Tag: SDI

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2017 Holiday Seasons Greetings From Server StorageIO

2017 Holiday Seasons Greetings

Greetings from Server StorageIO wishing you, your data infrastructures as well as friends and family’s all the best for a safe, merry happy 2017 holiday season.

In the Jingle Bell

Btw, if you have not done so lately, check out storageio.tv to view various videos, podcasts and images. Some of the storageio.tv content is data infrastructure technology, tools, technique, tradecraft and trends related. Also on storageio.tv are fun content including views from the drone as well as cooking (food and recipes) among other items.

Ok, nuff said, for now.

Cheers Gs

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

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

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November 2017 Server StorageIO Data Infrastructure Update Newsletter

Volume 17, Issue 11 (November 2017)

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

Software-Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials SDDI SDDC

2017 has a few more weeks left which look to be busy with end of year, holidays and other activities. Like the rest of 2017 November saw a lot of activity in and around the industry, setting up 2018 as yet another sequel to the busiest and most exciting year ever.

This is also the time of year when predictions for the following year (e.g. 2018) start to roll out, some of which are variations from those of the past or perennial favorites (e.g. the year of flash, the year of cloud, the year of software defined, the year of <insert_your_favorite_item_here>. Look for predictions and perspectives in future posts and newsletters.

Having been a busy month, let’s get to the content…

In This Issue

Enjoy this edition of the Server StorageIO data infrastructure update newsletter.

Cheers GS

Data Infrastructure and IT Industry Activity Trends

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

On the heals of completing its acquisition of Brocade (note previously Avago (who bought LSI) also bought Broadcom and then changed its name to the more well-known entity. Broadcom also announced relocating it headquarters from Singapore to the US, along an over $100 Billion USD acquisition offer of Qualcomm (here is interesting perspective Apple might play). Broadcom has been focused more on server, storage, I/O and general networking technology, while Qualcomm on mobile including phones and related items. Note that Qualcomm has previously made a $38.5 Billion USD offer for NXP semiconductors waiting regularity approval. View recent Broadcom financial results here.

Also in November server storage I/O controller chip maker Marvell (not to be confused with entertainment provider Marvel) announced a merger with Cavium who had previously acquired Qlogic among others. The resulting combined entity to be called Marvell will have an estimated $16 Billion USD revenue stream focused on server, storage, I/O and networking technologies among others.

In other merger and acquisition activity, VMware announced acquisition of VeloCloud for software defined wide area networking (SD-WAN).

With Super Compute 2017 (SC17) in November there were several announcements including from ATTO, DDN, Enmotus and Micron, Everspin, along with many others. By the way, in case you missed it at end of October Microsoft and Cray announced a partnership to bring Super Compute capabilities to Azure clouds. Speaking of Microsoft, there was also an announcement of adding VMware running on top of Azure (granted without VMware support), similar in concept to VMware on AWS (read hare).

Also at the end of November was AWS Reinvent with many announcements (more on those in a follow-up newsletter and posts). Prior to Reinvent AWS announced several server, storage and other data infrastructure security enhancements including for S3. Highlights from AWS reinvent include Fargate (serverless aka containers at scale without managing infrastructure), Elastic Container Services for Kubernetes (EKS), Greengrass (machine learning [ML] data infrastructure), along with many others.

Fargate is for those who want to leverage serveless microservices containers without having to devote DevOps and related activity to the care and feeding of its data infrastructure. In other words, Fargate is for those who want to focus maximum effort on the business applications, vs. the business of setting up and maintaining the data infrastructure for serverless On the other hand, AWS also announced EKS for those who want or need to customize their serverless data infrastructure including around Kubernetes among others.

In other industry activity, Taiwanese based Foxconn who manufactures technology for the who’s who of the industry announced progress towards their future Wisconsin based factory complex.

Over at HPE, the big news announcement is that CEO Meg Whitman is stepping down. HPE also announced new AMD powered Gen 10 Proliant services, as well as multi-cloud management solutions. HPE also announced new partnerships with DDN for HPC and SC, with Rackspace for selling private cloud services, along with Cloudian EMEA partnership among others.

OwnBackup announced a new version of their data protection software, while low-cost budget bulk storage service backblaze (B2) announced their more recent quarterly drive failure (or success) reliability reports. Meanwhile over at Quantum they released former Ceo Jon Gacek and rotated in new management.

