Tag: converged

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New family of Intel Xeon Scalable Processors enable software defined data infrastructures (SDDI) and SDDC

Intel Xeon Scalable Processors SDDI and SDDC

server storage I/O data infrastructure trends

Today Intel announced a new family of Xeon Scalable Processors (aka Purely) that for some workloads Intel claims to be on average of 1.65x faster than their predecessors. Note your real improvement will vary based on workload, configuration, benchmark testing, type of processor, memory, and many other server storage I/O performance considerations.

Intel Scalable Xeon Processors
Image via Intel.com

In general the new Intel Xeon Scalable Processors enable legacy and software defined data infrastructures (SDDI), along with software defined data centers (SDDC), cloud and other environments to support expanding workloads more efficiently as well as effectively (e.g. boosting productivity).

Data Infrastructures and workloads

Some target application and environment workloads Intel is positioning these new processors for includes among others:

  • Machine Learning (ML), Artificial Intelligence (AI), advanced analytics, deep learning and big data
  • Networking including software defined network (SDN) and network function virtualization (NFV)
  • Cloud and Virtualization including Azure Stack, Docker and Kubernetes containers, Hyper-V, KVM, OpenStack VMware vSphere, KVM among others
  • High Performance Compute (HPC) and High Productivity Compute (e.g. the other HPC)
  • Storage including legacy and emerging software defined storage software deployed as appliances, systems or server less deployment modes.

Features of the new Intel Xeon Scalable Processors include:

  • New core micro architecture with interconnects and on die memory controllers
  • Sockets (processors) scalable up to 28 cores
  • Improved networking performance using Quick Assist and Data Plane Development Kit (DPDK)
  • Leverages Intel Quick Assist Technology for CPU offload of compute intensive functions including I/O networking, security, AI, ML, big data, analytics and storage functions. Functions that benefit from Quick Assist include cryptography, encryption, authentication, cipher operations, digital signatures, key exchange, loss less data compression and data footprint reduction along with data at rest encryption (DARE).
  • Optane Non-Volatile Dual Inline Memory Module (NVDIMM) for storage class memory (SCM) also referred to by some as Persistent Memory (PM), not to be confused with Physical Machine (PM).
  • Supports Advanced Vector Extensions 512  (AVX-512) for HPC and other workloads
  • Optional Omni-Path Fabrics in addition to 1/10Gb Ethernet among other I/O options
  • Six memory channels supporting up to 6TB of RDIMM with multi socket systems
  • From two to eight  sockets per node (system)
  • Systems support PCIe 3.x (some supporting x4 based M.2 interconnects)

Note that exact speeds, feeds, slots and watts will vary by specific server model and vendor options. Also note that some server system solutions have two or more nodes (e.g. two or more real servers) in a single package not to be confused with two or more sockets per node (system or motherboard). Refer to the where to learn more section below for links to Intel benchmarks and other resources.

Software Defined Data Infrastructures, SDDC, SDX and SDDI

What About Speeds and Feeds

Watch for and check out the various Intel partners who have or will be announcing their new server compute platforms based on Intel Xeon Scalable Processors. Each of the different vendors will have various speeds and feeds options that build on the fundamental Intel Xeon Scalable Processor capabilities.

For example Dell EMC announced their 14G server platforms at the May 2017 Dell EMC World event with details to follow (e.g. after the Intel announcements).

Some things to keep in mind include the amount of DDR4 DRAM (or Optane NVDIMM) will vary by vendors server platform configuration, motherboards, several sockets and DIMM slots. Also keep in mind the differences between registered (e.g. buffered RDIMM) that give good capacity and great performance, and load reduced DIMM (LRDIMM) that have great capacity and ok performance.

Various nvme options

What about NVMe

It’s there as these systems like previous Intel models support NVMe devices via PCIe 3.x slots, and some vendor solutions also supporting M.2 x4 physical interconnects as well.

server storageIO flash and SSD
Image via Software Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials (CRC)

Note that Broadcom formerly known as Avago and LSI recently announced PCIe based RAID and adapter cards that support NVMe attached devices in addition to SAS and SATA.

server storage data infrastructure sddi

What About Intel and Storage

In case you have not connected the dots yet, the Intel Xeon Scalable Processor based server (aka compute) systems are also a fundamental platform for storage systems, services, solutions, appliances along with tin-wrapped software.

What this means is that the Intel Xeon Scalable Processors based systems can be used for deploying legacy as well as new and emerging software-defined storage software solutions. This also means that the Intel platforms can be used to support SDDC, SDDI, SDX, SDI as well as other forms of legacy and software-defined data infrastructures along with cloud, virtual, container, server less among other modes of deployment.

Image Via Intel.com

Moving beyond server and compute platforms, there is another tie to storage as part of this recent as well as other Intel announcements. Just a few weeks ago Intel announced 64 layer triple level cell (TLC) 3D NAND solutions positioned for the client market (laptop, workstations, tablets, thin clients). Intel with that announcement increased the traditional aerial density (e.g. bits per square inch or cm) as well as boosting the number of layers (stacking more bits as well).

The net result is not only more bits per square inch, also more per cubic inch or cm. This is all part of a continued evolution of NAND flash including from 2D to 3D, MCL to TLC, 32 to 64 layer.  In other words, NAND flash-based Solid State Devices (SSDs) are very much still a relevant and continue to be enhanced technology even with the emerging 3D XPoint and Optane (also available via Amazon in M.2) in the wings.

server memory evolution
Via Intel and Micron (3D XPoint launch)

Keep in mind that NAND flash-based technologies were announced almost 20 years ago (1999), and are still evolving. 3D XPoint announced two years ago, along with other emerging storage class memories (SCM), non-volatile memory (NVM) and persistent memory (PM) devices are part of the future as is 3D NAND (among others). Speaking of 3D XPoint and Optane, Intel had announcements about that in the past as well.

Where To Learn More

Learn more about Intel Xeon Scalable Processors along with related technology, trends, tools, techniques and tips with the following links.

What This All Means

Some say the PC is dead and IMHO that depends on what you mean or define a PC as. For example if you refer to a PC generically to also include servers besides workstations or other devices, then they are alive. If however your view is that PCs are only workstations and client devices, then they are on the decline.

However if your view is that a PC is defined by the underlying processor such as Intel general purpose 64 bit x86 derivative (or descendent) then they are very much alive. Just as older generations of PCs leveraging general purpose Intel based x86 (and its predecessors) processors were deployed for many uses, so to are today’s line of Xeon (among others) processors.

Even with the increase of ARM, GPU and other specialized processors, as well as ASIC and FPGAs for offloads, the role of general purpose processors continues to increase, as does the technology evolution around. Even with so called server less architectures, they still need underlying compute server platforms for running software, which also includes software defined storage, software defined networks, SDDC, SDDI, SDX, IoT among others.

Overall this is a good set of announcements by Intel and what we can also expect to be a flood of enhancements from their partners who will use the new family of Intel Xeon Scalable Processors in their products to enable software defined data infrastructures (SDDI) and SDDC.

Ok, nuff said (for now…).

Cheers
Gs

Greg Schulz – Multi-year Microsoft MVP Cloud and Data Center Management, VMware vExpert (and vSAN). Author Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking (CRC Press), The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC Press), Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier) and twitter @storageio. Watch for the spring 2017 release of his new book "Software-Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials" (CRC Press).

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 2006-2023 Server StorageIO(R) and UnlimitedIO. All Rights Reserved.

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Top vBlog 2017 Voting Now Open

server storage I/O trends

Top vBlog 2017 Voting Now Open

It is that time of the year again when Eric Siebert (@ericsiebert) over at vSphere-land holds his annual Top vBlog (e.g. VMware and Virtualization related) voting (vote here until June 30, 2017). The annual Top vBlog event enables fans to vote for their favorite blogs (to get them into the top 10, 25, 50 and 100) as well as rank them for different categories which appear on Eric’s vLaunchPad site.

This years Top vBlog voting is sponsored by TurboNomic (e.g. formerly known as VMturbo) who if you are not aware of, have some interesting technology for cross-platform (cloud, container, virtualization, hardware, software, services) data infrastructure management software tools.

Software Defined Data Infrastructure Management

The blogs and sites listed on Eric’s site have common theme linkage to Virtualization and in particular tend to be more VMware focused, however some are also hybrid agnostic spanning other technologies, vendors, services and tools. Some examples of the different focus areas include hypervisors, VDI, cloud, containers, management tools, scripting, networking, servers, storage, data protection including backup/restore, replication, BC, DR among others).

In addition to the main list of blogs (that are active), there are also sub lists for different categories including:

  • Top 100 (Also top 10, 25, 50) vBlogs
  • Archive of retired (e.g. not active or seldom post)
  • News and Information sites
  • Podcasts
  • Scripting Blogs
  • Storage related
  • Various Virtualization Blogs
  • VMware Corporate Blogs

What To Do

Get out and vote for your favorite (or blogs that you frequent) in appreciation to those who create virtualization, VMware and data infrastructure related content. Click here or on the image above to reach the voting survey site where you will find more information and rules. In summary, select 12 of your favorite or preferred blogs, then rank them from 1 (most favorite) to 12. Then select your favorites for other categories such as Female Blog, Independent, New Blog, News websites, Podcast, Scripting and Storage among others.

Note: You will find my StorageIOblog in the main category (e.g. where you select 12 and then rank), as well as in the Storage, Independent, as well as Podcast categories, and thank you in advance for your continued support.

Which Blogs Do I Recommend (Among Others)

Two of my favorite blogs (and authors) are not included as Duncan Epping (Yellow Bricks) former #1 and Frank Denneman former #4 chose not to take part this year opening the door for some others to move up into the top 10 (or 25, 50 and 100). Of those listed some of my blogs I find valuable include Cormac Hogan of VMware, Demitasse (Alastair Cooke), ESX Virtualization (Vladan Seget), Kendrick Coleman, NTPro.nl (Eric Sloof), Planet VM (Tom Howarth), Virtually Ghetto (William Lam), VM Blog (David Marshall), vsphere-land.com (Eric Siebert) and Wahl Networks (Chris Wahl) among others.

Where to learn more

What this all means

It’s that time of the year again to take a few moments and show some appreciation for your favorite or preferred blogs along with their authors who spend time to create content for those sites. Also check out Turbonomic as they are an interesting technology that I have kept an eye on for some time now and so should you. Thank you all in advance regardless of if you take part in the voting as I also appreciate your continued support by viewing these posts either at StorageIOblog.com site or one of the many downstream sites where you can also read the content.

Ok, nuff said (for now…).

Cheers
Gs

Greg Schulz – Multi-year Microsoft MVP Cloud and Data Center Management, VMware vExpert (and vSAN). Author Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking (CRC Press), The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC Press), Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier) and twitter @storageio. Watch for the spring 2017 release of his new book "Software-Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials" (CRC Press).

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 2006-2023 Server StorageIO(R) and UnlimitedIO. All Rights Reserved.

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May 2017 Server StorageIO Data Infrastructures Update Newsletter

Volume 17, Issue V

Hello and welcome to the May 2017 issue of the Server StorageIO update newsletter.

Summer officially here in the northern hemisphere is still a few weeks away, however for all practical purposes it has arrived. What this means is that in addition to normal workplace activities and projects, there are plenty of outdoor things (as well as distractions) to attend to.

Over the past several months I have mentioned a new book that is due out this summer and which means it’s getting close to announcement time. The new book title is Software Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials – Cloud, Converged, and Virtual Fundamental Server Storage I/O Tradecraft (CRC PRess/Taylor Francis/Auerbach) that you can learn more about here (with more details being added soon). A common question is will there be electronic versions of the book and the answer is yes (more on this in future newsletter).

Data Infrastructures

Another common question is what is it about, what is a data infrastructure (see this post) and what is tradecraft (see this post). Software-Defined Data Infrastructures Essentials provides fundamental coverage of physical, cloud, converged, and virtual server storage I/O networking technologies, trends, tools, techniques, and tradecraft skills.

Software-Defined Data Infrastructures Essentials provides fundamental coverage of physical, cloud, converged, and virtual server storage I/O networking technologies, trends, tools, techniques, and tradecraft skills. From webscale, software-defined, containers, database, key-value store, cloud, and enterprise to small or medium-size business, the book is filled with techniques, and tips to help develop or refine your server storage I/O hardware, software, and services skills. Whether you are new to data infrastructures or a seasoned pro, you will find this comprehensive reference indispensable for gaining as well as expanding experience with technologies, tools, techniques, and trends.

Software-Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials SDDI SDDC
ISBN-13: 978-1498738156
ISBN-10: 149873815X
Hardcover: 672 pages
Publisher: Auerbach Publications; 1 edition (June 2017)
Language: English

Watch for more news and insight about my new book Software-Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials soon. In the meantime, check out the various items below in this edition of the Server StorageIO Update.

