chassis for data plane and management plane traffic.

Server I/O connectivity options include:

  • MX5108n Ethernet Switch with 8 x 25GbE (server facing ports), 2 x 100GbE ports, 1 x 40GbE port, 4 x 10GbE ports.
  • MX9116n Fabric Switching Engine (e.g., Kinetic fabric) with 16 x 25GbE server facing ports, 2 x 100GbE/8 x 32GFC unified ports, 2 x 100 GbE ports and 12 fabric expansion ports.
  • MXG610s Fibre Channel Switch with 16 x 32GFC internal ports, 8 x 32 GFC SFP+ ports and 2 QSFP (4 x 32GFC) uplink ports.

Where to learn more

Learn more about Dell EMC PowerEdge MX, Kinetic, Composable and data infrastructures related topics via the following links:

Additional learning experiences along with common questions (and answers), as well as tips can be found in Software Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials book.

Software Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials Book SDDC

What this all means

Overall this is a good announcement of technology, product, as well as where resources are headed to meet different workload demands and look forward to getting some test time with a Dell EMC PowerEdge MX 7000.

Dell EMC PowerEdge MX 7000 Three Tenants
Dell EMC PowerEdge MX 7000 Three Tenants Image via Dell.com

The new Dell EMC PowerEdge MX 7000 Provides a data infrastructure resource platform for deploying traditional, cloud, software-defined, composable, as well as converged infrastructure (CI) disaggregated, as well as hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) aggregated along with hybrid configurations.

With the Dell EMC PowerEdge MX 7000, there is more resource granularity and future-proof capabilities than traditional high-density blade, as well as twin, quad or eight node server configuration solutions.

Many vendors talk about solutions being future proof or enabling investment protection, with PowerEdge MX 7000, Dell EMC is taking the next step in discussing trends, technology, and what you can do today. Unlike traditional dual, quad, eight or high-density node and blade servers with dedicated discrete mid-planes tied to a given technology, Dell PowerEdge MX 7000 and Kinetic based architecture are mid planes aka back plane free. Now there is still connectivity between the different PowerEdge MX 7000 chassis modules which is a fabric (network if you prefer).

For example, server compute sled modules have an industry standard connector that connects with other components in the chassis. What differs from the traditional blade and multi-node server configurations is that on board the compute sleds; an adapter module can be changed to support a new interface over different generations of technology (as an example, keep an eye on what happens with Gen-Z).

The result is that the Dell EMC PowerEdge MX 7000 should be an excellent platform for software-defined data centers (SDDC), software-defined data infrastructures (SDDI), software-defined infrastructures (SDI) as well as other software defined or traditional deployments. The Dell EMC PowerEdge MX 7000 will make for a good CI, HCI, SDDC, SDDI, SDI platform for public, private as well as hybrid clouds, PaaS as well as IaaS deployments, along with VMware, Microsoft (Hyper-V, Windows Storage Spaces Direct (S2D), as well as Azure Stack) among other scenarios.

By being flexible, scalable, agile and adaptable, easy management, responsive design that is future proof enabling a pool of dynamic data infrastructure resource, the Dell EMC PowerEdge MX 7000 should be good allowing IT Unbound.

Ok, nuff said, for now.

Cheers Gs

Greg Schulz – Microsoft MVP Cloud and Data Center Management, VMware vExpert 2010-2018. Author of Software Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials (CRC Press), as well as Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking (CRC Press), The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC Press), Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier) and twitter @storageio. Courteous comments are welcome for consideration. First published on https://storageioblog.com any reproduction in whole, in part, with changes to content, without source attribution under title or without permission is forbidden.

All Comments, (C) and (TM) belong to their owners/posters, Other content (C) Copyright 2006-2024 Server StorageIO and UnlimitedIO. All Rights Reserved. StorageIO is a registered Trade Mark (TM) of Server StorageIO.

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Catching Up With Summer 2018 IBM Cloudy Software Defined Storage Announcements

Summer 2018 IBM Cloudy Software Defined Storage Announcements

Catching Up With Summer 2018 IBM Cloudy Software Defined Storage Announcements

Time for some catching up with summer 2018 IBM cloudy software defined storage announcements that were made earlier this week. The Share Event (Mainframe centric) is occurring this week in St. Louis. Thus, it is no surprise that it is time for catching up with summer 2018 IBM cloudy software-defined storage announcements that are geared to mainframe Z environments. These cloud and software-defined storage for the mainframe environment announcements follow those from a few weeks ago including new Power9 based servers and IBM FlashSystem 9100 flash SSD.

What was announced

What IBM announced this week were a mix of mainframe Z server storage with software-defined storage and cloud (e.g. cloudy) support including:

IBM Spectrum Protect 8.1.6 multi-cloud updates with tiered backup across on-site and cloud. For example, active data remains on-site (or on-prem), inactive data protection copies get moved (tiered) to cloud storage. Other enhancements include software-defined threat protection such as malware and ransomware extending to hypervisor data, along with blueprint guides for IBM Cloud (e.g., Softlayer), AWS and Microsoft Azure.

IBM Spectrum Protect Plus 10.1.1 enhanced with encryption of vSnap repositories for security, VMware vSphere 6.7 support, improved dashboards user interfaces (UI), and DB2 support in addition to Microsoft SQL Server and Oracle.

IBM DS8882F storage
IBM DS8882F Z mainframe rack mount storage Image via IBM.com

IBM DS8882F rack-mounted storage system (part of DS8000 storage family) integrated with IBM Z ZR1 (mainframe) and LinuxOne Rockhopper II (mainframe) servers. The DS8882F supports from 6.4TB to 368.64TB raw capacity. Along with safeguarded copy protection including read-only copies (e.g., a variation of WORM), along with encrypted digital signatures, and 256-bit AES encryption.

IBM Cloud Object Storage aka COS (formerly known as Cleversafe) functions as a target tier for DS8880 without the need for an external gateway. Enhancements also include a new 1U server (via Quanta) supporting up to 72 TB configurations.

IBM Elastic Storage Server File and Object pre-configured storage for AI, ML, Big Data and High-Performance Compute (HPC) includes an integrated file (NFS, SMB, S3, Swift) and object access. The solution is pre-installed on IBM Power8 servers running Red Hat Linux (e.g., RHEL). IBM claims high throughput for NAS NFS workloads with a large number of server connections. However, some performance numbers would be impressive to see along with a side of context.

IBM Spectrum Scale on AWS is a software-defined storage solution alternative to the traditional appliance-based solution. With Spectrum Scale 5.0.2 IBM is joining other vendors who have made their software-defined storage solutions available on clouds such as AWS, Azure, Google among others. Besides running on AWS working with Virtual Private Clouds (VPC), IBM supports per TB licenses including bringing your own license a growing industry trend.