Red Hat announced Ceph Storage 3 including CephFS (POSIX compatible file system), iSCSI gateway including support for VMware and Windows that lack native Ceph drivers, daemon deployment in Linux containers for smaller hardware footprint. Also included are enhanced monitoring, troubleshooting and diagnostics to streamline deployment and ongoing management. Red Hat also announced OpenShift version 3.7 for containers.

SANblaze announced NVMf and dual port NVMe capabilities for NVMe fabrics, while Linbit won an European grant to build out a software defined storage cloud scale out solution.

I often get asked who are the hot, new, trendy or other vendors and services to keep an eye on some of which I have mentioned in previous newsletters, as well as posts such as here and here. Moving in to 2018 some to keep an eye on (not all are new or trendy, yet they can enable you to be productive, or differentiate) include the following.

AWS, Bluemedora, Chelsio, Cloudian, CloudPassage, Compuverde, Databricks, Datadog, Datos, Enmotus, Everspin, Excelero, Fluree (Blockchain database), Google, Mellonox, Microsemi, Microsoft, Marvel and Cavium, MyWorkDrive, Red Hat, Rook, Rozo, Rubrik, Strongbox, Storone, Turbonomic, Ubuntu, Veeam, Velostrata, Virtuozo, VMware, WekaIO and others.

What the above means, is that it has been a busy month as well as year, and, the year is not over yet. There are still plenty of shopping days left both for christmas and the holidays, as well as for IT year-end spending, vendors looking to do acquisitions, or other last-minute projects. Speaking of which, drop me a note if you have any end of year, or new year projects Server StorageIO can assist you with.

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

Server StorageIO Commentary in the news, tips and articles

Recent Server StorageIO industry trends perspectives commentary in the news.

Via HPE Insights: Comments on Public cloud versus on-prem storage
Via DataCenterKnowledge: Data Center Standards: Where’s the Value?
Via arsTechnica: Comments on cloud backup disaster recovery

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

Server StorageIOblog Data Infrastructure Posts

Recent and popular Server StorageIOblog posts include:

In Case You Missed It #ICYMI

View other recent as well as past StorageIOblog posts here

Server StorageIO Recommended Reading (Watching and Listening) List

In addition to my own books including Software Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials (CRC Press 2017), the following are Server StorageIO data infrastructure recommended reading, watching and listening list items. The list includes various IT, Data Infrastructure and related topics. Speaking of my books, Didier Van Hoye (@WorkingHardInIt) has a good review over on his site you can view here, also check out the rest of his great content while there.

Intel Recommended Reading List (IRRL) for developers is a good resource to check out.

For those who are into Linux, container and hypervisor performance along with internals including cloud based, check out Brendan Gregg site. He has a lot of great material including some recent interesting posts ranging from dealing with workplace jerks, to whats inside AWS EC2 new KVM (switch from Xen based) hypervisors among others.

Here is a post by New York Times CIO/CTO Nick Rockwell The (Futile) Resistance to Serverless, also check out my podcast discussion with Nick here.

Over at Next Platform they have some interesting perspectives on Intel’s next Exascale architecture worth spending a few minutes to read.

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

Events and Activities

Recent and upcoming event activities.

Nov. 9, 2017 – Webinar – All You Need To Know about ROBO Data Protection Backup
Nov. 2, 2017 – Webinar – Modern Data Protection for Hyper-Convergence

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

Server StorageIO Industry Resources and Links

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

Connect and Converse With Us


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

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October 2017 Server StorageIO Data Infrastructure Update Newsletter



Server StorageIO October 2017 Data Infrastructure Update Newsletter

Volume 17, Issue 10 (October 2017)

Hello and welcome to the October 2017 issue of the Server StorageIO data infrastructure update newsletter.

Software-Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials SDDI SDDC

October has been a busy month pertaining data infrastructure including server storage I/O related trends, activities, news, perspectives and related topics, so let’s have a look at them.

In This Issue

Enjoy this edition of the Server StorageIO data infrastructure update newsletter.

Cheers GS

Data Infrastructure and IT Industry Activity Trends

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

Startup Aparavi launched with a SaaS platform for managing long-term data retention. As part of a move to streamline the acquisition of Brocade by Broadcom (formerly known as Avago), the Brocade data center Ethernet networking business is being sold to Extreme networks. Datacore also updated their software defined storage solutions in October.