In This Issue

Enjoy this edition of the Server StorageIO update newsletter.

Cheers GS

Data Infrastructure and IT Industry Activity Trends

Some recent Industry Activities, Trends, News and Announcements include:

Flackbox.com has some new independent (non NetApp produced) learning resources including NetApp simulator eBook and MetroCluster tutorial. Over in the Microsoft world, Thomas Maurer has a good piece about Windows Server build 2017 and all about containers. Microsoft also announced SQL Server 2017 CTP 2.1 is now available. Meanwhile here are some my experiences and thoughts from test driving Microsoft Azure Stack.

Speaking of NetApp among other announcements they released a new version of their StorageGrid object storage software. NVMe activity in the industry (and at customer sites) continues to increase with Cavium Qlogic NVMe over Fabric news, along with Broadcom recent NVMe RAID announcements. Keep in mind that if the answer is NVMe, than what are the questions.

Here is a good summary of the recent OpenStack Boston Summit. Storpool did a momentum announcement which for those of you into software defined storage, add Storpool to your watch list. On the VMware front, check out this vSAN 6.6 demo (video) of stretched cluster via Yellow Bricks.

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

Server StorageIOblog Posts

Recent and popular Server StorageIOblog posts include:

View other recent as well as past StorageIOblog posts here

Server StorageIO Commentary in the news

Recent Server StorageIO industry trends perspectives commentary in the news.

Via EnterpriseStorageForum: What to Do with Legacy Assets in a Flash Storage World
There is still a place for hybrid arrays. A hybrid array is the home run when it comes to leveraging your existing non-flash, non-SSD based assets today.

Via EnterpriseStorageForum: Where All-Flash Storage Makes No Sense
A bit of flash in the right place can go a long way, and everybody can benefit from at least a some of flash somewhere. Some might say the more, the better. But where you have budget constraints that simply prevent you from having more flash for things such as cold, inactive, or seldom access data, you should explore other options.

Via Bitpipe: Changing With the Times – Protecting VMs(PDF)

Via FedTech: Storage Strategies: Agencies Optimize Data Centers by Focusing on Storage

Via SearchCloudStorage: Dell EMC cloud storage strategy needs to cut through fog

Via SearchStorage: Microsemi upgrades controllers based on HPE technology

Via EnterpriseStorageForum: 8 Data Machine Learning and AI Storage Tips

Via SiliconAngle: Dell EMC announces hybrid cloud platform for Azure Stack

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

Events and Activities

Recent and upcoming event activities.

Sep. 13-15, 2017 – Fujifilm IT Executive Summit – Seattle WA

August 28-30, 2017 – VMworld – Las Vegas

Jully 22, 2017 – TBA

June 22, 2017 – Webinar – GDPR and Microsoft Environments

May 11, 2017 – Webinar – Email Archiving, Compliance and Ransomware

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

Server StorageIO Industry Resources and Links

Useful links and pages:
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/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

Ok, nuff said, for now.

Cheers
Gs

Greg Schulz – Microsoft MVP Cloud and Data Center Management, VMware vExpert (and vSAN). Author Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking (CRC Press), The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC Press), Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier) and twitter @storageio. Watch for the spring 2017 release of his new book “Software-Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials” (CRC Press).

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 2006-2023 Server StorageIO(R) and UnlimitedIO. All Rights Reserved.

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Dell EMC World 2017 Day One news announcement summary

server storage I/O trends

Dell EMC World 2017 Day One news announcement summary

This is the first day of the first combined Dell EMC World 2017 being held in Las Vegas Nevada. Last year’s event in Las Vegas was the end of the EMC World, while this being the first of the combined Dell EMC World events that succeeded its predecessors.

What this means is an expanded focus because of the new Dell EMC that has added servers among other items to the event focus. Granted, EMC had been doing servers via its VCE and converged divisions, however with the Dell EMC integration completed as of last fall, the Dell Server group is now part of the Dell EMC organization.

The central theme of this Dell EMC world is REALIZE with a focus on four pillars:

  • Digital Transformation (Pivotal focus) of applications
  • IT Transformation (Dell EMC, Virtustream, VMware) data center modernization
  • Workforce transformation (Dell Client Solutions) devices from mobile to IoT
  • Information Security (RSA and Secureworks)

software defined data infrastructures SDDI and SDDC

What Did Dell EMC Announce Today

Note that while there are focus areas of the different Dell Technologies business units aligned to the pillars, there is also leveraging across those areas and groups. For example, VMware NSX spans into security, and  PowerEdge servers span into other pillars as a core data infrastructure building block.

What Dell EMC and Dell Technologies announced today.

  • Wave of Innovations to help customers realize digital transformation
  • New 14th generation PowerEdge Servers that are core building blocks for data infrastructures
  • Flexible consumption models (financing and more) from desktop to data center
  • Hyper-Converged Infrastructure (HCI), Converged (CI) and Cloud like systems
  • New All-Flash (ADA) SSD Storage Systems (VMAX, XtremIO X2, Unity, SC, Isilon)
  • Integrated Data Protection Appliance (IDPA) and Cloud Protection solutions
  • Using Gen14 servers several Software Defined Storage (SDS) enhancements
  • Open Networking and software-defined networks (SDN) with 25G
  • Last week Dell EMC announced Microsoft Azure Stack hybrid cloud solutions

New 14th generation PowerEdge Servers that are core building blocks for data infrastructures

Dell EMC has announced the 14th generation of Intel-powered Dell EMC PowerEdge server portfolio systems. These includes servers that get defined with software for software-defined data centers (SDDC), software-defined data infrastructures (SDDI) for the cloud, virtual, the container as well as storage among other applications. Target application workloads and environments range from high-performance compute (HPC), and high-productivity (or profitability) compute (the other HPC), super compute (SC), little data and big data analytics, legacy and emerging business applications as well as cloud and beyond. Enhancements besides new Intel processor technology includes enhanced iDRAC, OpenManage, REST interface, QuickSync, Secure Boot among other management, automation, security, performance, and capacity updates.

Other Dell EMC enhancements with Gen14 include support for various NVDIMM to enable persistent memory also known as storage class memories such as 3D Xpoint among others. Note at this time, Dell EMC is not saying much about speeds, feeds and other details, stay tuned for more information on these in the weeks and months to come.

Dell EMC has also been leaders with deploying NVMe from PCIe flash cards to 8639 U.2 devices such as 2.5” drives. Thus it makes sense to see continued adoption and deployment of those devices along with SAS, SATA support. Note that Broadcom (formerly known as Avago) recently announced the release of their PCIe SAS, SATA and NVMe based adapters.

The reason this is worth mentioning is that in the past Dell has OEM sourced Avago (formerly known as LSI) based adapters. Given Dell EMC use of NVMe drives, it only makes sense to put two and two together.

Let’s wait a few months to see what the speeds, feeds, and specifications are to put the rest of the puzzle together. Speaking of NVMe, also look for Dell EMC to also supporting PCIe AIC and U.2 (8639) NVMe devices, also leverage M.2 Next Generation Form Factor (NGFF) aka Gum sticks as boot devices.

While these are all Intel focused, I would expect Dell EMC not to sit back, instead, watch for what they do with other processors and servers including ARMs among others.

Increased support for more GPUs to support VDI and other graphic intensive workloads such as video rendering, imaging among others. Part of enhanced GPU support is improvements (multi-vector cooling) to power and cooling including sensing the type of PCIe card, and then adjusting cooling fans and subsequent power draw accordingly. The benefit should be more proper cooling to reduce power to support more work and productivity.

Flexible consumption models (financing and more) from desktop to data center

Dell Technologies has announced several financing, procurement, and consumption models with cloud-like flexible options for different IT and data center, along with mobile device technologies. These range from licensing to deployment as a service, consumption and other options via Dell Financial Services (DFS).

Highlights include:

  • DFS Flex on Demand is available now in select countries globally.
  • DFS Cloud Flex for HCI is available now for Dell EMC VxRail and Dell EMC XC Series and has planned availability for Q3 2017 in Dell EMC VxRack Systems.
  • PC as a Service is available now in select countries globally.
  • Dell EMC VDI Complete Solutions are available now in select countries globally.
  • DFS Flex on Demand is available now in select countries globally.
  • DFS Cloud Flex for HCI is available now for Dell EMC VxRail and Dell EMC XC Series and has planned VxRack systems in Q3 2017.
  • PC as a Service solution is available now in select countries globally.
  • Dell EMC VDI Complete Solutions are available now in select countries.
  • Dell Technologies transformation license agreement (TLA) is available now in select countries

Hyper-Converged Infrastructure (HCI), Converged (CI) and Cloud like systems

Enhancements to VxRail system, VxRACK Systems, and XC Series leveraging Del EMC Gen14 PowerEdge servers along with other improvements. Note that this also includes continued support for VMware, Microsoft as well as Nutanix software-defined solutions.

New All-Flash (ADA) SSD Storage Systems (VMAX, XtremIO X2, Unity, SC, Isilon)

Storage system enhancements include from high-end (VMAX and XtremIO) to mid-range (Unity and SC) along with scale-out NAS (Isilon)

Highlights of the announcements include:

  • New VMAX 950F all flash array (AFA)
  • New XtremIO X2 with enhanced software, more powerful hardware
  • New Unity AFA systems
  • New SC5020 midrange hybrid storage
  • New generation of Isilon storage with improved performance, capacity, density

Integrated Data Protection Appliance (IDPA) and Cloud Protection solutions

Data protection enhancement highlights include:

  • New Turnkey Integrated Data Protection Appliance (IDPA) with four models (DP5300, DP5800, DP8300, and DP8800) starting at 34 TB usable scaling up to 1PB usable. Data services including encryption, data footprint reduction such as dedupe, remote monitoring, Maintenance service dispatch, along with application integration. Application integration includes MongoDB, Hadoop, MySQL.

  • Enhanced cloud capabilities powered by Data Domain virtual edition (DD VE 3.1) along with data protection suite enable data to be protected too, and restored from Amazon Web Services (AWS) Simple Storage Service (S3) as well as Microsoft Azure.

Open Networking and software-defined networks (SDN) with 25G

Dell EMC Open Networking highlights include:

  • Dell EMCs first 25GbE open networking top of rack (TOR) switch including S5100-ON series (With OS10 enterprise edition software) complimenting new PowerEdge Gen14 servers with native 25GbE support. Switches support 100GbE uplinks fabric connectivity for east-west (management) network traffic. Also announced is the S4100-ON series and N1100-ON series that are in addition to recently announce N3100-ON and N2100-ON switches.

  • Dell EMCs first optimized Open Networking platform for unified storage network switching including support for 16Gb/32GB Fibre Channel

  • New Network Function Virtualization (NFV) and IoT advisory consulting services

Note that Dell EMC is announcing the availability of these networking solutions in Dell Technologies 2018 fiscal year which occurs before the traditional calendar year.

Using Gen14 servers, several Software Defined Storage (SDS) enhancements

Dell EMC announced enhancements to their Software Defined Storage (SDS) portfolio that leveraging the PowerEdge 14th generation server portfolio. These improvements include ScaleIO, Elastic Cloud Storage (ECS), IsilonSD Edge and Preview of Project Nautilus.

Where to learn more

What this all means

This is a summary of what has been announced so far on the first morning of the first day of the first new Dell EMC world. Needless to say, there is more detail to look at for the above announcements from speeds, feeds, functionality and related topics that will get addressed in subsequent posts. Overall this is a good set of announcements expanding capabilities of the combined Dell EMC while enhancing existing systems as well as well as solutions.

Ok, nuff said (for now…)

Cheers
Gs

Greg Schulz – Microsoft MVP Cloud and Data Center Management, VMware vExpert (and vSAN). Author Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking (CRC Press), The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC Press), Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier) and twitter @storageio. Watch for the spring 2017 release of his new book "Software-Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials" (CRC Press).

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 2006-2023 Server StorageIO(R) and UnlimitedIO. All Rights Reserved.

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VMware vSAN V6.6 Part V (vSAN evolution and summary)

server storage I/O trends

VMware vSAN V6.6 Part V (vSAN evolution and summary)

In case you missed it, VMware announced vSAN v6.6 hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) software defined data infrastructure solution. This is the fifth of a five-part series about VMware vSAN V6.6. View Part I here, Part II (just the speeds feeds please) is located here, part III (reducing cost and complexity) found here, part IV (scaling ROBO and data centers today) located here.

VMware vSAN 6.6
Image via VMware

For those who are not aware, vSAN is a VMware virtual Storage Area Network (e.g. vSAN) that is software-defined, part of being a software-defined data infrastructure (SDDI) and software-defined data center (SDDC). Besides being software-defined vSAN is HCI combining compute (server), I/O networking, storage (space and I/O) along with hypervisors, management, and other tools.