Where to learn more

Learn more about IBM Server, Storage, Data Protection and data infrastructures related topics via the following links:

Additional learning experiences along with common questions (and answers), as well as tips can be found in Software Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials book.

Software Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials Book SDDC

What this all means

Despite having been declared dead for decades, IBM Z series are still prevalent in many large environments even in a software-defined cloudy era. It’s good to see IBM continuing to invest in, and join other industry vendors who are supporting various cloudy deployments, as well as legacy on-site aka on-prem.

Likewise, IBM is making its legacy Z mainframe systems trendy and cloudy with these new enhancements to support customer hybrid server, storage, and data infrastructure deployments.

Overall, a nice set of incremental improvements following industry trends, and catching up with summer 2018 IBM cloudy software defined storage announcements.

Ok, nuff said, for now.

Cheers Gs

Greg Schulz – Microsoft MVP Cloud and Data Center Management, VMware vExpert 2010-2018. Author of Software Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials (CRC Press), as well as Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking (CRC Press), The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC Press), Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier) and twitter @storageio. Courteous comments are welcome for consideration. First published on https://storageioblog.com any reproduction in whole, in part, with changes to content, without source attribution under title or without permission is forbidden.

All Comments, (C) and (TM) belong to their owners/posters, Other content (C) Copyright 2006-2024 Server StorageIO and UnlimitedIO. All Rights Reserved. StorageIO is a registered Trade Mark (TM) of Server StorageIO.

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IBM announces new Power9 processor based E950 E980 server systems

IBM announces new Power9 processor based E950 E980 server systems

IBM announces new Power9 processor based E950 E980 server systems.

IBM announces new Power9 processor based E950 E980 server systems.

As a single server or node, the Power9 E950 supports up to four (4) CPU processor sockets each with multiple cores. An E980 system comprises up to four E950 based systems as a solution. The new E950 succeeds Power E850 and E850C, its machine type model number is 9040-MR9 that is a 4U single enclosure with two or four processor modules.


Power9 Processor image via IBM.com

IBM Power9 E950 and E980

As a refresher, leveraging IBMs proprietary processor chip technology called Power, which are used in their various mid-range and higher end server solutions.

The Power9 E950 and E980 systems support PowerVM virtualization, along with virtual machine (VM) mobility as well as optimization for OpenStack among other workloads.

IBM touts Power9 E950 (AIX and Linux) and E980 (AIX, Linux, I systems) optimized for:

  • Analytics, AI (ML/DL) and Cognitive computing
    • Faster cores and threads, more performance per socket
    • More bandwidth and lower latency
  • Super Compute (SC), Technical, High Performance Compute (HPC)
    • High bandwidth graphical processing unit (GPU) attachment
    • Optimized CPU GPU memory sharing and interaction
    • Bandwidth optimized main memory
    • Virtual addressing optimization
  • Cloud and Hyper Scale Data Infrastructures and Data Centers
    • Dense performance and energy consumption
    • Virtualization assist, QoS, power management and security
    • Fast I/O subsystem for server I/O to storage and networks
  • Enterprise data infrastructures and data centers
    • Scale-up and scale-out
    • Server and workload consolidation
    • Up to 4TB of buffered memory per socket (16TB per E950 node)

IBM E950 Power9 System

Front view of E950 System Image via IBM.com

The following image (via IBM.com) shows an exploded component view of the E950.
IBM Power9 E950 exploded view

The following image (via IBM.com) shows a top view looking down into an E950.

IBM Power9 E950 top view

E950 is a 4U server (or E980 node) with compute and memory features including:

  • Power9 8,10,11 or 12 cores per socket, up to 48 cores (4 x 12 cores)
  • Four times memory compared to E850 systems (up to 16TB or 4TB per socket)
  • Eight (8) memory riser cards with 16 DDR4 DIMM each (8,16,32,64 or 128GB DIMM)
  • Memory bandwidth of up to 920 GB/sec (note that is big B not Gb or little b)
  • Refresh your server, CPU, compute, socket, core and threads knowledge here.

E950 also features faster I/O subsystem for server I/O to storage and networks:

  • 630GB/sec (e.g. 5Tbpsec) I/O bandwidth
  • NVIDIA NVLink GPU attachment, PCIe Gen4 and OpenCAPI I/O
  • Up to eight (8) (4 socket systems) PCIe Gen4 x16 (16 lanes each) card slots
  • Up to two (2) PCIe Gen4 x8 (8 lanes each) card slots
  • Up to 144 PCIe lanes (4 socket systems), full height, half length
  • USB 3 (2 front, 2 rear)
  • 12 internal 2.5” form factor storage bays for HDD and SSDs including up to eight (8) SAS SAS, and four NVMe U.2 (8639). Note that NVMe devices attach via PCIe ports and lanes.
  • Hot plug components and optional I/O expansion as well as storage drawers
  • Here is a refresher (or primer) on PCIe, as well as NVMe, SAS, and SSD technologies.

IBM E980

The IBM E980 system is a collection of up to four nodes along with a control module, a cabinet rack E980 system is shown below (image via IBM.com).
IBM Power9 E980

IBM Power9 E950 E980
Via IBM.com

View more features for E950 here (PDF) and E980 here (PDF).

Where to learn more

Learn more about IBM Power and data infrastructures related topics via the following links:

Additional learning experiences along with common questions (and answers), as well as tips can be found in Software Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials book.

Software Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials Book SDDC

What this all means

These new systems provide increase in not only compute, also memory as well as server I/O for storage and networking. With the addition of multiple PCIe Gen4 x16 card slots, more GPUs such as those from NVIDIA as well as fast Fibre Channel, SAS and NVMe based storage can be attached to these systems.

With a good number of x16 PCIe Gen4 slots, the E950 and E980 systems are capable of supporting more GPU offload cards such as those from NVIDIA, along with other ASIC or FPGA accelerator devices. In addition to compute offload, the x16 PCIe Gen4 slots enable server I/O cards to more storage devices including faster Fibre Channel, Ethernet, SAS as well as NVMe attachment.

Overall, IBM announces new Power9 processor based E950 E980 server systems is a good move for existing customers of AIX, Linux as well as with the E980 for i systems.

Ok, nuff said, for now.

Cheers Gs

Greg Schulz – Microsoft MVP Cloud and Data Center Management, VMware vExpert 2010-2018. Author of Software Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials (CRC Press), as well as Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking (CRC Press), The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC Press), Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier) and twitter @storageio. Courteous comments are welcome for consideration. First published on https://storageioblog.com any reproduction in whole, in part, with changes to content, without source attribution under title or without permission is forbidden.