Cisco announced new storage networking products and acquisition of Brodsoft (cloud calling and contact center solutions). As part of continued support for Fibre Channel based data infrastructure environments, Cisco has announced a 1U MDS 9132T 32 port 32 Gbps Fibre Channel Switch with FCP (SCSI Fibre Channel Protocol) now, and emerging FC-NVMe future support. Also announced are SAN telemetry activity monitoring, insight and event streaming for analysis in MDS 9700 32Gbps module.

Cisco also announced interoperability for data center and data infrastructure insight, activity monitoring and telemetry with Virtual Instruments Virtual Wisdom technology eliminating the reliance on hardware based probes, along with Fibre Channel N-Port virtualization on Nexus 9300-FX DC switch.

Commvault announced scale-out data protection with ScaleProtect for Cisco UCS platforms, along with their HyperScale appliance and HyperScale software.

IBM had several October announcements include LTO 8 related, FlashSystem V9000 updates (e.g. All Flash Array) enclosure as well as hardware based compression, FlashSystem A9000 leveraging 3D TLC NAND flash (lower cost, higher capacity) among others.

There is plenty of content (blogs, articles, podcasts, webinars, videos, white papers, presentations) on when to do containers, microservices and serverless compute including mesos, kubernetes and docker among others. What about when not to use those approaches or caveats to be aware of, here is such a piece (via Redhat) to have a look at.

Granted if you are part of the micro services cheerleading bandwagon crowd you might not agree with the authors points, after all, everything is not the same in data centers and data infrastructures. Speaking of serverless, containers, here is a good post about Docker Swarm vs. Kubernetes management over at Upcloud.

In Microsoft and Azure related activity, despite some early speculation in some venues that Storage Spaces Direct (S2D) was being discontinued as it was not part of Server release 1709, the reality is S2D is very much alive.

Microsoft LTSC and SAC release cycles
Image via Microsoft.com

However some clarification is needed that might have lead to some initial speculation due to lack of understanding the new Microsoft release cycle.

Microsoft has gone to Semi Annual Channel (SAC) releases that introduce new features in advance of the Long Term Support Channel (LTSC). LTSC are what you might be familiar with Windows and Windows Server releases that are updates spread out over time for a given major version (e.g. going from Server 2012 to Server 2012 R2 and so forth). The current Windows Server LTSC is the base introduced fall of 2016 along with incremental updates.

By comparison, think of SAC as a branch channel for early adopters to get new features and with 1709 (e.g. September 2017), the focus is on containers. A mistake that has been made is to assume that a SAC release is actually a new major LTSC release, thus probably why some thought S2D was dead as it is not in SAC 1709. Indications from Microsoft are that there will be S2D enhancements in the next SAC, as well as future LTSC.

For those interested in IoT, check out this Microsoft Azure IoT Hub and device twin document. Here is a post by Thomas Mauer looking at 10 hidden Hyper-V features to know about.

In other activity, Minio announced experimental AWS S3 API support for Backblaze storage service. Software Defined Serverless Storage startup OpenIO gets $5M USD in additional funding. Quantum and other LTO Organization vendors have announced support for the new LTO version 8 tape drives and media. In addition to LTO 8, new roadmaps including out to LTO 12 are outlined here, and VMware vCloud Air is hosted by OVH. Western Digital Corporation (WDC) announced Microwave Assisted Magnetic Recording (MAMR) enabled Hard Disk Drives (HDD) that will enable future, larger capacity devices to be brought to market.

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

Server StorageIO Commentary in the news

Recent Server StorageIO industry trends perspectives commentary in the news.

Via HPE Insights: Comments on Public cloud versus on-prem storage
Via arsTechnica: Comments on cloud backup disaster recovery
Via Gizmodo: Comments on WDC 40TB HDD
Via CDW: Comments on Is Your Network About To Fail?
Via EnterpriseStorageForum: Comments on Trends for Data Storage with Big Data Analytics
Via EnterpriseStorageForum: Comments on 8 ways to save on cloud storage
Via EnterpriseStorageForum: Comments on Google Cloud Platform and Storage

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

Server StorageIOblog Posts

Recent and popular Server StorageIOblog posts include:

In Case You Missed It #ICYMI

View other recent as well as past StorageIOblog posts here

Server StorageIO Data Infrastructure Tips and Articles

Recent Server StorageIO industry trends perspectives commentary in the news.