How has vSAN (formerly referred to as VSAN) Evolved

A quick recap of the VMware vSAN progression which first appeared as part of vSphere 5.5. (e.g. vSAN 5.5 can be thought of 1.0 in some ways) consists of several releases. Since vSAN is tightly integrated with VMware vSphere along with associated management tools, there is a correlation between enhancements to the underlying hypervisor, and added vSAN functionality. Keep in mind sometimes by seeing where something has been, helps to view where going.

Previous vSAN enhancements include:

  • 5.5 Hybrid (mixed HDD and flash)
  • 6.2 (2016) All flash (e.g. AFA) versions included data footprint reduction (DFR) technologies such as compression and dedupe along with performance Quality of Service (QoS) enhancements.
  • 6.5 Cross Cloud functionality including the announcement of container support, cloud-native apps, as well as upcoming vSphere, vSAN, NSX and other VMware software-defined data center (SDDC) and software-defined data infrastructure (SDDI) technology running natively on AWS (not on EC2) cloud infrastructure.
  • 6.6 Modern data infrastructure flexibility, scalability, resiliency, extensibility including performance, availability, capacity and economics (PACE).

V5.5

  • Distributed RAID
  • Per-VM SPBM
  • Set and change FTT via policy
  • In-kernel hyper-convergence engine
  • RVC and Observer

V6.0

  • All-flash architecture
  • Perf improvements (4xIOPS)
  • 64-node support
  • High-density storage blades
  • Fault domain awareness
  • Scalable snapshots and clones
  • Disk enclosure management

V6.1

  • Windows Failover Clustering
  • Oracle RAC support
  • HW checksum and encryption
  • 2-node ROBO mode
  • UltraDIMM and NVMe support
  • Stretch clusters
  • 5 min RPO (vSphere Rep)
  • SMP-FT support
  • Health Check, vROps, Log Insight

V6.2

  • IPv6 support
  • Software checksum
  • Nearline dedupe and compression on all-flash
  • Erasure coding on all-flash
  • QoS IOPS limits
  • Performance monitoring service

V6.5

  • iSCSI
  • 2-Node direct connect
  • PowerCLI
  • Public APIs and SDK
  • 512e support
  • All-Flash to all editions

Where to Learn More

The following are additional resources to find out more about vSAN and related technologies.

What this all means, wrap up and summary

VMware continues to extend the software-defined data center (SDDC) and Software-Defined Data Infrastructure (SDDI) ecosystem with vSAN to address the needs from smaller SMB and ROBO environments to larger SME and enterprise workloads. To me a theme with V6.6 is expanding resiliency, scalability with stability to expand vSAN upmarket as well as into new workloads similar to how vSphere has evolved.

With each new release, vSAN is increasing its feature, functionality, resiliency and extensiveness associated with traditional storage and non-CI or HCI solutions. Overall a good set of enhancements as vSAN continues its evolution looking back just a few years ago, to where it is today and will be in the future. If you have not looked at vSAN recently, take some time beyond reading this piece to learn some more.

Ok, nuff said (for now…).

Cheers
Gs

Greg Schulz – Microsoft MVP Cloud and Data Center Management, VMware vExpert (and vSAN). Author Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking (CRC Press), The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC Press), Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier) and twitter @storageio. Watch for the Spring 2017 release of his new book “Software-Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials” (CRC Press).

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 2006-2023 Server StorageIO(R) and UnlimitedIO. All Rights Reserved.

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March 2017 Server StorageIO Data Infrastructure Update Newsletter

Volume 17, Issue III

Hello and welcome to the March 2017 issue of the Server StorageIO update newsletter.

First a reminder world backup (and recovery) day is on March 31. Following up from the February Server StorageIO update newsletter that had a focus on data protection this edition includes some additional posts, articles, tips and commentary below.

Other data infrastructure (and tradecraft) topics in this edition include cloud, virtual, server, storage and I/O including NVMe as well as networks. Industry trends include new technology and services announcements, cloud services, HPE buying Nimble among other activity. Check out the Converged Infrastructure (CI), Hyper-Converged (HCI) and Cluster in Box (or Cloud in Box) coverage including a recent SNIA webinar I was invited to be the guest presenter for, along with companion post below.

In This Issue

Enjoy this edition of the Server StorageIO update newsletter.

Cheers GS

Data Infrastructure and IT Industry Activity Trends

Some recent Industry Activities, Trends, News and Announcements include:

Dell EMC has discontinued the NVMe direct attached shared DSSD D5 all flash array has been discontinued. At about the same time Dell EMC is shutting down the DSSD D5 product, it has also signaled they will leverage the various technologies including NVMe across their broad server storage portfolio in different ways moving forward. While Dell EMC is shutting down DSSD D5, they are also bringing additional NVMe solutions to the market including those they have been shipping for years (e.g. on the server-side). Learn more about DSSD D5 here and here including perspectives of how it could have been used (plays for playbooks).

Meanwhile NVMe industry activity continues to expand with different solutions from startups such as E8, Excelero, Everspin, Intel, Mellanox, Micron, Samsung and WD SANdisk among others. Also keep in mind, if the answer is NVMe, then what were and are the questions to ask, as well as what are some easy to use benchmark scripts (using fio, diskspd, vdbench, iometer).

Speaking of NVMe, flash and SSDs, Amazon Web Services (AWS) have added new Elastic Cloud Compute (EC2) storage and I/O optimized i3 instances. These new instances are available in various configurations with different amounts of vCPU (cores or logical processors), memory and NVMe SSD capacities (and quantity) along with price.

Note that the price per i3 instance varies not only by its configuration, also for image and region deployed in. The flash SSD capacities range from an entry-level (i3.large) with 2 vCPU (logical processors), 15.25GB of RAM and a single 475GB NVMe SSD that for example in the US East Region was recently priced at $0.156 per hour. At the high-end there is the i3.16xlarge with 64 vCPU (logical processors), 488GB RAM and 8 x 1900GB NVMe SSDs with a recent US East Region price of $4.992 per hour. Note that the vCPU refers to the available number of logical processors available and not necessarily cores or sockets.

Also note that your performance will vary, and while NVMe protocol tends to use less CPU per I/O, if generating a large number of I/Os you will need some CPU. What this means is that if you find your performance limited compared to expectations with the lower end i3 instances, move up to a larger instance and see what happens. If you have a Windows-based environment, you can use a tool such as Diskspd to see what happens with I/O performance as you decrease the number of CPUs used.

Chelsio has announced they are now Microsoft Azure Stack Certified with their iWARP RDMA host adapter solutions, as well as for converged infrastructure (CI), hyper-converged (HCI) and legacy server storage deployments. As part of the announcement, Chelsio is also offering a 30 day no cost trial of their adapters for Microsoft Azure Stack, Windows Server 2016 and Windows 10 client environments. Learn more about the Chelsio trial offer here.

Everspin (the MRAM Spintorque, persistent RAM folks) have announced a new Storage Class Memory (SCM) NVMe accessible family (nvNITRO) of storage accelerator devices (PCIe AiC, U.2). Whats interesting about Everspin is that they are using NVMe for accessing their persistent RAM (e.g. MRAM) making it easily plug compatible with existing operating systems or hypervisors. This means using standard out of the box NVMe drivers where the Everspin SCM appears as a block device (for compatibility) functioning as a low latency, high performance persistent write cache.

Something else interesting besides making the new memory compatible with existing servers CPU complex via PCIe, is how Everspin is demonstrating that NVMe as a general access protocol is not just exclusive to nand flash-based SSDs. What this means is that instead of using non-persistent DRAM, or slower NAND flash (or 3D XPoint SCM), Everspin nvNITRO enables high endurance write cache with persistent to compliment existing NAND flash as well as emerging 3D XPoint based storage. Keep an eye on Everspin as they are doing some interesting things for future discussions.

Google Cloud Services has added additional regions (cloud locations) and other enhancements.

HPE continued buying into server storage I/O data infrastructure technologies announcing an all cash (e.g. no stock) acquisition of Nimble Storage (NMBL). The cash acquisition for a little over $1B USD amounts to $12.50 USD per Nimble share, double what it had traded at. As a refresh, or overview, Nimble is an all flash shared storage system leverage NAND flash solid storage device (SSD) performance. Note that Nimble also partners with Cisco and Lenovo platforms that compete with HPE servers for converged systems.View additional perspectives here.

Riverbed has announced the release of Steelfusion 5 which while its name implies physical hardware metal, the solution is available as tin wrapped (e.g. hardware appliance) software. However the solution is also available for deployment as a VMware virtual appliance for remote office branch office (ROBO) among others. Enhancements include converged functionality such as NAS support along with network latency as well as bandwidth among other features.

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

Server StorageIOblog Posts

Recent and popular Server StorageIOblog posts include:

View other recent as well as past StorageIOblog posts here

Server StorageIO Commentary in the news

Recent Server StorageIO industry trends perspectives commentary in the news.

Via InfoStor: 8 Big Enterprise SSD Trends to Expect in 2017
Watch for increased capacities at lower cost, differentiation awareness of high-capacity, low-cost and lower performing SSDs versus improved durability and performance along with cost capacity enhancements for active SSD (read and write optimized). You can also expect increased support for NVMe both as a back-end storage device with different form factors (e.g., M.2 gum sticks, U.2 8639 drives, PCIe cards) as well as front-end (e.g., storage systems that are NVMe-attached) including local direct-attached and fiber-attached. This means more awareness around NVMe both as front-end and back-end deployment options.

Via SearchITOperations: Storage performance bottlenecks
Sometimes it takes more than an aspirin to cure a headache. There may be a bottleneck somewhere else, in hardware, software, storage system architecture or something else.

Via SearchDNS: Parsing through the software-defined storage hype
Beyond scalability, SDS technology aims for freedom from the limits of proprietary hardware.

Via InfoStor: Data Storage Industry Braces for AI and Machine Learning
AI could also lead to untapped hidden or unknown value in existing data that has no or little perceived value

Via SearchDataCenter: New options to evolve data backup recovery

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

Various Tips, Tools, Technology and Tradecraft Topics

Recent Data Infrastructure Tradecraft Articles, Tips, Tools, Tricks and related topics.

Via ComputerWeekly: Time to restore from backup: Do you know where your data is?
Via IDG/NetworkWorld: Ensure your data infrastructure remains available and resilient
Via IDG/NetworkWorld: Whats a data infrastructure?

Check out Scott Lowe @Scott_Lowe of VMware fame who while having a virtual networking focus has a nice roundup of related data infrastructure topics cloud, open source among others.

Want to take a break from reading or listening to tech talk, check out some of the fun videos including aerial drone (and some technology topics) at www.storageio.tv.

View more tips and articles here

Events and Activities

Recent and upcoming event activities.

May 8-10, 2017 – Dell EMCworld – Las Vegas

April 3-7, 2017 – Seminars – Dutch workshop seminar series – Nijkerk Netherlands

March 15, 2017 – Webinar – SNIA/BrightTalk – HyperConverged and Storage – 10AM PT

January 26 2017 – Seminar – Presenting at Wipro SDx Summit London UK

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


Cheers
Gs

Greg Schulz – Microsoft MVP Cloud and Data Center Management, VMware vExpert (and vSAN). Author Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking (CRC Press), The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC Press) and Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier) and twitter @storageio. Watch for the spring 2017 release of his new book Software-Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials(CRC Press).

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 2006-2023 Server StorageIO(R) and UnlimitedIO. All Rights Reserved.

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Updated Software Defined Data Infrastructure Webinars and Fall 2016 events

Software Defined Data Infrastructure Webinars and Fall 2016 events

server storage I/O trends

Here is the updated Server StorageIO fall 2016 webinar and event activities covering software defined data center, data infrastructure, virtual, cloud, containers, converged, hyper-converged server, storage, I/O network, performance and data protection among other topics.

December 7, 2016 – Webinar 11AM PT – BrightTalk
Hyper-Converged Infrastructure Decision Making

Hyper-Converged Infrastructure, HCI and CI Decision Making

Are Converged Infrastructures (CI), Hyper-Converged Infrastructures (HCI), Cluster in Box or Cloud in Box (CiB) solutions for you? The answer is it depends on what your needs, requirements, application among other criteria are. In addition are you focused on a particular technology solution or architecture approach, or, looking for something that adapts to your needs? Join us in this discussion exploring your options for different scenarios as we look beyond they hype including to next wave of hyper-scale converged along with applicable decision-making criteria. Topics include:

– Data Infrastructures exist to support applications and their underlying resource needs
– What are your application and environment needs along with other objectives
– Explore various approaches for hyper-small and hyper-large environments
– What are you converging, hardware, hypervisors, management or something else?
– Does HCI mean hyper-vendor-lock-in, if so, is that a bad thing?
– When, where, why and how to use different scenarios

November 29-30, 2016 (New) – Converged & Hyper-Converged Decision Making
Is Converged Infrastructure Right For You?
Workshop Seminar – Nijkerk The Netherlands

Converged and server storage I/O data infrastructure trends
Agenda and topics to be covered include:

  • When should decide to evaluate CI/HCI vs. traditional approach
  • What are decision and evaluation criteria for apples to apples vs. Apples to pears
  • What are the costs, benefits, and caveats of the different approaches
  • How different applications such as VDI or VSI or database have different needs
  • What are the network, storage, software license and training cost implications
  • Different comparison criteria for smaller environments remote office vs. Larger enterprise
  • How will you protect and secure a CI, HCI environment (HA, BC, BR, DR, Backup)
  • What is the risk and benefit of startups, companies with limited portfolios vs. Big vendors
  • Do it yourself (DiY) vs. Turnkey software vs. Bundled tin wrapped software solution
  • We will also look at associated trends including software-defined, NVM/SSD, NVMe, VMware, Microsoft, KVM, Citrix/Xen, Docker, OpenStack among others.