All Comments, (C) and (TM) belong to their owners/posters, Other content (C) Copyright 2006-2024 Server StorageIO and UnlimitedIO. All Rights Reserved. StorageIO is a registered Trade Mark (TM) of Server StorageIO.

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July 2018 Server StorageIO Data Infrastructure Update Newsletter

July 2018 Server StorageIO Data Infrastructure Update Newsletter

July 2018 Server StorageIO Data Infrastructure Update Newsletter

Volume 18, Issue 7 (July 2018)

Hello and welcome to the July 2018 Server StorageIO Data Infrastructure Update Newsletter.

In cased you missed it, the June 2018 Server StorageIO Data Infrastructure Update Newsletter can be viewed here ( HTML and PDF).

In this issue buzzwords topics include Dell Technology and VMware, AWS and Google public, private and hybrid cloud, machine learning, 3D XPoint, SCM, SSD, NVMe, data infrastructure management tools among other topics.

Enjoy this edition of the Server StorageIO Data Infrastructure update newsletter.

Cheers GS

Data Infrastructure and IT Industry Activity Trends

July 2018 data infrastructure, server, storage, I/O network, hardware, software, cloud, converged, and container as well as data protection industry activity includes among others:

Amazon Web Services AWS July 2018 Updates include enhancements to machine learning (ML) Sagemaker service, faster S3 access, new EC2 instances along with Snowball Edge (SBE) for on-prem converged server and compute appliance ( read more about SBE here). In other public cloud activity, Google Cloud Platform GCP announced new Los Angeles Region.

Intel and Micron have announced that they will be pursuing different paths when they complete the second generation in 2019 of 3D XPoint used in Intel Optane NVMe SSD and Storage Class Memory (SCM) technologies, read more here Intel Micron 3D XPoint Evolving. Meanwhile, Broadcom buying CA, Brilliant or a Brainbuster? This deal is a bit of a head scratcher with Broadcom spending $18.9 Billion USD (cash) to by CA Technologies.

In other data infrastructures news and activity, DataDirect Networks Stages Bid to Acquire Tintri’s Assets and Expand Its Storage Portfolio into the Enterprise. Dell EMC announced a new integrated data protection appliance ( IDPA DP4400) for small and midsize organizations. In other activity, VMware declared a dividend, with Dell Technologies being a majority owner, will use cash to fund Dell business structuring. Read more about Dell Technologies Announces Class V VMware Tracking Stock exchange for stock or cash here.

Spectra (e.g. who some of you know as Spectra Logic) has announced enhancements to their tape libraries. Note that one of the larger growth (or sustainment) markets for tape based technologies in recent years have been the larger cloud scale service providers. Granted those providers are not using tape in old ways (e.g. for direct backup), rather, in new ways where it is a companion to SSD, HDD as another storage class, tier or technology enabler.

IBM has jumped on the NVMe bandwagon announcing updates to their Flashsystems 9100 systems (e.g. what they acquired via TMS a few years ago). Opvisor has announced a new VMware vSAN performance monitoring and troubleshooting feature for their insight, awareness management tools.

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

Data Infrastructure Server StorageIO Comments Content

Server StorageIO Commentary in the news, tips and articles

Recent Server StorageIO industry trends perspectives commentary in the news.

Via : SearchStorage: Comments on GDPR and Cloudian File Sync Share 
Via : NetworkComputing: Comments Software Defined Storage SDS Getting Started 
Via SearchStorage: Comments The storage administrator skills you need to keep up today
Via SearchStorage: Comments Managing storage for IoT data at the enterprise edge
Via SearchCloudComputing: Comments Hybrid cloud deployment demands a change in security mind set

View more Server, Storage and I/O trends and perspectives comments here.

Data Infrastructure Server StorageIOblog posts

Server StorageIOblog Data Infrastructure Posts

Recent and popular Server StorageIOblog posts include:

2018 Hot Popular New Trending Data Infrastructure Vendors to Watch
June 2018 Server StorageIO Data Infrastructure Update Newsletter
May 2018 Server StorageIO Data Infrastructure Update Newsletter
Have you heard about the new CLOUD Act data regulation?
Data Protection Recovery Life Post World Backup Day Pre GDPR
Microsoft Windows Server 2019 Insiders Preview
Server Storage I/O Benchmark Performance Resource Tools
Data Infrastructure Primer Overview (Its Whats Inside The Data Center)
If NVMe is the answer, what are the questions?

View other recent as well as past StorageIOblog posts here

Server StorageIO Recommended Reading (Watching and Listening) List

Software-Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials SDDI SDDC

In addition to my own books including Software Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials (CRC Press 2017) available at Amazon.com (check out special sale price), the following are Server StorageIO data infrastructure recommended reading, watching and listening list items. The Server StorageIO data infrastructure recommended reading list includes various IT, Data Infrastructure and related topics including Intel Recommended Reading List (IRRL) for developers is a good resource to check out.

Duncan Epping ( @DuncanYB), Frank Denneman ( @FrankDenneman) and Neils Hagoort ( @NHagoort) have released their VMware vSphere 6.7 Clustering Deep Dive book available at venues including Amazon.com. This is the latest in a series of Cluster and deep dive books from Frank and Duncan which if you are involved with VMware, SDDC and related software defined data infrastructures these should be on your bookshelf.

Watch for more items to be added to the recommended reading list book shelf soon.

Data Infrastructure Server StorageIO event activities

Events and Activities

Recent and upcoming event activities.

July 25, 2018 – Webinar – Data Protect & Storage

June 27, 2018 – Webinar – App Server Performance

June 26, 2018 – Webinar – Cloud App Optimize

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

Data Infrastructure Server StorageIO Industry Resources and Links

Various useful links and resources:

Data Infrastructure Recommend Reading and watching list
Microsoft TechNet – Various Microsoft related from Azure to Docker to Windows
storageio.com/links – Various industry links (over 1,000 with more to be added soon)
objectstoragecenter.com – Cloud and object storage topics, tips and news items
OpenStack.org – Various OpenStack related items
storageio.com/downloads – Various presentations and other download material
storageio.com/protect – Various data protection items and topics
thenvmeplace.com – Focus on NVMe trends and technologies
thessdplace.com – NVM and Solid State Disk topics, tips and techniques
storageio.com/converge – Various CI, HCI and related SDS topics
storageio.com/performance – Various server, storage and I/O benchmark and tools
VMware Technical Network – Various VMware related items

What this all means and wrap-up

Summer is here in North America and the Northern Hemisphere which means holidays as well as vacations. However Data Infrastructures continue to evolve as do the tools, technologies, trends, hardware, software, services along with those who take care of, and define them. Enjoy your summer vacation, holidays as well as this July 2018 Server StorageIO Data Infrastructure Update Newsletter edition.