Via EnterpriseStorageForum: Comments on Who Will Rule the Storage World?
Via InfoGoto: Comments on Google Cloud Platform Gaining Data Storage Momentum
Via InfoGoto: Comments on Singapore High Rise Data Centers
Via InfoGoto: Comments on New Tape Storage Capacity
Via EnterpriseStorageForum: Comments on 8 ways to save on cloud storage
Via EnterpriseStorageForum: Comments on Google Cloud Platform and Storage

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

Server StorageIO Recommended Reading (Watching and Listening) List

In addition to my own books including Software Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials (CRC Press 2017), the following are Server StorageIO recommended reading, watching and listening list items. The list includes various IT, Data Infrastructure and related topics.

Intel Recommended Reading List (IRRL) for developers is a good resource to check out.

Its October which means that it is also Blogtober, check out some of the blogs and posts occurring during October here.

For those involved with VMware, check out Frank Denneman VMware vSphere 6.5 host resource guide-book here at Amazon.com.

Docker: Up & Running: Shipping Reliable Containers in Production by Karl Matthias & Sean P. Kane via Amazon.com here.

Essential Virtual SAN (VSAN): Administrator’s Guide to VMware Virtual SAN,2nd ed. by Cormac Hogan & Duncan Epping via Amazon.com here.

Hadoop: The Definitive Guide: Storage and Analysis at Internet Scale by Tom White via Amazon.com here.

Cisco IOS Cookbook: Field tested solutions to Cisco Router Problems by Kevin Dooley and Ian Brown Via Amazon.com here.

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

Events and Activities

Recent and upcoming event activities.

Nov. 9, 2017 – Webinar – All You Need To Know about ROBO Data Protection Backup
Nov. 2, 2017 – Webinar – Modern Data Protection for Hyper-Convergence
Sep. 21, 2017 – MSP CMG – Minneapolis MN
Sep. 20, 2017 – Webinar – BC, DR and Business Resiliency (BR) tips
Sep. 14, 2017 – Fujifilm IT Executive Summit – Seattle WA
Sep. 12, 2017 – SNIA Software Developers Conference (SDC) – Santa Clara CA
Sep. 7, 2017 – Wipro SDX – Enabling, Planning Your Software Defined Journey

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/downloads – Various presentations and other download material
storageio.com/protect – Various data protection items and topics
thenvmeplace.com – Focus on NVMe trends and technologies
thessdplace.com – NVM and Solid State Disk topics, tips and techniques
storageio.com/converge – Various CI, HCI and related SDS topics
storageio.com/performance – Various server, storage and I/O benchmark and tools
VMware Technical Network – Various VMware related items

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

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Dell EMC VMware September 2017 Software Defined Data Infrastructure Updates

Dell EMC VMware September 2017 Software Defined Data Infrastructure Updates

server storage I/O data infrastructure trends

Dell EMC VMware September 2017 Software Defined Data Infrastructure Updates

vmworld 2017

September was a busy month including VMworld in Las Vegas that featured many Dell EMC VMware (among other) software defined data infrastructure updates and announcements.

A summary of September VMware (and partner) related announcements include:

VMware on AWS via Amazon.com
VMware and AWS via Amazon Web Services

VMware and AWS

Some of you might recall VMware earlier attempt at public cloud with vCloud Air service (see Server StorageIO lab test drive here) which has since been depreciated (e.g. retired). This new approach by VMware leverages the large global presence of AWS enabling customers to set up public or hybrid vSphere, vSAN and NSX based clouds, as well as software defined data centers (SDDC) and software defined data infrastructures (SDDI).

VMware Cloud on AWS exists on a dedicated, single-tenant (unlike Elastic Cloud Compute (EC2) multi-tenant instances or VMs) that supports from 4 to 16 underlying host per cluster. Unlike EC2 virtual machine instances, VMware Cloud on AWS is delivered on elastic bare-metal (e.g. dedicated private servers aka DPS). Note AWS EC2 is more commonly known, AWS also has other options for server compute including Lambda micro services serverless containers, as well as Lightsail virtual private servers (VPS).

Besides servers with storage optimized I/O featuring low latency NVMe accessed SSDs, and applicable underlying server I/O networking, VMware Cloud on AWS leverages the VMware software stack directly on underlying host servers (e.g. there is no virtualization nesting taking place). This means more robust performance should be expected like in your on premise VMware environment. VM workloads can move between your onsite VMware systems and VMware Cloud on AWS using various tools. The VMware Cloud on AWS is delivered and managed by VMware, including pricing. Learn more about VMware Cloud on AWS here, and here (VMware PDF) and here (VMware Hands On Lab aka HOL).

Read more about AWS September news and related updates here in this StorageIOblog post.