Organized by:
Brouwer Storage Consultancy

November 28, 2016 (New) – Server Storage I/O Fundamental Trends V2.1116
Whats New, Whats the buzz, what you need to know about and whos doing what
Workshop Seminar – Nijkerk The Netherlands

Converged and server storage I/O data infrastructure trends
Agenda and topics that will be covered include:

  • Who’s doing what, who are the new emerging vendors, solutions and technologies to watch
  • Non-Volatile Memory (NVM), flash solid state device (SSD), Storage Class Memory (SCM)
  • Networking with your servers and storage including NVMe, NVMeoF and RoCE
  • Cloud, Object and Bulk storage for data protection, archiving, near-line, scale-out
  • Data protection and software defined storage management (backup, BC, BR, DR, archive)
  • Microsoft Windows Server 2016, Nano, S2D and Hyper-V
  • VMware, OpenStack, Ceph, Docker and Containers, CI and HCI
  • EMC is gone, now there is Dell EMC and what that means
  • Various vendors and solutions from legacy to new and emerging
  • Recommendations, usage or deployment scenarios and tips
  • Some examples of who’s doing what includes AWS, Brocade, Cisco, Dell EMC, Enmotus, Futjistu, Google, HDS, HP and Huawei, IBM, Intel, Lenovo, Mellanox, Micron, Microsoft, NetApp, Nutanix, Oracle, Pure, Quantum, Qumulo, Reduxio, Rubrik, Samsung, SANdisk, Seagate, Simplivity and Tintri, Veeam, Veritas, VMware and WD among others.

Organized by:
Brouwer Storage Consultancy

November 23, 2016 – Webinar 10AM PT BrightTalk
BCDR and Cloud Backup Software Defined Data Infrastructures (SDDI) and Data Protection

BC DR Cloud Backup and Data Protection

The answer is BCDR and Cloud Backup, however what was the question? Besides how to protect preserve and secure your data, applications along with data Infrastructures against various threat risk issues, what are some other common questions? For example how to modernize, rethink, re-architect, use new and old things in new ways, these and other topics, techniques, trends, tools have a common theme of BCDR and Cloud Backup. Join us in this discussion exploring your options for protecting data, applications and your data Infrastructures spanning legacy, software-defined virtual and cloud environments. Topics include:

– Data Infrastructures exist to support applications and their underlying resource needs
– Various cloud storage options to meet different application PACE needs
– Do clouds need to be backed-up or protected?
– How to leverage clouds for various data protection objectives
– When, where, why and how to use different scenarios

November 23, 2016 – Webinar 9AM PT – BrightTalk
Cloud Storage – Hybrid and Software Defined Data Infrastructures (SDDI)

Cloud Storage Decision Making

You have been told, or determined that you need (or want) to use cloud storage, ok, now what? What type of cloud storage do you need or want, or do you simply want cloud storage? However, what are your options as well as application requirements including Performance, Availability, Capacity and Economics (PACE) along with access or interfaces? Where are your applications and where will they be located? What are your objectives for using cloud storage or is it simply you have heard or told its cheaper. Join us in this discussion exploring your options, considerations for cloud storage decision-making. Topics include:

– Data Infrastructures exist to support applications and their underlying resource needs
– Various cloud storage options to meet different application PACE needs
– Storage for primary, secondary, performance, availability, capacity, backup, archiving
– Public, private and hybrid cloud storage options from block, file, object to application service
– When, where, why and how to use cloud storage for different scenarios

November 22, 2016 – Webinar 10AM PT – BrightTalk
Cloud Infrastructure Hybrid and Software Defined Data Infrastructures (SDDI)

Cloud Infrastructure and Hybrid Software Defined

At the core of cloud (public, private, hybrid) next generation data centers are software defined data infrastructures that exist to protect, preserve and serve applications, data along with their resulting information services. Software defined data infrastructure core components include hardware, software servers and storage configured (defined) to provide various services enabling application Performance Availability Capacity and Economics (PACE). Just as there are different types of environments, applications along with workloads various options, technologies as well as techniques exist for cloud services (and underlying data infrastructures). Join us in this session to discuss trends, technologies, tools, techniques and services options for cloud infrastructures. Topics include:

– Data Infrastructures exist to support applications and their underlying resource needs
– Software Defined Infrastructures (SDDI) are what enable Software Defined Data Centers and clouds
– Various types of clouds along with cloud services that determine how resources get defined
– When, where, why and how to use cloud Infrastructures along with associated resources

November 15, 2016 (New) – 11AM PT Webinar – Redmond Magazine and Solarwinds
The O.A.R. of Virtualization Scaling
A journey of optimization, automation, and reporting

Your journey to a flexible, scalable and secure IT universe begins now. Join Microsoft MVP and VMware vSAN and vExpert Greg Schulz of Server StorageIO along with VMware vExpert, Cisco Champion and Head Geek of Virtualization and Cloud Practice Kong Yang of SolarWinds for an interactive discussion empowering you to become the master of your software defined and virtual data center. Topics will include:

  • Trust your instruments and automation, however, verify they are working properl
  • Insight into how your environment, as well as automation tools, are working
  • Leverage automation to handle recurring tasks so you can focus on more productive activities
  • Capture, retain and transfer knowledge and tradecraft experiences into automation policies
  • Automated system management is only as good as the policies and data they rely upon
  • Optimize via automation that relies on reporting for insight, awareness and analytics 

November 3, 2016 (New) – Webinar 11AM PT – Redmond Magazine and
Dell Software
Tailor Your Backup Data Repositories to
Fit Your Security and Management Needs

Does data protection storage have you working overtime to take care of it? Do you have the flexibility to protect, preserve, secure and serve different workgroups or customers in a shared environment? Is your environment looking to expand with new applications and remote offices, yet your data protection is slowing you down? 

In this webinar we will look at current and emerging trends along with issues including how different threat risk challenges impact your evolving environment, as well as opportunities to address them. It’s time to deploy technology that works for you and your environment instead of you working for the solution. 

Attend and learn about:

  • Data protection trends, issues, regulatory compliance, challenges and opportunities
  • How to utilize purpose built appliances to protect and defend your systems, applications and data from various threat risks
  • Importance of timely insight and situational awareness into your data protection infrastructure
  • Protecting centralized and distributed remote office branch offices (ROBO) workgroups
  • What you can do today to optimize your environment

October 27, 2016 (New) – Webinar 10AM PT – Virtual Instruments
The Value of Infrastructure Insight

This webinar looks at the value of data center infrastructure insight both as a technology as well as a business productivity enabler. Besides productivity, having insight into how data infrastructure resources (servers, storage, networks, system software) are used, enables informed analysis, troubleshooting, planning, forecasting as well as cost-effective decision-making. In other words, data center infrastructure insight, based on infrastructure performance analytics, enables you to avoid flying blind, having situational awareness for proactive Information Technology (IT) management. Your return on innovation is increased, and leveraging insight awareness along with metrics that matter drives return on investment (ROI) along with enhanced service delivery.

October 20, 2016 – Webinar 9AM PT – BrightTalk
Next-Gen Data Centers Software Defined Data Infrastructures (SDDI) including Servers, Storage and Virtualization

Cloud Storage Decision Making

At the core of next generation data centers are software defined data infrastructures that enable, protect, preserve and serve applications, data along with their resulting information services. Software defined data infrastructure core components include hardware, software servers and storage configured (defined) to provide various services enabling application Performance Availability Capacity and Economics (PACE). Just as there are different types of environments, applications along with workloads various options, technologies as well as techniques exist for virtual servers and storage. Join us in this session to discuss trends, technologies, tools, techniques and services around storage and virtualization for today, tomorrow, and in the years to come. Topics include:

– Data Infrastructures exist to support applications and their underlying resource needs
– Software Defined Infrastructures (SDDI) are what enable Software Defined Data Centers
– Server and Storage Virtualization better together, with and without CI/HCI
– Many different facets (types) of Server virtualization and virtual storage
– When, where, why and how to use storage virtualization and virtual storage

September 20, 2016 – Webinar 8AM PT – BrightTalk
Software Defined Data Infrastructures (SDDI) Enabling Software Defined Data Centers – Part of Software-Defined Storage summit

Cloud Storage Decision Making

Data Infrastructures exist to support applications and their underlying resource needs. Software-Defined Infrastructures (SDI) are what enable Software-Defined Data Centers, and at the heart of a SDI is storage that is software-defined. This spans cloud, virtual and physical storage and is at the focal point of today. Join us in this session to discuss trends, technologies, tools, techniques and services around SDI and SDDC- today, tomorrow, and in the years to come.

September 13, 2016 – Webinar 11AM PT – Redmond Magazine and
Dell Software
Windows Server 2016 and Active Directory
Whats New and How to Plan for Migration

Windows Server 2016 is expected to GA this fall and is a modernized version of the Microsoft operating system that includes new capabilities such as Active Directory (AD) enhancements. AD is critical to organizational operations providing control and secure access to data, networks, servers, storage and more from physical, virtual and cloud (public and hybrid). But over time, organizations along with their associated IT infrastructures have evolved due to mergers, acquisitions, restructuring and general growth. As a result, yesterday’s AD deployments may look like they did in the past while using new technology (e.g. in old ways). Now is the time to start planning for how you will optimize your AD environment using new tools and technologies such as those in Windows Server 2016 and AD in new ways. Optimizing AD means having a new design, performing cleanup and restructuring prior to migration vs. simply moving what you have. Join us for this interactive webinar to begin planning your journey to Windows Server 2016 and a new optimized AD deployment that is flexible, scalable and elastic, and enables resilient infrastructures. You will learn:

  • What’s new in Windows Server 2016 and how it impacts your AD
  • Why an optimized AD is critical for IT environments moving forward
  • How to gain insight into your current AD environment
  • AD restructuring planning considerations

September 8, 2016 – Webinar 11AM PT (Watch on Demand) – Redmond Magazine, Acronis and Unitrends
Data Protection for Modern Microsoft Environments

Your organization’s business depends on modern Microsoft® environments — Microsoft Azure and new versions of Windows Server 2016, Microsoft Hyper-V with RCT, and business applications — and you need a data protection solution that keeps pace with Microsoft technologies. If you lose mission-critical data, it can cost you $100,000 or more for a single hour of downtime. Join our webinar and learn how different data protection solutions can protect your Microsoft environment, whether you store data on company premises, at remote locations, in private and public clouds, and on mobile devices.

Where To Learn More

What This All Means

Its fall back to school and learning time, join me on these and other upcoming event activities.

Ok, nuff said, for now…

Cheers
Gs

Greg Schulz – Microsoft MVP Cloud and Data Center Management, vSAN and VMware vExpert. Author Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking (CRC Press), The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC Press) and Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier) and twitter @storageio

All Comments, (C) and (TM) belong to their owners/posters, Other content (C) Copyright 2006-2023 Server StorageIO(R) and UnlimitedIO All Rights Reserved

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2016 Going Dutch Cloud Virtualization Server Storage I/O Seminars

2016 Going Dutch Cloud Virtualization Server Storage I/O Seminars

server storage I/O trends

In June 2016 Brouwer Storage Consultancy is organizing their yearly spring seminar workshops in Nijkerk Holland (south of Amsterdam, near Utrecht and Amersfoort) with myself among others presenting.

Brouwer Consultancy

Cloud Virtualization Server Storage I/O Seminars

For this series of seminar workshops, there are four sessions, two being presented by myself, and two others in conjunction with Reduxio as well as Fujitsu & SJ Solutions.

Brouwer and Server StorageIO Seminar Sessions

Agenda, How To Register and Where To Learn More

The vendor sponsored sessions will consist of about 50% content being independent presented by myself and Gert Brouwer, the balance by the event sponsors as well as their partners. All presentation and associated content including handouts will be in English.