Ok, nuff said, for now.

Gs

Greg Schulz – Microsoft MVP Cloud Data Center Management, VMware vExpert 2010-2018. Author of Software Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials (CRC Press), as well as Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking (CRC Press), The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC Press), Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier) and twitter @storageio. Courteous comments are welcome for consideration. First published on https://storageioblog.com any reproduction in whole, in part, with changes to content, without source attribution under title or without permission is forbidden.

All Comments, (C) and (TM) belong to their owners/posters, Other content (C) Copyright 2006-2024 Server StorageIO and UnlimitedIO. All Rights Reserved. StorageIO is a registered Trade Mark (TM) of Server StorageIO.

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Amazon Web Services AWS July 2018 Updates

Amazon Web Services AWS July 2018 Updates

Amazon Web Services (AWS) July 2018 Updates

Amazon Web Services AWS July 2018 Updates

Amazon Web Services AWS July 2018 Updates continue to expand feature, functionality, service capabilities of the public cloud providers capabilities across various geographies.

Recent AWS updates include Snowball Edge (SBE) that adds local, on-site, on-premises aka on-prem EC2 compute capabilities as part of the Snowball appliance. Previously Snowball was a data and storage migration only appliance, now with the new capabilities, compute is also enabled as part of a turnkey converged platform. Read more about SBE here.

In other updates, AWS has extended its Elastic Cloud Compute (EC2) capabilities (besides Snowball Edge) with new instance types, along with leveraging their next generation hypervisor as part of Nitro enabled systems. New EC2 instances span from on-prem Snowball Edge (SBE) to AWS Dedicated aka bare metal instances, along with traditional cloud instances (e.g., virtual machines).

These new instances including R5, R5D, and Z1 among others leverage faster Intel Xeon Platinum 8000 series processors, along with more memory. For example, Z1D is a compute-intensive instance with 4.0 GHz all turbo enabled core, while R5 is memory optimized with 3.1 GHz cores (up to 96 vCPU) and up to 768GB of RAM. The R5D is a memory-optimized instance that also supports up to 3.6TB of on-instance NVMe based storage. View additional AWS instance types here.

AWS has enhanced SageMaker (Machine Learning) service supporting higher throughput enabling faster data transformation batch jobs of non-real-time inference. To enable higher data and API call rates, AWS has also enhanced Simple Storage Service (S3) request rate. Another enhancement by AWS is enabling bring your own IP address preview for virtual private cloud (VPC) as part of allowing hybrid clouds.

View additional new, recent and past AWS updates here, and here.

Where to learn more

Learn more about AWS, Cloud and data infrastructures related topics via the following links:

Additional learning experiences along with common questions (and answers), as well as tips can be found in Software Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials book.

Software Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials Book SDDC

What this all means

Amazon Web Services AWS July 2018 Updates continue to expand the number, type and extensiveness of public cloud services, as well as enabling hybrid capabilities. The Amazon Web Services AWS July 2018 Updates also address different data infrastructure layers from lower level Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) including EC2 compute, as well as higher level artificial inelegance (AI), machine learning (ML), deep learning (DL) among other cognitive as well as analytic offerings.

Ok, nuff said, for now.

Cheers Gs

Greg Schulz – Microsoft MVP Cloud and Data Center Management, VMware vExpert 2010-2018. Author of Software Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials (CRC Press), as well as Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking (CRC Press), The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC Press), Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier) and twitter @storageio. Courteous comments are welcome for consideration. First published on https://storageioblog.com any reproduction in whole, in part, with changes to content, without source attribution under title or without permission is forbidden.

All Comments, (C) and (TM) belong to their owners/posters, Other content (C) Copyright 2006-2024 Server StorageIO and UnlimitedIO. All Rights Reserved. StorageIO is a registered Trade Mark (TM) of Server StorageIO.

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Dell Technology World 2018 Announcement Summary

Dell Technology World 2018 Announcement Summary

Dell Technology World 2018 Announcement Summary
This is part one of a five-part series about Dell Technology World 2018 announcement summary. Last week (April 30-May 3) I traveled to Las Vegas Nevada (LAS) to attend Dell Technology World 2018 (e.g., DTW 2018) as a guest of Dell (that is a disclosure btw). There were several announcements along with plenty of other activity from sessions, meetings, hallway and event networking taking place at Dell Technology World DTW 2018.

Major data infrastructure technology announcements include:

  • PowerMax all-flash array (AFA) solid state device (SSD) NVMe storage system
  • PowerEdge four-socket 2U and 4U rack servers
  • XtremIO X2 AFA SSD storage system updates
  • PowerEdge MX preview of future composable servers
  • Desktop and thin client along with other VDI updates
  • Cloud and networking enhancements

Besides the above, additional data infrastructure related announcements were made in association with Dell Technology family members including VMware along with other partners, as well as customer awards. Other updates and announcements were tied to business updates from Dell Technology, Dell Technical Capital (venture capital), and, Dell Financial Services.

Dell Technology World Buzzword Bingo Lineup

Some of the buzzword bingo terms, topics, acronyms from Dell Technology World 2018 included AFA, AI, Autonomous, Azure, Bare Metal, Big Data, Blockchain, CI, Cloud, Composable, Compression, Containers, Core, Data Analytics, Dedupe, Dell, DFS (Dell Financial Services), DFR (Data Footprint Reduction), Distributed Ledger, DL, Durability, Fabric, FPGA, GDPR, Gen-Z, GPU, HCI, HDD, HPC, Hybrid, IOP, Kubernetes, Latency, MaaS (Metal as a Service), ML, NFV, NSX, NVMe, NVMeoF, PACE (Performance Availability Capacity Economics), PCIe, Pivotal, PMEM, RAID, RPO, RTO, SAS, SATA, SC, SCM, SDDC, SDS, Socket, SSD, Stamp, TBW (Terabytes Written per day), VDI, venture capital, VMware and VR among others.

Dell Technology World 2018 Venue
Dell Technology World DTW 2018 Event and Venue

Dell Technology World 2018 was located at the combined Palazzo and Venetian hotels along with adjacent Sands Expo center kicking off Monday, April 30th and wrapping up May 4th.

The theme for Dell Technology World DTW 2018 was make it real, which in some ways was interesting given the focus on virtual including virtual reality (VR), software-defined data center (SDDC) virtualization, data infrastructure topics, along with artificial intelligence (AI).

Virtual Sky Dell Technology World 2018
Make it real – Venetian Palazzo St. Mark’s Square on the way to Sands Expo Center

There was plenty of AI, VR, SDDC along with other technologies, tools as well as some fun stuff to do including VR games.

Dell Technology World 2018 Commons Area
Dell Technology World Village Area near Key Note and Expo Halls

Dell Technology World 2018 Commons Area Drones
Dell Technology World Drone Flying Area

During a break from some meetings, I used a few minutes to fly a drone using VR which was interesting. I Have been operating drones (See some videos here) visually without dependence on first-person view (FPV) or relying on extensive autonomous operations instead flying heads up by hand for several years. Needless to say, the VR was interesting, granted encountered a bit of vertigo that I had to get used to.

Dell Technology World 2018 Commons Area Virtual Village
More views of the Dell Technology World Village and Commons Area with VR activity

Dell Technology World 2018 Commons Area Virtual Village
Dell Technology World Village and VR area

Dell Technology World 2018 Commons Area Virtual Village
Dell Technology World Bean Bag Area

Dell Technology World 2018 Announcement Summary

Ok, nuff with the AI, ML, DL, VR fun, time to move on to the business and technology topics of Dell Technologies World 2018.

What was announced at Dell Technology World 2018 included among others:

Dell Technology World 2018 PowerMax
Dell PowerMax Front View

Subsequent posts in this series take a deeper look at the various announcements as well as what they mean.

Where to learn more

Learn more about Dell Technology World 2018 and related topics via the following links:

Additional learning experiences along with common questions (and answers), as well as tips can be found in Software Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials book.

Software Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials Book SDDC

What this all means

On the surface it may appear that there was not much announced at Dell Technology World 2018 particular compared to some of the recent Dell EMC Worlds and EMC Worlds. However turns out that there was a lot announced, granted without some of the entertainment and circus like atmosphere of previous events. Continue reading here Part II Dell Technology World 2018 Modern Data Center Announcement Details in this series, along with Part III here, Part IV here (including PowerEdge MX composable infrastructure leveraging Gen-Z) and Part V (servers and converged) here.

Ok, nuff said, for now.

Cheers Gs

Greg Schulz – Microsoft MVP Cloud and Data Center Management, VMware vExpert 2010-2017 (vSAN and vCloud). Author of Software Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials (CRC Press), as well as Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking (CRC Press), The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC Press), Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier) and twitter @storageio. Courteous comments are welcome for consideration. First published on https://storageioblog.com any reproduction in whole, in part, with changes to content, without source attribution under title or without permission is forbidden.

All Comments, (C) and (TM) belong to their owners/posters, Other content (C) Copyright 2006-2024 Server StorageIO and UnlimitedIO. All Rights Reserved. StorageIO is a registered Trade Mark (TM) of Server StorageIO.

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Part II Dell Technology World 2018 Modern Data Center Announcement Details

Part II Dell Technology World 2018 Modern Data Center Announcement Details

Dell Technology World 2018 Modern Data Center Announcement Summary
This is Part II Dell Technology World 2018 Modern Data Center Announcement Details that is part of a five-post series (view part I here, part III here, part IV here and part V here). Last week (April 30-May 3) I traveled to Las Vegas Nevada (LAS) to attend Dell Technology World 2018 (e.g., DTW 2018) as a guest of Dell (that is a disclosure btw).

Dell Technology World 2018 Venue
Dell Technology World DTW 2018 Event and Venue

What was announced at Dell Technology World 2018 included among others:

Dell Technology World 2018 PowerMax
Dell PowerMax Front View

Dell Technology World 2018 Modern Data Center Announcement Details

Dell Technologies data infrastructure related announcements included new solutions competencies and expanded services deployment competencies with partners to boost deal size and revenues. An Internet of Things (IoT) solution competency was added with others planned including High-Performance Computing (HPC) / Super Computing (SC), Data Analytics, Business Applications and Security related topics. Dell Financial Services flexible consumption models announced at Dell EMC World 2017 provide flexible financing options for both partners as well as their clients.

Flexible Dell Financial Services cloud-like consumption model (e.g., pay for what you use) enhancements include reduced entry points for the Flex on Demand solutions across the Dell EMC storage portfolio. For example, Flex on Demand velocity pricing models for Dell EMC Unity All-Flash Array (AFA) solid state device (SSD) storage solution, and XtremIO X2 AFA systems with price points of less than USD 1,000.00 per month. The benefit is that Dell partners have a financial vehicle to help their midrange customers run consumption-based financing for all-flash storage without custom configurations resulting in faster deployment opportunities.

In other partner updates, Dell Technologies is enhancing the incentive program Dell EMC MyRewards program to help drive new business. Dell EMC MyRewards Program is an opt-in, points-based reward program for solution provider sales reps and systems engineers. MyRewards program is slated to replace the existing Partner Advantage and Sell & Earn programs with bigger and better promotions (up to 3x bonus payout, simplified global claiming).

What this means for partners is the ability to earn more while offering their clients new solutions with flexible financing and consumption-based pricing among other options. Other partner enhancements include update demo program, Proof of Concept (POC) program, and IT transformation campaigns.

Powering up the Modern Data Center and Future of Work

Powering up the modern data center along with future of work, part of the make it real theme of Dell Technologies world 2018 includes data infrastructure server, storage, I/O networking hardware, software and service solutions. These data infrastructure solutions include NVMe based storage, Converged Infrastructure (CI), hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI), software-defined data center (SDDC), VMware based multi-clouds, along with modular infrastructure resources.

In addition to server and storage data infrastructure resources form desktop to data center, Dell also has a focus of enabling traditional as well as emerging Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning (ML) and Deep Learning (DL) as well as analytics applications. Besides providing data infrastructure resources to support AI, ML, DL, IoT and other applications along with their workloads, Dell is leveraging AI technology in some of their products for example PowerMax.

Other Dell Technologies announcements include Virtustream cloud risk management and compliance, along with Epic and SAP Digital Health healthcare software solutions. In addition to Virtustream, Dell Technologies cloud-related announcements also include VMware NSX network Virtual Cloud Network with Microsoft Azure support along with security enhancements. Refer here to recent April VMware vSphere, vCenter, vSAN, vRealize and other Virtual announcements as well as here for March VMware cloud updates.

Where to learn more

Learn more about Dell Technology World 2018 and related topics via the following links:

Additional learning experiences along with common questions (and answers), as well as tips can be found in Software Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials book.