There will be 4 seminar workshop sessions, two of those are paid sessions dedicated to Greg Schulz and the other two are free (sponsored) sessions where 50% of the content is sponsored (Reduxio, Fujitsu & SJ Solutions) and the other 50% will be independent (Greg Schulz & Gert Brouwer).

Thursday June 9th – Server StorageIO Trends and Updates

Server Storage I/O Fundamental Trends V2.016 and Updates. What’s New, What’s the buzz, what you need to know about. From Speeds and Feeds, Slots and Watts to Who’s doing what. Event Location: Golden Tulip Ampt van Nijkerk Hotel, Berencamperweg 4, 3861MC, Nijkerk. Learn more here (PDF abstract and topics to be covered).

Thursday June 10th – Converged Day

Converged Day – Moving beyond Hyper-Converged Hype and Server Storage I/O Decision Making Strategies. Event Location: Golden Tulip Ampt van Nijkerk Hotel, Berencamperweg 4, 3861MC, Nijkerk. Learn more here (PDF abstract and topics to be covered).

Brouwer and Server StorageIO Seminar Sessions De Roode Schuur

Tuesday June 14th – Round Table Vendor Session with Reduxio

Symposium Workshop – Round Table Vendor Session with Reduxio – Are some solutions really ‘a Paradigm shift’ or ‘new and revolutionary” as they claim to be, or is it just more of the same (e.g. evolutionary)? – Presentations and discussions led by Greg Schulz (StorageIO), Reduxio and Brouwer Storage Consultancy. (Free, sponsored Session, Access for end-users only). Event Location: Hotel & Gasterij De Roode Schuur, Oude Barneveldseweg 98, 3862PS Nijkerk. Learn more here (PDF abstract and topics to be covered).

Wednesday June 15th – Software Defined Data Center Symposium Workshop

Software Defined Data Center Symposium Workshop – Round Table Vendor Session with Fujitsu & SJ Solutions
With subjects like Openstack, Ceph, distributed object storage, Bigdata, Hyper-Converged Infrastructure (HCI), Converged Infrastructure (CI), Software defined storage (SDS) and Network (SDN and NFV), this round table format workshop seminars explores these and other related topics including what to use when, where, why and how. Presentations by Greg Schulz (StorageIO), SJ Solutions & Fujitsu and Brouwer Storage Consultancy. Event Location: Hotel & Gasterij De Roode Schuur, Oude Barneveldseweg 98, 3862PS Nijkerk. Learn more here (PDF abstract and topics to be covered).

For more information, abstracts/agenda, registration and the specific locations for all the above events click here.

Brouwer and Server StorageIO Sessions Ampt van Nijkerk

What This All Means

There is a lot of things occurring in the IT industry from physical to software defined clouds, containers and virtualization, nonvolatile memory (NVM) including flash SSD among others. These series of interactive educational workshop seminars converge on Nijkerk Holland combing content discussions from strategy, planning decision making, to what’s new (and old) that can be used in new ways, as well as some trends, speeds and feeds along with practicality for your environment.

Brouwer Consultancy

I Look forward to seeing you in Nijkerk and Europe during June 2016, in the meantime, contact Brouwer Storage Consultancy for more information on the above sessions as well as to arrange private discussions or meetings.

Ok, nuff said, for now…

Cheers
Gs

Greg Schulz – Author Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking (CRC Press), The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC Press) and Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier)
twitter @storageio

All Comments, (C) and (TM) belong to their owners/posters, Other content (C) Copyright 2006-2023 Server StorageIO(R) and UnlimitedIO All Rights Reserved

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Server StorageIO March 2016 Update Newsletter

Volume 16, Issue III

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

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

In This Issue

  • Feature Topic and Themes
  • Industry Trends News
  • Commentary in the news
  • Tips and Articles
  • StorageIOblog posts
  • Videos and Podcast’s
  • Events and Webinars
  • Recommended Reading List
  • Industry Activity Trends
  • Server StorageIO Lab reports
  • New and Old Vendor Update
  • Resources and Links

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Cheers GS

    Feature Topic and Theme

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

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

    StorageIOblog Posts

    Recent and popular Server StorageIOblog posts include:

    View other recent as well as past blog posts here

    Server Storage I/O Industry Activity Trends (Cloud, Virtual, Physical)

    StorageIO news (image licensed for use from Shutterstock by StorageIO)

    Some new Products Technology Services Announcements (PTSA) include:

  • Via Redmondmag: AWS Cloud Storage Service Turns 10 years old in March, happy birthday AWS (read more here at the AWS site).
  • Cisco announced new flexible HyperFlex converged compute server platforms for hybrid cloud and other deployments. Also announced were NetApp All Flash Array (AFA) FlexPod converged solutions powered by Cisco UCS servers and networking technology. In other activity, Cisco unveiled a Digital Network Architecture to enable customer digital data transformation. Cisco also announced its intent to acquire CliQr for management of hybrid clouds.

  • Data Direct Networks (DDN) expands NAS offerings with new GS14K platform via PRnewswire.

  • Via Computerworld: DropBox quits Amazon cloud, takes back 500 PB of data. DropBox has created their own cloud to host videos, images, files, folders, objects, blobs and other storage items that used to be stored within AWS S3. In this DropBox post, you can read about the why they decided to create their own cloud, as well as how they used a hybrid approach with metadata kept local, actual data stored in AWS S3. Now the data and the metadata are in DropBox data centers. However, DropBox is still keeping some data in AWS particular in different geographies.

  • Web site hosting company GoDaddy has extended their capabilities similar to other service providers by adding an OpenStack powered cloud service. This is a trend that others such as Bluehost (where my sites are located on a DPS) have evolved from simple shared hosting, to dedicated private servers (DPS), virtual private servers (VPS) along with other cloud related services. Think of a VPS as a virtual machine or cloud instance. Likewise some of the cloud service providers such as AWS are moving into dedicated private servers.

  • Following up from the February 2016 Server StorageIO Update Newsletter that included Google’s message to disk vendors: Make hard drives like this, even if they lose more data and Google Disk for Data Centers White Paper (PDF Here), read about Google experiences SSD.

    In this PDF white paper that was presented at the recent Usenix 2016 conference outlining Google’s experiences with different types (SLC, MLC, eMLC) and generations of NAND flash SSD media across various vendors and generations. Some of the takeaways include that context matters when looking at SSD metrics on endurance, durability and errors. While some in the industry focus on Unrecoverable Bit Error Rates (UBER), there needs to be awareness around Raw Bit Error Rate (RBER) among other metrics and usage. Read more about Google’s experiences here.


  • Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) announced Hyper-Converged systems Via Marketwired including HC 380 based on ProLiant DL380 technology providing all in one (AiO) converged compute, storage and virtualization software with simplified management. The HC 380 is targeted for mid-market aka small medium business (SMB), remote office branch office (ROBO) and workgroups. HPE also announced all flash array (AFA) enhancements for 3PAR storage (Via Businesswire).

  • Microsoft has announced that it will be releasing a version of its SQL Server database on Linux. What this means is that as well as being able to use SQL Server and associated tools on Windows and Azure platforms, you will also in the not so distant future be able to deploy on Linux. By making SQL Server available on Linux opens up some interesting scenarios and solution alternatives vs. Oracle along with MySQL and associated MySQL derivatives, as well as NoSQL offerings (Read more about NoSQL Databases here). Read more about Microsoft’s SQL Server for Linux here.

    In addition to SQL Server for Linux, Microsoft has also announced enhancements for easing docker container migrations to clouds. In other Microsoft activity, they announced enhancements to Storsimple and Azure. Keep an eye out for Windows Server 2016 Tech Preview 5 (e.g. TP5) which will be the next release of the upcoming new version of the popular operating systems.


  • MSDI, Rockland IT Solutions and Source Support Services Merge to Form Congruity with CEO Todd Gresham, along with Mike Stolz and Mark Shirman (formerly of Glasshouse) among others you may know.

  • Via Businesswire: PrimaryIO announces server-based flash acceleration for VMware systems, while Riverbed extends Remote Office Branch Office (ROBO) cloud connectivity Via Businesswire.

  • Via Computerworld: Samsung ships 12Gbs SAS 15TB 2.5" 3D NAND Flash SSD (Hey Samsung, send me a device or two and will give them a test drive in the Server StorageIO lab ;). Not to be out done, Via Forbes: Seagate announces fast SSD card, as well as for the High Performance Compute (HPC) and Super Compute (SC) markets, Via HPCwire: Seagate Sets Sights on Broader HPC Market with their scale-out clustered Lustre based systems.

  • Servers Direct is now offering the HGST 4U x 60 drive enclosures while Via PRnewswire: SMIC announces RRAM partnership.

  • ATTO Technology has enhanced their RAID Arrays Behind FibreBridge 7500, while Oracle announced mainframe virtual tape library (VTL) cloud support Via Searchdatabackup. In other updates for this month, VMware has released and made generally available (GA) VSAN 6.2 and Via Businesswire: Wave and Centeris Launch Transpacific Broadband Data and Fiber Hub.

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

    View other recent news and industry trends here.

    StorageIO Commentary in the news

    View more Server, Storage and I/O hardware as well as software trends comments here

    Vendors you may not have heard of

    Various vendors (and service providers) you may not know or heard about recently.

    • Continum – R1Soft Server Backup Manager
    • HyperIO – HiMon and HyperIO server storage I/O monitoring software tools
    • Runcast – VMware automation and management software tools
    • Opvizor – VMware health management software tools
    • Asigra – Cloud, Managed Service and distributed backup/data protection tools
    • Datera – Software defined storage management startup
    • E8 Storage – Software Defined Stealth Storage Startup
    • Venyu – Cloud and data center data protection tools
    • StorPool – Distributed software defined storage management tools
    • ExaBlox – Scale out storage solutions

    Check out more vendors you may know, have heard of, or that are perhaps new on the Server StorageIO Industry Links page here (over 1,000 entries and growing).

    StorageIO Tips and Articles

    Recent Server StorageIO articles appearing in different venues include:

    • InfoStor:  Data Protection Gaps, Some Good, Some Not So Good

    • Virtual Blocks (VMware Blogs):  Part III EVO:RAIL – When And Where To Use It?

    • InfoStor:  Object Storage Is In Your Future

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

    StorageIO Videos and Podcasts

    Check out this video (Via YouTube) of a Google Data Center tour.

    In the IoT and IoD era of little and big data, how about this video I did with my Phantom DJI drone and a HD GoPro (e.g. 1K vs. 2.7K or 4K in newer cameras). This generates about a GByte of raw data per 10 minutes of flight, which then means another GB copies to a staging area, then to a protected copies, then production versions and so forth. Thus a 2 minute clip in 1080p resulted in plenty of storage including produced, uploaded versions along with backup copies in archives spread across YouTube, Dropbox and elsewhere.

    StorageIO podcasts are also available via and at StorageIO.tv

    StorageIO Webinars and Industry Events

    EMCworld (Las Vegas) May 2-4, 2016

    Interop (Las Vegas) May 4-6 2016

    TBA – April 27, 2016 webinar

    NAB (Las Vegas) April 19-20, 2016

    Backup with Brains – March 31, 2016 free webinar (1PM ET)

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

    From StorageIO Labs

    Research, Reviews and Reports

    NVMe is in your future, resources to start preparing today for tomorrow

    NVM and NVMe corner (Via and Compliments of Micron.com)

    View more NVMe related items at microsite thenvmeplace.com.

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

    Server StorageIO Recommended Reading List

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

    For this months recommended reading, it’s a blog site. If you have not visited Eric Siebert’s (@ericsiebert) site vSphere-land and its companion resources pages including top blogs, do so now.

    Granted there is a heavy VMware server virtualization focus, however there is a good balance of other data infrastructure topics spanning servers, storage, I/O networking, data protection and more.

    Server StorageIO Industry Resources and Links

    Check out these useful links and pages:

    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
    storageioblog.com/data-protection-diaries-main/ – 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/performance.com – Various server, storage and I/O performance and benchmarking

    Ok, nuff said

    Cheers
    Gs

    Greg Schulz – Author Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking (CRC Press), The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC Press) and Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier)
    twitter @storageio

    All Comments, (C) and (TM) belong to their owners/posters, Other content (C) Copyright 2006-2024 Server StorageIO and UnlimitedIO LLC All Rights Reserved

    Posted on

    Part II – EMC DSSD D5 Direct Attached Shared AFA

    Part II – EMC DSSD D5 Direct Attached Shared AFA

    server storage I/O trends

    This is the second post in a two-part series on the EMC DSSD D5 announcement, you can read part one here.

    Lets take a closer look at how EMC DSSD D5 works, its hardware and software components, how it compares and other considerations.