Software Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials Book SDDC

What this all means

The above set of announcements span business to technology along with partner activity. Continue reading here (Part III Dell Technology World 2018 Storage Announcement Details) of this series, and part I (general summary) here, along with Part IV (PowerEdge MX Composable) here and part V here.

Ok, nuff said, for now.

Cheers Gs

Greg Schulz – Microsoft MVP Cloud and Data Center Management, VMware vExpert 2010-2017 (vSAN and vCloud). Author of Software Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials (CRC Press), as well as Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking (CRC Press), The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC Press), Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier) and twitter @storageio. Courteous comments are welcome for consideration. First published on https://storageioblog.com any reproduction in whole, in part, with changes to content, without source attribution under title or without permission is forbidden.

All Comments, (C) and (TM) belong to their owners/posters, Other content (C) Copyright 2006-2024 Server StorageIO and UnlimitedIO. All Rights Reserved. StorageIO is a registered Trade Mark (TM) of Server StorageIO.

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Part III Dell Technology World 2018 Storage Announcement Details

Part III Dell Technology World 2018 Storage Announcement Details

Part III Dell Technology World 2018 Storage Announcement Details

This is Part III Dell Technology World 2018 Storage Announcement Details that is part of a five-post series (view part I here, part II here, part IV (PowerEdge MX Composable) here and part V here). Last week (April 30-May 3) I traveled to Las Vegas Nevada (LAS) to attend Dell Technology World 2018 (e.g., DTW 2018) as a guest of Dell (that is a disclosure btw).

Dell Technology World 2018 Storage Announcements Include:

  • PowerMax – Enterprise class tier 0 and tier 1 all-flash array (AFA)
  • XtremIO X2 – Native replication and new entry-level pricing

Dell Technology World 2018 PowerMax back view
Back view of Dell PowerMax

Dell PowerMax Something Old, Something New, Something Fast Near You Soon

PowerMax is the new companion to VMAX. Positioned for traditional tier 0 and tier 1 enterprise-class applications and workloads, PowerMax is optimized for dense server virtualization and SDDC, SAP, Oracle, SQL Server along with other low-latency, high-performance database activity. Different target workloads include Mainframe as well as Open Systems, AI, ML, DL, Big Data, as well as consolidation.

The Dell PowerMax is an all-flash array (AFA) architecture with an end to end NVMe along with built-in AI and ML technology. Building on the architecture of Dell EMC VMAX (some models still available) with new faster processors, full end to end NVMe ready (e.g., front-end server attachment, back-end devices).

The AI and ML features of PowerMax PowerMaxOS include an engine (software) that learns and makes autonomous storage management decisions, as well as implementations including tiering. Other AI and ML enabled operations include performance optimizations based on I/O pattern recognition.

Other features of PowerMax besides increased speeds, feeds, performance includes data footprint reduction (DFR) inline deduplication along with enhanced compression. The DFR benefits include up to 5:1 data reduction for space efficiency, without performance impact to boost performance effectiveness. The DFR along with improved 2x rack density, along with up to 40% power savings (your results may vary) based on Dell claims to enable an impressive amount of performance, availability, capacity, economics (e.g., PACE) in a given number of cubic feet (or meters).

There are two PowerMax models including 2000 (scales from 1 to 2 redundant controllers) and 8000 (scales from 1 to 8 redundant controller nodes). Note that controller nodes are Intel Xeon multi-socket, multi-core processors enabling scale-up and scale-out performance, availability, and capacity. Competitors of the PowerMax include AFA solutions from HPE 3PAR, NetApp, and Pure Storage among others.

Dell Technology World 2018 PowerMax Front View
Front view of Dell PowerMax

Besides resiliency, data services along with data protection, Dell is claiming PowerMax is 2x faster than their nearest high-end storage system competitors with up to 150GB/sec (e.g., 1,200Gbps) of bandwidth, as well as up to 10 million IOPS with 50% lower latency compared to previous VMAX.

PowerMax is also a full end to end NVMe ready (both back-end and front-end). Back-end includes NVMe drives, devices, shelves, and enclosures) as well as front-end (future NVMe over Fabrics, e.g., NVMeoF). Being NVMeoF ready enables PowerMax to support future front-end server network connectivity options to traditional SAN Fibre Channel (FC), iSCSI among others.

PowerMax is also ready for new, emerging high speed, low-latency storage class memory (SCM).  SCM is the next generation of persistent memories (PMEM) having performance closer to traditional DRAM while persistence of flash SSD. Examples of SCM technologies entering the market include Intel Optane based on 3D XPoint, along with others such as those from Everspin among others.

IBM Z Zed Mainframe at Dell Technology World 2018
An IBM “Zed” Mainframe (in case you have never seen one)

Based on the performance claims, the Dell PowerMax has an interesting if not potentially industry leading power, performance, availability, capacity, economic footprint per cubic foot (or meter). It will be interesting to see some third-party validation or audits of Dell claims. Likewise, I look forward to seeing some real-world applied workloads of Dell PowerMax vs. other storage systems. Here are some additional perspectives Via SearchStorage: Dell EMC all-flash PowerMax replaces VMAX, injects NVMe


Dell PowerMax Visual Studio (Image via Dell.com)

To help with customer decision making, Dell has created an interactive VMAX and PowerMax configuration studio that you can use to try out as well as learn about different options here. View more Dell PowerMax speeds, feeds, slots, watts, features and functions here (PDF).

Dell Technology World 2018 XtremIO X2

XtremIO X2

Dell XtremIO X2 and XIOS 6.1 operating system (software-defined storage) enhanced with native replication across wide area networks (WAN). The new WAN replication is metadata-aware native to the XtremIO X2 that implements data footprint reduction (DFR) technology reducing the amount of data sent over network connections. The benefit is more data moved in a given amount of time along with better data protection requiring less time (and network) by only moving unique changed data.

Dell Technology World 2018 XtremIO X2 back view
Back View of XtremIO X2

Dell EMC claims to reduce WAN network bandwidth by up to 75% utilizing the new native XtremIO X2 native asynchronous replication. Also, Dell says XtremIO X2 requires up to 38% less storage space at disaster recovery and business resiliency locations while maintaining predictable recovery point objectives (RPO) of 30 seconds. Another XtremIO X2 announcement is a new entry model for customers at up to 55% lower cost than previous product generations. View more information about Dell XtremIO X2 here, along with speeds feeds here, here, as well as here.

What about Dell Midrange Storage Unity and SC?

Here are some perspectives Via SearchStorage: Dell EMC midrange storage keeps its overlapping arrays.

Dell Bulk and Elastic Cloud Storage (ECS)

One of the questions I had going into Dell Technology World 2018 was what is the status of ECS (and its predecessors Atmos as well as Centera) bulk object storage is given lack of messaging and news around it. Specifically, my concern was that if ECS is the platform for storing and managing data to be preserved for the future, what is the current status, state as well as future of ECS.

In conversations with the Dell ECS folks, ECS which has encompassed Centera functionality and it (ECS) is very much alive, stay tuned for more updates. Also, note that Centera has been EOL. However, its feature functionality has been absorbed by ECS meaning that data preserved can now be managed by ECS. While I can not divulge the details of some meeting discussions, I can say that I am comfortable (for now) with the future directions of ECS along with the data it manages, stay tuned for updates.

Dell Data Protection

What about Data Protection? Security was mentioned in several different contexts during Dell Technology World 2018, as was a strong physical security presence seen at the Palazzo and Sands venues. Likewise, there was a data protection presence at Dell Technologies World 2018 in the expo hall, as well as with various sessions.

What was heard was mainly around data protection management tools, hybrid, as well as data protection appliances and data domain-based solutions. Perhaps we will hear more from Dell Technologies World in the future about data protection related topics.

Where to learn more

Learn more about Dell Technology World 2018 and related topics via the following links:

Additional learning experiences along with common questions (and answers), as well as tips can be found in Software Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials book.

Software Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials Book SDDC

What this all means

If there was any doubt about would Dell keep EMC storage progressing forward, the above announcements help to show some examples of what they are doing. On the other hand, lets stay tuned to see what news and updates appear in the future pertaining to mid-range storage (e.g. Unity and SC) as well as Isilon, ScaleIO, Data Protection platforms as well as software among other technologies.

Continue reading part IV (PowerEdge MX Composable and Gen-Z) here in this series, as well as part I here, part II here, part IV (PowerEdge MX Composable) here, and, part V here.

Ok, nuff said, for now.

Cheers Gs

Greg Schulz – Microsoft MVP Cloud and Data Center Management, VMware vExpert 2010-2017 (vSAN and vCloud). Author of Software Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials (CRC Press), as well as Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking (CRC Press), The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC Press), Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier) and twitter @storageio. Courteous comments are welcome for consideration. First published on https://storageioblog.com any reproduction in whole, in part, with changes to content, without source attribution under title or without permission is forbidden.

All Comments, (C) and (TM) belong to their owners/posters, Other content (C) Copyright 2006-2024 Server StorageIO and UnlimitedIO. All Rights Reserved. StorageIO is a registered Trade Mark (TM) of Server StorageIO.

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Part IV Dell Technology World 2018 PowerEdge MX Gen-Z Composable Infrastructure

Part IV Dell Technology World 2018 PowerEdge MX Gen-Z Composable Infrastructure

Part IV Dell Technology World 2018 PowerEdge MX Gen-Z Composable Infrastructure
This is Part IV Dell Technology World 2018 PowerEdge MX Gen-Z Composable Infrastructure that is part of a five-post series (view part I here, part II here, part III here and part V here). Last week (April 30-May 3) I traveled to Las Vegas Nevada (LAS) to attend Dell Technology World 2018 (e.g., DTW 2018) as a guest of Dell (that is a disclosure btw).

Introducing PowerEdge MX Composable Infrastructure (the other CI)

Dell announced at Dell Technology World 2018 a preview of the new PowerEdge MX (kinetic) family of data infrastructure resource servers. PowerEdge MX is being developed to meet the needs of resource-centric data infrastructures that require scalability, as well as performance availability, capacity, economic (PACE) flexibility for diverse workloads. Read more about Dell PowerEdge MX, Gen-Z and composable infrastructures (the other CI) here.

Some of the workloads being targeted by PowerEdge MX include large-scale dense SDDC virtualization (and containers), private (or public clouds by service providers). Other workloads include AI, ML, DL, data analytics, HPC, SC, big data, in-memory database, software-defined storage (SDS), software-defined networking (SDN), network function virtualization (NFV) among others.

The new PowerEdge MX previewed will be announced later in 2018 featuring a flexible, decomposable, as well as composable architecture that enables resources to be disaggregated and reassigned or aggregated to meet particular needs (e.g., defined or composed). Instead of traditional software defined virtualization carving up servers in smaller virtual machines or containers to meet workload needs, PowerEdge MX is part of a next-generation approach to enable server resources to be leveraged at a finer granularity.

For example, today an entire server including all of its sockets, cores, memory, PCIe devices among other resources get allocated and defined for use. A server gets defined for use by an operating system when bare metal (or Metal as a Service) or a hypervisor. PowerEdge MX (and other platforms expected to enter the market) have a finer granularity where with a proper upper layer (or higher altitude) software resources can be allocated and defined to meet different needs.

What this means is the potential to allocate resources to a given server with more granularity and flexibility, as well as combine multiple server’s resources to create what appears to be a more massive server. There are vendors in the market who have been working on and enabling this type of approach for several years ranging from ScaleMP to startup Liqid and Tidal among others. However, at the heart of the Dell PowerEdge MX is the new emerging Gen-Z technology.

If you are not familiar with Gen-Z, add it to your buzzword bingo lineup and learn about it as it is coming your way. A brief overview of Gen-Z consortium and Gen-Z material and primer information here. A common question is if Gen-Z is a replacement for PCIe which for now is that they will coexist and complement each other. Another common question is if Gen-Z will replace Ethernet and InfiniBand and the answer is for now they complement each other. Another question is if Gen-Z will replace Intel Quick Path and another CPU device and memory interconnects and the answer is potentially, and in my opinion, watch to see how long Intel drags its feet.

Note that composability is another way of saying defined without saying defined, something to pay attention too as well as have some vendor fun with. Also, note that Dell is referent to PowerEdge MX and Kinetic architecture which is not the same as the Seagate Kinetic Ethernet-based object key value accessed drive initiative from a few years ago (learn more about Seagate Kinetic here). Learn more about Gen-Z and what Dell is doing here.

Where to learn more

Learn more about Dell Technology World 2018 and related topics via the following links:

Additional learning experiences along with common questions (and answers), as well as tips can be found in Software Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials book.

Software Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials Book SDDC

What this all means

Dell has provided a glimpse of what they are working on pertaining composable infrastructure, the other CI, as well as Gen-Z and related next generation of servers with PowerEdge MX as well as Kinetic. Stay tuned for more about Gen-Z and composable infrastructures. Continue reading Part V (servers converged) in this series here, as well as part I here, part II here and part III here.

Ok, nuff said, for now.