    How Does DSSD D5 Work

    Up to 48 Linux servers attach via dual port PCIe Gen 3 x8 cards that are stateless. Stateless simply means they do not have any flash or are not being used as storage cards, rather, they are essentially just an NVMe adapter card. With the first release block, HDFS file along with object and APIs are available for Linux systems. These drivers enabling the shared NVMe storage to be accessed by applications using different streamlined server and storage I/O driver software stacks to cut latency. DSSD D5 is meant to be a rack scale solutions so distance is measured as inside a rack (e.g. a couple of meters).

    The 5U tall DSSD D5 supports 48 servers via a pair of I/O Modules (IOM) each with 48 ports that in turn attach to the data plane and on to the Flash Modules (FM). Also attached to the data plane are a pair of controllers that are active / active for performing management tasks, however they do not sit in the data path. This means that host client directly access the FMs without having to go through a controller which is the case in traditional storage systems and AFAs. The controllers only get involved when there is some setup, configuration or other management activities, otherwise they get out-of-the-way, kind of like how management should function. There when you need them to help, then get out-of-the-way so productive work can be done.

    EMC DSSD shared ssd das
    Pardon the following hand drawn sketches, you can see some nice pretty diagrams, videos and other content via the EMC Pulse Blog as well as elsewhere.

    Note that the host client servers take on the responsibility for managing and coordinating data consistency meaning data can be shared between servers assuming applicable software is used for implementing integrity. This means that clustering and other software that can support shared storage are able to support low latency high performance read and write activity the DSSD D5 as opposed to relying on the underlying storage system for handling the shared storage coordination such as in a NAS. Another note is that the DSSD D5 is optimized for concurrent multi-threaded and asynchronous I/O operations along with atomic writes for data integrity that enable the multiple cores in today’s faster processors to be more effectively leveraged.

    The data plane is a mesh or switch or expander based back plane enabling any of the north bound (host client-server) 96 (2 x 48) PCIe Gen 3 x4 ports to reach the up to 36 (or as few as 18) FMs that are also dual pathed. Note that the host client-server PCIe dual port cards are Gen 3 x8 while the DSSD D5 ports are Gen 3 x4. Simple math should tell you that if are going to have 2 x PCIe Gen 3 x4 ports running at full speed, you want to have a Gen 3 x8 connection inside the server to get full performance.

    Think of the data plane similar to how a SAS expander works in an enclosure or a SAS switch, the difference being it is PCIe and not SAS or other protocol. Note that even though the terms mesh, fabric, switch, network are used, these are NOT attached to traditional LAN, SAN, NAS or other networks. Instead, this is a private “networked back plane” between the server and storage devices (e.g. FM).

    EMC DSSD D5 details

    The dual controllers (e.g. control plane) over see the flash management including garbage collection among other tasks, as well as storage is thin provisioned.

    Dual Controllers (active/active) are connected to each other (e.g. control plane) as well as to the data path, however, do not sit in the data path. Thus this is a fast path control path approach meaning the controllers can get involved to do management functions when needed, and get out-of-the-way of work when not needed. The controllers are hot-swap and add global management functions including setting up, tearing down host client/server I/O paths, mappings and affinities. Controllers also support the management of CUBIC RAID data protection functions performed by the Flash Modules (FM).

    Other functions the controllers implement leveraging their CPUs and DRAM include flash translation layer (FTL) functions normally handled by SSD cards, drives or other devices. These FTL functions include wear-leveling for durability, garbage collection, voltage power management among other tasks. The result is that the flash modules are able to spend more time and their resources handling I/O operations vs. handling management tasks vs. traditional off the shelf SSD drives, cards or devices.

    The FMs insert from the front and come in two sizes of 2TB and 4TB of raw NAND capacity. What’s different about the FMs vs. some other vendors approach is that these are not your traditional PCIe flash cards, instead they are custom cards with a proprietary ASIC and raw nand dies. DRAM is used in the FM as a buffer to hold data for write optimization as well as enhance wear-leveling to increase flash endurance.

    The result is up to thousands of nand dies spread over up to 36 FMs however more important, more performance being derived out of those resources. The increased performance comes from DSSD implementing its own flash translation layer, garbage collection, power voltage management among other techniques to derive more useful work per watt of energy consumed.

    EMC DSSD performance claims:

    • 100 microsecond latency for small IOs
    • 100GB bandwidth for large IOs
    • 10 Million small IO IOPs
    • Up to 144TB raw capacity

    How Does It Compare To Other AFA and SSD solutions

    There will be many apples to oranges comparisons as is often the case with new technologies or at least until others arrive in the market.

    Some general comparisons that may be apples to oranges as opposed to apples to apples include:

    • Shared and dense fast nand flash (eMLC) SSD storage
    • disaggregated flash SSD storage from server while enabling high performance, low latency
    • Eliminate pools or ponds of dedicated SSD storage capacity and performance
    • Not a SAN yet more than server-side flash or flash SSD JBOD
    • Underlying Flash Translation Layer (FTL) is disaggregated from SSD devices
    • Optimized hardware and software data path
    • Requires special server-side stateless adapter for accessing shared storage

    Some other comparisons include:

    • Hybrid and AFA shared via some server storage I/O network (good sharing, feature rich, resilient, slower performance and higher latency due to hardware, network and server I/O software stacks). For example EMC VMAX, VNX, XtremIO among others.
    • Server attached flash SSD aka server SAN (flash SSD creates islands of technology, lower resource sharing, data shuffling between servers, limited or no data services, management complexity). For example PCIe flash SSD state full (persistent) cards where data is stored or used as a cache along with associated management tools and drivers.
    • DSSD D5 is a rack-scale hybrid approach combing direct attached shared flash with lower latency, higher performance vs. traditional AFA or hybrid storage array, better resource usage, sharing, management and performance vs. traditional dedicated server flash. Compliment server-side data infrastructure and applications scale-out software. Server applications can reach NVMe storage via user spacing with block, hdfs, Flood and other APIs.

    Using EMC DSSD D5 in possible hybrid ways

    What Happened to Server PCIe cards and Server SANs

    If you recall a few years ago the industry rage was flash SSD PCIe server cards from vendors such as EMC, FusionIO (now part of SANdisk), Intel (still Intel), LSI (now part of Seagate), Micron (still Micron) and STEC (now part of Western Digital) among others. Server side flash SSD PCIe cards are still popular particular with newer NVMe controller based models that use the NVMe protocol stack instead of AHC/SATA or others.

    However as is often the case, things evolve and while there is still a place for server-side state full PCIe flash cards either for data or as cache, there is also the need to combine and simplify management, as well as streamline the software I/O stacks which is where EMC DSSD D5 comes into play. It enables consolidation of server-side SSD cards into a shared 5U chassis enabling up to 48 dual pathed servers access to the flash pools while using streamlined server software stacks and drivers that leverage NVMe over PCIe.

    Where to learn more

    Continue reading with the following links about NVMe, flash SSD and EMC DSSD.

  • Part one of this series here and part two here.
  • Performance Redefined! Introducing DSSD D5 Rack-Scale Flash Solution (EMC Pulse Blog)
  • EMC Unveils DSSD D5: A Quantum Leap In Flash Storage (EMC Press Release)
  • EMC Declares 2016 The “Year of All-Flash” For Primary Storage (EMC Press Release)
  • EMC DSSD D5 Rack-Scale Flash (EMC PDF Overview)
  • EMC DSSD and Cloudera Evolve Hadoop (EMC White Paper Overview)
  • Software Aspects of The EMC DSSD D5 Rack-Scale Flash Storage Platform (EMC PDF White Paper)
  • EMC DSSD D5 (EMC PDF Architecture and Product Specification)
  • EMC VFCache respinning SSD and intelligent caching (Part II)
  • EMC To Acquire DSSD, Inc., Extends Flash Storage Leadership
  • Part II: XtremIO, XtremSW and XtremSF EMC flash ssd portfolio redefined
  • XtremIO, XtremSW and XtremSF EMC flash ssd portfolio redefined
  • Learn more about flash SSD here and NVMe here at thenvmeplace.com

    • What this all means

    EMC with DSSD D5 now has another solution to offer clients, granted their challenge as it has been over the past couple of decades now will be to educate and compensate their sales force and partners on what technology solution to put for different needs.

    On one hand, life could be simpler for EMC if they only had one platform solution that would then be the answer to every problem, something that some other vendors and startups face. Likewise, if all you have is one solution, then while you can try to make that solution fit different environments, or, get the environment to adapt to the solution, having options is a good thing if those options can remove complexity along with cost while boosting productivity.

    I would like to see support for other operating systems such as Windows, particular with the future Windows 2016 based Nano, as well as hypervisors including VMware, Hyper-V among others. On the other hand I also would like to see a Sharp Aquous Quattron 80" 1080p 240Hz 3D TV on my wall to watch HD videos from my DJI Phantom Drone. For now focusing on Linux makes sense, however, would be nice to see some more platforms supported.

    Keep an eye on the NVMe space as we are seeing NVMe solutions appearing inside servers, storage system, external dedicated and shared, as well as some other emerging things including NVMe over Fabric. Learn more about EMC DSSD D5 here.

    Ok, nuff said (for now)

    Cheers
    Gs

    Greg Schulz – Author Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking (CRC Press), The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC Press) and Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier)
    twitter @storageio

    All Comments, (C) and (TM) belong to their owners/posters, Other content (C) Copyright 2006-2023 Server StorageIO(R) and UnlimitedIO All Rights Reserved

    Posted on

    Big Files Lots of Little File Processing Benchmarking with Vdbench

    Big Files Lots of Little File Processing Benchmarking with Vdbench


    server storage data infrastructure i/o File Processing Benchmarking with Vdbench

    Updated 2/10/2018

    Need to test a server, storage I/O networking, hardware, software, services, cloud, virtual, physical or other environment that is either doing some form of file processing, or, that you simply want to have some extra workload running in the background for what ever reason? An option is File Processing Benchmarking with Vdbench.

    I/O performance

    Getting Started


    Here’s a quick and relatively easy way to do it with Vdbench (Free from Oracle). Granted there are other tools, both for free and for fee that can similar things, however we will leave those for another day and post. Here’s the con to this approach, there is no Uui Gui like what you have available with some other tools Here’s the pro to this approach, its free, flexible and limited by your creative, amount of storage space, server memory and I/O capacity.

    If you need a background on Vdbench and benchmarking, check out the series of related posts here (e.g. www.storageio.com/performance).

    Get and Install the Vdbench Bits and Bytes


    If you do not already have Vdbench installed, get a copy from the Oracle or Source Forge site (now points to Oracle here).

    Vdbench is free, you simply sign-up and accept the free license, select the version down load (it is a single, common distribution for all OS) the bits as well as documentation.

    Installation particular on Windows is really easy, basically follow the instructions in the documentation by copying the contents of the download folder to a specified directory, set up any environment variables, and make sure that you have Java installed.

    Here is a hint and tip for Windows Servers, if you get an error message about counters, open a command prompt with Administrator rights, and type the command:

    $ lodctr /r


    The above command will reset your I/O counters. Note however that command will also overwrite counters if enabled so only use it if you have to.

    Likewise *nix install is also easy, copy the files, make sure to copy the applicable *nix shell script (they are in the download folder), and verify Java is installed and working.

    You can do a vdbench -t (windows) or ./vdbench -t (*nix) to verify that it is working.

    Vdbench File Processing

    There are many options with Vdbench as it has a very robust command and scripting language including ability to set up for loops among other things. We are only going to touch the surface here using its file processing capabilities. Likewise, Vdbench can run from a single server accessing multiple storage systems or file systems, as well as running from multiple servers to a single file system. For simplicity, we will stick with the basics in the following examples to exercise a local file system. The limits on the number of files and file size are limited by server memory and storage space.

    You can specify number and depth of directories to put files into for processing. One of the parameters is the anchor point for the file processing, in the following examples =S:\SIOTEMP\FS1 is used as the anchor point. Other parameters include the I/O size, percent reads, number of threads, run time and sample interval as well as output folder name for the result files. Note that unlike some tools, Vdbench does not create a single file of results, rather a folder with several files including summary, totals, parameters, histograms, CSV among others.


    Simple Vdbench File Processing Commands

    For flexibility and ease of use I put the following three Vdbench commands into a simple text file that is then called with parameters on the command line.
    fsd=fsd1,anchor=!fanchor,depth=!dirdep,width=!dirwid,files=!numfiles,size=!filesize

    fwd=fwd1,fsd=fsd1,rdpct=!filrdpct,xfersize=!fxfersize,fileselect=random,fileio=random,threads=!thrds

    rd=rd1,fwd=fwd1,fwdrate=max,format=yes,elapsed=!etime,interval=!itime

    Simple Vdbench script

    # SIO_vdbench_filesystest.txt
    
#
    
# Example Vdbench script for file processing
    
#
    
# fanchor = file system place  where directories and files will be created
    
# dirwid = how wide should the directories be (e.g. how many directories wide)
    
# numfiles = how many files per directory
    
# filesize = size in in k, m, g e.g. 16k = 16KBytes
    
# fxfersize = file I/O transfer size in kbytes
    
# thrds = how many threads or workers
    
# etime = how long to run in minutes (m) or hours (h)
    
# itime = interval sample time e.g. 30 seconds
    
# dirdep = how deep the directory tree
    
# filrdpct = percent of reads e.g. 90 = 90 percent reads
    
# -p processnumber = optional specify a process number, only needed if running multiple vdbenchs at same time, number should be unique
    
# -o output file that describes what being done and some config info
    
#
    
# Sample command line shown for Windows, for *nix add ./
    
#
    
# The real Vdbench script with command line parameters indicated by !=
    
#
    

    fsd=fsd1,anchor=!fanchor,depth=!dirdep,width=!dirwid,files=!numfiles,size=!filesize
    

    fwd=fwd1,fsd=fsd1,rdpct=!filrdpct,xfersize=!fxfersize,fileselect=random,fileio=random,threads=!thrds
    

    rd=rd1,fwd=fwd1,fwdrate=max,format=yes,elapsed=!etime,interval=!itime

    Big Files Processing Script


    With the above script file defined, for Big Files I specify a command line such as the following.
    $ vdbench -f SIO_vdbench_filesystest.txt fanchor=S:\SIOTemp\FS1 dirwid=1 numfiles=60 filesize=5G fxfersize=128k thrds=64 etime=10h itime=30 numdir=1 dirdep=1 filrdpct=90 -p 5576 -o SIOWS2012R220_NOFUZE_5Gx60_BigFiles_64TH_STX1200_020116

    Big Files Processing Example Results


    The following is one of the result files from the folder of results created via the above command for Big File processing showing totals.


    
Run totals
    

    21:09:36.001 Starting RD=format_for_rd1
    

    Feb 01, 2016 .Interval. .ReqstdOps.. ...cpu%...  read ....read.... ...write.... ..mb/sec... mb/sec .xfer.. ...mkdir... ...rmdir... ..create... ...open.... ...close... ..delete...
    
                          rate  resp total  sys   pct   rate  resp   rate  resp  read write  total    size  rate  resp  rate  resp  rate  resp  rate  resp  rate  resp  rate  resp
    
21:23:34.101   avg_2-28 2848.2  2.70   8.8 8.32   0.0    0.0  0.00 2848.2  2.70  0.00 356.0 356.02  131071   0.0  0.00   0.0  0.00   0.1 109176   0.1  0.55   0.1  2006   0.0  0.00
    

    21:23:35.009 Starting RD=rd1; elapsed=36000; fwdrate=max. For loops: None
    

    07:23:35.000 avg_2-1200 4939.5  1.62  18.5 17.3  90.0 4445.8  1.79  493.7  0.07 555.7 61.72 617.44  131071   0.0  0.00   0.0  0.00   0.0  0.00   0.1  0.03   0.1  2.95   0.0  0.00

    Lots of Little Files Processing Script


    For lots of little files, the following is used.


    
$ vdbench -f SIO_vdbench_filesystest.txt fanchor=S:\SIOTEMP\FS1 dirwid=64 numfiles=25600 filesize=16k fxfersize=1k thrds=64 etime=10h itime=30 dirdep=1 filrdpct=90 -p 5576 -o SIOWS2012R220_NOFUZE_SmallFiles_64TH_STX1200_020116

    Lots of Little Files Processing Example Results


    The following is one of the result files from the folder of results created via the above command for Big File processing showing totals.
    Run totals
    

    09:17:38.001 Starting RD=format_for_rd1
    

    Feb 02, 2016 .Interval. .ReqstdOps.. ...cpu%...  read ....read.... ...write.... ..mb/sec... mb/sec .xfer.. ...mkdir... ...rmdir... ..create... ...open.... ...close... ..delete...
    
                          rate  resp total  sys   pct   rate  resp   rate  resp  read write  total    size  rate  resp  rate  resp  rate  resp  rate  resp  rate  resp  rate  resp
    
09:19:48.016    avg_2-5  10138  0.14  75.7 64.6   0.0    0.0  0.00  10138  0.14  0.00 158.4 158.42   16384   0.0  0.00   0.0  0.00 10138  0.65 10138  0.43 10138  0.05   0.0  0.00
    

    09:19:49.000 Starting RD=rd1; elapsed=36000; fwdrate=max. For loops: None
    

    19:19:49.001 avg_2-1200 113049  0.41  67.0 55.0  90.0 101747  0.19  11302  2.42 99.36 11.04 110.40    1023   0.0  0.00   0.0  0.00   0.0  0.00  7065  0.85  7065  1.60   0.0  0.00

    Where To Learn More

    View additional NAS, NVMe, SSD, NVM, SCM, Data Infrastructure and HDD 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 examples can easily be modified to do different things particular if you read the Vdbench documentation on how to setup multi-host, multi-storage system, multiple job streams to do different types of processing. This means you can benchmark a storage systems, server or converged and hyper-converged platform, or simply put a workload on it as part of other testing. There are even options for handling data footprint reduction such as compression and dedupe.

    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.

    Posted on

    Server StorageIO January 2016 Update Newsletter

    Volume 16, Issue I – beginning of Year (BoY) Edition

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

    Is it just me, or did January disappear in a flash like data stored in non-persistent volatile DRAM memory when the power is turned off? It seems like just the other day that it was the first day of the new year and now we are about to welcome in February. Needless to say, like many of you I have been busy with various projects, many of which are behind the scenes, some of which will start appearing publicly sooner while others later.

    In terms of what have I been working on, it includes the usual of performance, availability, capacity and economics (e.g. PACE) related to servers, storage, I/O networks, hardware, software, cloud, virtual and containers. This includes NVM as well as NVMe based SSD’s, HDD’s, cache and tiering technologies, as well as data protection among other things with Hyper-V, VMware as well as various cloud services.

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

    Cheers GS

    In This Issue

  • Feature Topic
  • Industry Trends News
  • Commentary in the news
  • Tips and Articles
  • StorageIOblog posts
  • Videos and Podcasts
  • Events and Webinars
  • Recommended Reading List
  • Industry Activity Trends
  • Server StorageIO Lab reports
  • New and Old Vendor Update
  • Resources and Links

    • Feature Topic – Microsoft Nano, Server 2016 TP4 and VMware

    This months feature topic is virtual servers and software defined storage including those from VMware and Microsoft. Back in November I mentioned the 2016 Technical Preview 4 (e.g. TP4) along with Storage Spaces Direct and Nano. As a reminder you can download your free trial copy of Windows Server 2016 TP4 from this Microsoft site here.

    Three good Microsoft Blog posts about storage spaces to check out include:

    • Storage Spaces Direct in Technical Preview 4 (here)
    • Hardware options for evaluating Storage Spaces Direct in Technical Preview 4 (here)
    • Storage Spaces Direct – Under the hood with the Software Storage Bus (here)

    As for Microsoft Nano, for those not familiar, it’s not a new tablet or mobile device, instead, it is a very light weight streamlined version of the Windows Server 2016 server. How streamlined? Much more so then the earlier Windows Server versions that simply disabled the GUI and desktop interfaces. Nano is smaller from a memory and disk storage space perspective meaning it uses less RAM, boots faster, has fewer moving parts (e.g. software modules) to break (or need patching).

    Specifically Nano removes 32 bit support and anything related to the desktop and GUI interfaces as well as removing the console interface. That’s right, no console or virtual console to log into, Wow is gone, access is via Powershell or Windows Management Interface tools from remote systems. How small is it? I have a Nano instance built on a VHDX that is under a GB in size, granted, its only for testing. The goal of Nano is to have a very light weight streamlined version of Windows Server that can run hundreds (or more) VMs in a small memory footprint, not to mention supports lots of containers. Nano is part of WIndows TP4, learn more about Nano here in this Microsoft post including how to get started using it.

    Speaking of VMware, if you have not received an invite yet to their Digital Enterprise February 6, 2016 announcement event, click here to register.

    StorageIOblog Posts

    Recent and popular Server StorageIOblog posts include:

    View other recent as well as past blog posts here

    Server Storage I/O Industry Activity Trends (Cloud, Virtual, Physical)

    StorageIO news (image licensed for use from Shutterstock by StorageIO)

    Some new Products Technology Services Announcements (PTSA) include:

    • EMC announced Elastic Cloud Storage (ECS) V2.2. A main theme of V2.2 is that besides being the 3rd generation of EMC object storage (dating back to Centera, then Atmos), is that ECS is also where the functionality of Centera, Atmos and other functionality converge. ECS provides object storage access along with HDFS (Hadoop and Hortonworks certified) and traditional NFS file access.

      Object storage access includes Amazon S3, OpenStack Swift, ATMOS and CAS (Centera). In addition to the access, added Centera functionality for regulatory compliance has been folded into the ECS software stack. For example, ECS is now compatible with SEC 17 a-4(f) and CFTC 1.3(b)-(c) regulations protecting data from being overwritten or erased for a specified retention period. Other enhancements besides scalability, resiliency and ease of use include meta data and search capabilities. You can download and try ECS for non-production workloads with no capacity or functionality limitations from EMC here.

    View other recent news and industry trends here

    StorageIO Commentary in the news

    StorageIO news (image licensed for use from Shutterstock by StorageIO)
    Recent Server StorageIO commentary and industry trends perspectives about news, activities tips, and announcements. In case you missed them from last month:

    • TheFibreChannel.com: Industry Analyst Interview: Greg Schulz, StorageIO

    • EnterpriseStorageForum: Comments Handling Virtual Storage Challenges

    • PowerMore (Dell): Q&A: When to implement ultra-dense storage

    View more Server, Storage and I/O hardware as well as software trends comments here

    Vendors you may not have heard of

    Various vendors (and service providers) you may not know or heard about recently.

    • Datrium – DVX and NetShelf server software defined flash storage and converged infrastructure

    • DataDynamics – StorageX is the software solution for enabling intelligent data migration, including from NetApp OnTap 7 to Clustered OnTap, as well as to and from EMC among other NAS file serving solutions.

    • Paxata – Little and Big Data management solutions

    Check out more vendors you may know, have heard of, or that are perhaps new on the Server StorageIO Industry Links page here (over 1,000 entries and growing).

    StorageIO Tips and Articles

    Recent Server StorageIO articles appearing in different venues include:

    • InfoStor:  Data Protection Gaps, Some Good, Some Not So Good

    And in case you missed them from last month

    • IronMountain:  5 Noteworthy Data Privacy Trends From 2015

    • Virtual Blocks (VMware Blogs):  Part III EVO:RAIL – When And Where To Use It?

    • InfoStor:  Object Storage Is In Your Future

    • InfoStor:  Water, Data and Storage Analogy

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

    StorageIO Videos and Podcasts

    StorageIO podcasts are also available via and at StorageIO.tv

    StorageIO Webinars and Industry Events

    EMCworld (Las Vegas) May 2-4, 2016

    Interop (Las Vegas) May 4-6 2016

    NAB (Las Vegas) April 19-20, 2016

    TBA – March 31, 2016

    Redmond Magazine Gridstore (How to Migrate from VMware to Hyper-V) February 25, 2016 Webinar (11AM PT)

    TBA – February 23, 2016

    Redmond Magazine and Dell Foglight – Manage and Solve Virtualization Performance Issues Like a Pro (Webinar 9AM PT) – January 19, 2016

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

    From StorageIO Labs

    Research, Reviews and Reports

    Quick Look: What’s the Best Enterprise HDD for a Content Server?
    Which enterprise HDD for content servers

    Insight for Effective Server Storage I/O decision-making
    This StorageIO® Industry Trends Perspectives Solution Brief and Lab Review (compliments of Seagate and Servers Direct) looks at the Servers Direct (www.serversdirect.com) converged Content Solution platforms with Seagate (www.seagate.com) Enterprise Hard Disk Drive (HDDs).

    I was given the opportunity to do some hands-on testing running different application workloads with a 2U content solution platform along with various Seagate Enterprise 2.5” HDDs handle different application workloads. This includes Seagate’s Enterprise Performance HDDs with the enhanced caching feature.

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

    Looking for NVM including SSD information? Visit the Server StorageIO www.thessdplace.com and www.thenvmeplace.com micro sites. View other StorageIO lab review and test drive reports here.

    Server StorageIO Recommended Reading List

    The following are various recommended reading including books, blogs and videos. If you have not done so recently, also check out the Intel Recommended Reading List (here) where you will also find a couple of mine as well as books from others. For this months recommended reading, it’s a blog site. If you have not visited Duncan Eppings (@DuncanYB) Yellow-Bricks site, you should, particular if you are interested in virtualization, high availability and related topical themes.