Cheers Gs

Greg Schulz – Microsoft MVP Cloud and Data Center Management, VMware vExpert 2010-2017 (vSAN and vCloud). Author of Software Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials (CRC Press), as well as Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking (CRC Press), The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC Press), Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier) and twitter @storageio. Courteous comments are welcome for consideration. First published on https://storageioblog.com any reproduction in whole, in part, with changes to content, without source attribution under title or without permission is forbidden.

All Comments, (C) and (TM) belong to their owners/posters, Other content (C) Copyright 2006-2024 Server StorageIO and UnlimitedIO. All Rights Reserved. StorageIO is a registered Trade Mark (TM) of Server StorageIO.

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HPE Announces AMD Powered Gen 10 ProLiant DL385 For Software Defined Workloads

HPE Announces AMD Powered Gen 10 ProLiant DL385 For Software Defined Workloads

server storage I/O data infrastructure trends

By Greg Schulz – www.storageioblog.com November 20, 2017

HPE Announced today a new AMD EPYC 7000 Powered Gen 10 ProLiant DL385 for Software Defined Workloads including server virtualization, software-defined data center (SDDC), software-defined data infrastructure (SDDI), software-defined storage among others. These new servers are part of a broader Gen10 HPE portfolio of ProLiant DL systems.

HPE AMD EPYC Gen10 DL385
24 Small Form Factor Drive front view DL385 Gen 10 Via HPE

The value proposition being promoted by HPE of these new AMD powered Gen 10 DL385 servers besides supporting software-defined, SDDI, SDDC, and related workloads are security, density and lower price than others. HPE is claiming with the new AMD EPYC system on a chip (SoC) processor powered Gen 10 DL385 that it is offering up to 50 percent lower cost per virtual machine (VM) than traditional server solutions.

About HPE AMD Powered Gen 10 DL385

HPE AMD EPYC 7000 Gen 10 DL385 features:

  • 2U (height) form factor
  • HPE OneView and iLO management
  • Flexible HPE finance options
  • Data Infrastructure Security
  • AMD EPYC 7000 System on Chip (SoC) processors
  • NVMe storage (Embedded M.2 and U.2/8639 Small Form Factor (SFF) e.g. drive form factor)
  • Address server I/O and memory bottlenecks

These new HPE servers are positioned for:

  • Software Defined, Server Virtualization
  • Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) workspaces
  • HPC, Cloud and other general high-density workloads
  • General Data Infrastructure workloads that benefit from memory-centric or GPUs

Different AMD Powered DL385 ProLiant Gen 10 Packaging Options

Common across AMD EPYC 7000 powered Gen 10 DL385 servers are 2U high form factor, iLO management software and interfaces, flexible LAN on Motherboard (LOM) options, MicroSD (optional dual MicroSD), NVMe (embedded M.2 and SFF U.2) server storage I/O interface and drives, health and status LEDs, GPU support, single or dual socket processors.

HPE AMD EPYC Gen10 DL385 Look Inside
HPE DL385 Gen10 Inside View Via HPE

HPE AMD EPYC Gen10 DL385 Rear View
HPE DL385 Gen10 Rear View Via HPE

Other up to three storage drive bays, support for Large Form Factor (LFF) and Small Form Factor (SFF) devices (HDD and SSD) including SFF NVMe (e.g., U.2) SSD. Up to 4 x Gbe NICs, PCIe riser for GPU (optional second riser requires the second processor). Other features and options include HPE SmartArray (RAID), up to 6 cooling fans, internal and external USB 3. Optional universal media bay that can also add a front display, optional Optical Disc Drive (ODD), optional 2 x U.2 NVMe SFF SSD. Note media bay occupies one of three storage drive bays.

HPE AMD EPYC Gen10 DL385 Form Factor
HPE DL385 Form Factor Via HPE

Up to 3 x Drive Bays
Up to 12 LFF drives (2 per bay)
Up to 24 SFF drives ( 3 x 8 drive bays, 6 SFF + 2 NVMe U.2 or 8 x NVMe)

AMD EPYC 7000 Series

The AMD EPYC 7000 series is available in the single and dual socket. View additional AMD EPYC speeds and feeds in this data sheet (PDF), along with AMD server benchmarks here.

HPE AMD EPYC Specifications
HPE DL385 Gen 10 AMD EPYC Specifications Via HPE

AMD EPYC 7000 General Features

  • Single and dual socket
  • Up to 32 cores, 64 threads per socket
  • Up to 16 DDR4 DIMMS over eight channels per socket (e.g., up to 2TB RAM)
  • Up to 128 PCIe Gen 3 lanes (e.g. combination of x4, x8, x16 etc)
  • Future 128GB DIMM support

AMD EPYC 7000 Security Features

  • Secure processor and secure boot for malware rootkit protection
  • System memory encryption (SME)
  • Secure Encrypted Virtualization (SEV) hypervisors and guest virtual machine memory protection
  • Secure move (e.g., encrypted) between enabled servers

Where To Learn More

Learn more about Data Infrastructure and related server technology, trends, tools, techniques, tradecraft and tips with the following links.

  • AMD EPYC 7000 System on Chip (SoC) processors
  • Gen10 HPE portfolio and ProLiant DL systems.
  • Various Data Infrastructure related news commentary, events, tips and articles
  • Data Center and Data Infrastructure industry links
  • Data Infrastructure server storage I/O network Recommended Reading List Book Shelf
  • Software Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials (CRC 2017) Book

    • What This All Means

    With the flexible options including HDD, SSD as well as NVMe accessible SSDs, large memory capacity along with computing cores, these new solutions provide good data infrastructure server density (e.g., CPU, memory, I/O, storage) per cubic foot or meter per cost.

    I look forward to trying one of these systems out for software-defined scenarios including virtualization, software-defined storage (SDS) among others workload scenarios. Overall the HPE announcement of the new AMD EPYC 7000 Powered Gen 10 ProLiant DL385 looks to be a good option for many environments.

    Ok, nuff said, for now.

    Gs

    Greg Schulz – Microsoft MVP Cloud and Data Center Management, VMware vExpert 2010-2017 (vSAN and vCloud). Author of Software Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials (CRC Press), as well as Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking (CRC Press), The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC Press), Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier) and twitter @storageio. Courteous comments are welcome for consideration. First published on https://storageioblog.com any reproduction in whole, in part, with changes to content, without source attribution under title or without permission is forbidden.

    All Comments, (C) and (TM) belong to their owners/posters, Other content (C) Copyright 2006-2024 Server StorageIO and UnlimitedIO. All Rights Reserved. StorageIO is a registered Trade Mark (TM) of Server StorageIO.