    Seven Databases in Seven Weeks guide to no SQL via Amazon.com

    Granted Duncan being a member of the VMware CTO office covers a lot of VMware related themes, however being the author of several books, he also covers non VMware related topics. Duncan recently did a really good and simple post about rebuilding a failed disk in a VMware VSAN vs. in a legacy RAID or erasure code based storage solution.

    One of the things that struck me as being important with what Duncan wrote about is avoiding apples to oranges comparisons. What I mean by this is that it is easy to compare traditional parity based or mirror type solutions that chunk or shard data on KByte basis spread over disks, vs. data that is chunk or sharded on GByte (or larger) basis over multiple servers and their disks. Anyway, check out Duncan’s site and recent post by clicking here.

    Server StorageIO Industry Resources and Links

    Check out these useful links and pages:

    storageio.com/links
    objectstoragecenter.com
    storageioblog.com/data-protection-diaries-main/
    storageperformance.us
    thenvmeplace
    thessdplace.com
    storageio.com/performance.com
    storageio.com/raid
    storageio.com/ssd

    Ok, nuff said

    Cheers
    Gs

    Greg Schulz – Author Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking (CRC Press), The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC Press) and Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier)
    twitter @storageio

    All Comments, (C) and (TM) belong to their owners/posters, Other content (C) Copyright 2006-2024 Server StorageIO and UnlimitedIO LLC All Rights Reserved

    Posted on

    Server storage I/O Intel NUC nick knack notes – First impressions

    Storage I/O trends

    Server storage I/O Intel NUC nick knack notes – First impressions

    This is the first of a two-part (part II here) series of my experiences (and impressions) using an Intel NUC ( a 4th generation model) for various things about cloud, virtual, physical and software defined server storage I/O networking.

    The NUC has been around new for a few years and continues to evolve and recently I bought my first one (e.g. a 4th generation model) to join some other servers that I have. My reason for getting a NUC is to use it as a simple low-power platform to run different software on including bare-metal OS, hypervisors, cloud, virtual and software defined server storage and networking applications on that might otherwise be on an old laptop or mini-tower.

    Intel® NUC with Intel® Core™ i5 Processor and 2.5-Inch Drive Support (NUC5i5RYH) via Intel.com

    Introducing Intel Next Unit Computing aka NUC

    For those not familiar, NUC is a series of products from Intel called Next Unit Computing that offer an alternative to traditional mini-desktop or even laptop and notebooks. There are several different NUC models available including the newer 5th generation models (click here to see various models and generations). The NUCs are simple, small units of computing with an Intel processor and room for your choice of memory, persistent storage (e.g. Hard Disk Drive (HDD) or flash Solid State Device (SSD), networking, video, audio and other peripheral device attachment.

    software (not supplied) is defined by what you choose to use such as a Windows or *nix operating system, VMware ESXi, Microsoft Hyper-V, KVM or Xen hypervisor, or some other applications. The base NUC package includes front and rear-side ports for attaching various devices. In terms of functionality, think of a laptop without a keyboard or video screen, or in terms of a small head-less (e.g. no monitor) mini-tower desktop workstation PC.

    Which NUC to buy?

    If you need to be the first with anything new, then jump direct to the recently released 5th generation models.

    On the other hand, if you are looking for a bargain, there are some good deals on 4th generation or older. likewise depending on your processor speed and features needed along with available budget, those criteria and others will direct you to a specific NUC model.

    I went with a 4th generation NUC realizing that the newer models were just around the corner as I figured could always get another (e.g. create a NUC cluster) newer model when needed. In addition I also wanted a model that had enough performance to last a few years of use and the flexibility to be reconfigured as needed. My choice was a model D54250WYK priced around $352 USD via Amazon (prices may vary by different venues).

    Whats included with a NUC?

    My first NUC is a model D54250WYK (e.g. BOXD54250WYKH1 ) that you can view the specific speeds and feeds here at the Intel site along with ordering info here at Amazon (or your other preferred venue).

    View and compare other NUC models at the Intel NUC site here.

    The following images show the front-side two USB 3.0 ports along with head-phone (or speaker) and microphone jacks. Looking at the rear-side of the NUC there are a couple of air vents, power connector port (external power supply), mini-display and HDMI video port, GbE LAN, and two USB 3.0 ports.

    NUC front viewRear ports of NUC
    Left is front view of my NUC model 54250 and Right is back or rear view of NUC

    NUC ModelBOXD54250WYKH1 (speeds/feeds vary by specific model)
    Form factor1.95" tall
    ProcessorIntel Core i5-4250U with active heat sink fan
    MemoryTwo SO-DIMM DDR3L (e.g. laptop) memory, up to 16GB (e.g. 2x8GB)
    DisplayOne mini DisplayPort with audio
    One mini HDMI port with audio
    AudioIntel HD Audio, 8 channel (7.1) digital audio via HDMI and DisplayPort, also headphone jack
    LANIntel Gigabit Ethernet (GbE) (I218)
    Peripheral and storageTwo USB 3.0 (e.g. blue) front side
    Two USB 3.0 rear side
    Two USB 2.0 (internal)

    One SATA port (internal 2.5 inch drive bay)

    Consumer infrared sensor (front panel)
    ExpansionOne full-length mini PCI Express slot with mSATA support
    One half-length mini PCI Express slot
    Included in the boxLaptop style 19V 65W power adapter (brick) and cord, VESA mounting bracket (e.g. for mounting on rear of video monitor), integration (installation) guide, wireless antennae (integrated into chassis), Intel Core i5 logo
    Warranty3-year limited

    Processor Speeds and Feeds

    There are various Intel Core i3 and i5 processors available depending on specific NUC model, such as my 54250WYK has a two core (1.3Ghz each) 4th generation i5-4250U (click here to see Intel speeds and feeds) which includes Intel Visual BIOS, Turbo Boost, Rapid Start and virtualization support among other features.

    Note that features vary by processor type, along with other software, firmware or BIOS updates. While the 1.3Ghz two core (e.g. max 2.6Ghz) is not as robust as faster quad (or more) cores running at 3.0Ghz (or faster), for most applications including as a first virtual lab or storage sand box among other uses, it will be fast enough or comparable to a lower-mid range laptop capabilities.

    What this all means

    In general I like the NUC so much that I bought one (model 54250) and would consider adding another in the future for somethings, however also see the need to continue using my other compute servers for different workloads.

    This wraps up part I of this two-part series and what this means is that I like the idea of a Intel NUC I bought one. Continue reading in part-two here where I cover the options that I added to my NUC, initial configuration, deployment, use and additional impressions.

    Ok, nuff said for now, check out part-two here.

    Cheers
    Gs

    Greg Schulz – Author Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking (CRC Press), The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC Press) and Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier)
    twitter @storageio

    All Comments, (C) and (TM) belong to their owners/posters, Other content (C) Copyright 2006-2023 StorageIO and UnlimitedIO LLC All Rights Reserved

    Posted on

    September October 2014 Server and StorageIO Update Newsletter

    September and October 2014

    Hello and welcome to this joint September and October Server and StorageIO update newsletter. Since the August newsletter, things have been busy with a mix of behind the scenes projects, as well as other activities including several webinars, on-line along with in-person events in the US as well as Europe.

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

    Cheers gs

    Industry Trends and Perspectives

    Storage trends

    In September I was invited to do a key-note opening presentation at the MSP area CMG event. Theme for the September CMG event was "Flash – A Real Life Experience" with a focus of what people are doing, how testing and evaluating including use of hybrid solutions as opposed to vendor marketing sessions. My session was titled "Flash back to reality – Myths and Realities, Flash and SSD Industry trends perspectives plus benchmarking tips and can be found here. Thanks to Tom Becchetti an the MSP CMG (@mspcmg) folks for a great event.

    There are many facets to hybrid storage including different types of media (SSD and HDD’s) along with unified or multi-protocol access. Then there are hybrid storage that spans local and public clouds. Here is a link to an on-line Internet Radio show via Information Week along with on-line chat about Hybrid Storage for Government.

    Some things I’m working with or keeping an eye on include Cloud, Converged solutions, Data Protection, Business Resiliency, DCIM, Docker, InfiniBand, Microsoft (Hyper-V, SOFS, SMB 3.0), Object Storage, SSD, SDS, VMware and VVOL among others items.

    Commentary In The News

    StorageIO news

    A lot has been going on in the IT industry since the last StorageIO Update newsletter. The following are some StorageIO industry trends perspectives comments that have appeared in various venues. Cloud conversations continue to be popular including concerns about privacy, security and availability. Here are some comments at SearchCloudComputing: about moving on from cloud deployment heartbreak.

    Nand flash Solid State Devices (SSD) continue to increase in customer deployments, over at Processor, here are some here are some comments on Incorporating SSD’s Into Your Storage Plan. Also on SSD, here are some perspectives making the Argument For Flash-Based Storage. Some other comments over at Processer.com include looking At Disaster Recovery As A Service, tips to Avoid In Data Center Planning, making the most of Enterprise Virtualization, as well as New Tech, Advancements To Justify Servers. Part of controlling and managing storage costs is having timely insight, metrics that matter, here are some more perspectives and also here.

    Over at SearchVirtualStorage I have some comments on how to configure and manage storage for a virtual desktop environment (VDI) while over at TechPageOne there are perspectives on top reasons to switch to Windows 8. 

    Some other comments and perspectives are over at EnterpriseStorageForum including Top 10 Ways to Improve Data Center Energy Efficiency. At InfoStor there are comments and tips about Object Storage, while at SearchDataBackup I have some perspectives about Symantec being broken up.

    View other industry trends comments at the here

    Tips and Articles

    Recent Server and StorageIO tips and articles appearing in various venues include over at SearchCloudStorage a series of discussion often asked question pieces:

    Are you concerned with the security of the cloud?
    Is the cost of cloud storage really cheaper?
    What’s important to know about cloud privacy policy?
    Are more than five nines of availability really possible?
    What to look for enterprise file sync-and-share app?
    How primary storage clouds and cloud backup differ?
    What should I consider when using SSD cloud?
    What is difference between a snapshot and a clone?

    View other recent as well as past tips and articles here

    StorageIOblog posts

    Recent StorageIOblog posts include:

    View other recent as well as past blog posts here

    In This Issue

  • Industry Trends Perspectives
  • Commentary in the news
  • Tips and Articles
  • StorageIOblog posts

    • Events & Activities

    September 25, 2014
    MSP CMG – Flash and SSD performance

    October 8-10, 2014
    Nijkerk Netherlands Brouwer Seminar Series

    November 11-13, 2014
    AWS re:Invent Las Vegas

    View other recent and upcoming events here

    Webinars

    November 13 9AM PT
    BrightTalk – Software Defined Storage

    November 11 10AM PT
    Google+ Hangout Dell BackupU

    November 11 9AM PT
    BrightTak – Software Defined Data Centers

    October 16 9AM PT
    BrightTalk – Cloud Storage Decision Making

    October 15 1PM PT
    BrightTalk – Hybrid Cloud Trends

    October 7 11AM PT
    BackupU – Data Protection Management

    September 18 8AM CT
    Nexsan – Hybrid Storage

    September 18 9AM PT
    BrightTalk – Converged Storage

    September 17 1PM PT
    BrightTalk – DCIM

    September 16 1PM PT
    BrightTalk – Data Center Convergence

    September 16 Noon PT
    BrightTalk – BC, BR and DR

    September 16 1PM CT
    StarWind – SMB 3.0 & Microsoft SOFS

    September 16 9AM PT
    Google+ Hangout – BackupU – Replication

    September 2 11AM PT
    Dell BackupU – Replication

    Videos and Podcasts

    Docker for Smarties
    Video: Docker for Smarties

    StorageIO podcasts are also available via and at StorageIO.tv

    From StorageIO Labs

    Research, Reviews and Reports

    Enterprise 12Gbps SAS and SSD’s
    Better Together – Part of an Enterprise Tiered Storage Strategy
    In this StorageIO Industry Trends Perspective thought leadership white paper we look at how enterprise class SSD’s and 12Gbps SAS address current and next generation tiered storage for virtual, cloud, traditional Little and Big Data environments. This report includes proof points running various workloads including Database TPC-B, TPC-E, Microsoft Exchange in the StorageIO Labs along with cache software comparing SSD, SSHD and HDD’s. Read the  white paper  compliments of Seagate 1200 12Gbs SAS SSD’s.

    Seagate SSD White Paper

    Resources and Links

    Check out these useful links and pages:
    storageio.com/links
    objectstoragecenter.com
    storageioblog.com/data-protection-diaries-main/
    storageio.com/ssd
    storageio.com/ssd

    Ok, nuff said (for now)

    Cheers
    Gs

    Greg Schulz – Author Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking (CRC Press), The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC Press) and Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier)
    twitter @storageio

    All Comments, (C) and (TM) belong to their owners/posters, Other content (C) Copyright 2006-2024 Server StorageIO and UnlimitedIO LLC All Rights Reserved