VMware PKS
VMware and Pivotal PKS via VMware.com

Pivotal Container Service (PKS) and Google Kubernetes Partnership

During VMworld VMware, Pivotal and Google announced a partnership for enabling Kubernetes container management called PKS (Pivotal Container Service). Kubernetes is evolving as a popular open source container microservice serverless management orchestration platform that has roots within Google. What this means is that what is good for Google and others for managing containers, is now good for VMware and Pivotal. In related news, VMware has become a platinum sponsor of the Cloud Native Compute Foundation (CNCF). If you are not familiar with CNCF, add it to your vocabulary and learn more here at www.cncf.io.

Other VMworld and September VMware related announcements

Hyper converged data infrastructure provider Maxta has announced a VMware vSphere Escape Pod (parachute not included ;) ) to facilitate migration from ESXi based to Red Hat Linux hypervisor environments. IBM and VMware for cloud partnership, along with Dell EMC, IBM and VMware joint cloud solutions. White listing of VMware vSphere VMs for enhanced security combine with earlier announced capabilities.

Note that both VMware with vSphere ESXi and Microsoft with Hyper-V (Windows and Azure based) are supporting various approaches for securing Virtual Machines (VMs) and the hosts they run on. These enhancements are moving beyond simply encrypting the VMDK or VHDX virtual disks the VMs reside in or use, as well as more than password, ssh and other security measures. For example Microsoft is adding support for host guarded fabrics (and machine hosts) as well as shielded VMs. Keep an eye on how both VMware and Microsoft extend the data protection and security capabilities for software defined data infrastructures for their solutions and services.

Dell EMC Announcements

At VMworld in September Dell EMC announcements included:

  • Hyper Converged Infrastructure (HCI) and Hybrid Cloud enhancements
  • Data Protection, Goverence and Management suite updates
  • XtremIO X2 all flash array (AFA) availability optimized for vSphere and VDI

HCI and Hybrid Cloud enhancements include VxRail Appliance, VxRack SDDC (vSphere 6.5, vSAN 6.6, NSX 6.3) along with hybrid cloud platforms (Enterprise Hybrid Cloud and Native Hybrid Cloud) along with vSAN Ready Nodes (vSAN 6.6 and encryption) and VMware Ready System. Note that Dell EMC in addition to supporting VMware hybrid clouds also previously announced solutions for Microsoft Azure Stack back in May.

Software Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials at VMworld Bookstore

xxxx

Software Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials (CRC Press) at VMworld bookstore

My new book Software Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials (CRC Press) made its public debut in the VMware book store where I did a book signing event. You can get your copy of Software Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials which includes Software Defined Data Centers (SDDC) along with hybrid, multi-cloud, serverless, converged and related topics at Amazon among other venues. Learn more here.

Where To Learn More

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

What This All Means

A year ago at VMworld the initial conversations were started around what would become the VMware Cloud on AWS solution. Also a year ago besides VMware Integrated Containers (VIC) and some other pieces, the overall container and in particular related management story was a bit cloudy (pun intended). However, now the fog and cloud seem to be clearing with the PKS solution, along with details of VMware Cloud on AWS. Likewise vSphere, vSAN and NSX along with associated vRealize tools continue to evolve as well as customer deployment growing. All in all, VMware continues to evolve, let’s see how things progress now over the year until the next VMworld.

By the way, if you have not heard, its Blogtober, check out some of the other blogs and posts occurring during October here.

Ok, nuff said, for now.
Gs

Greg Schulz – Microsoft MVP Cloud and Data Center Management, VMware vExpert 2010-2017 (and vSAN). 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 2006-2023 Server StorageIO(R) and UnlimitedIO. All Rights Reserved.

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September 2017 Server StorageIO Data Infrastructure Update Newsletter



Server StorageIO September 2017 Data Infrastructure Update Newsletter

Volume 17, Issue IX (September 2017)

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

With September being generally known as back to school month, the two September event bookends were VMware VMworld and Microsoft Ignite with many other things in between. Needless to say, a lot has happened in and around data infrastructure topic areas since the August newsletter (here if you missed it). Here is a post covering some of the things that I participated with during September including presentations at events in Las Vegas (VMworld), New York City (Wipro SDx Summit), SNIA SDC in Santa Clara, Fujifilm Executive Summitt in Seattle, Minneapolis/St. Paul CMG along with other activities.

Software-Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials SDDI SDDC

One of the activities I participated in with while at VMworld in Las Vegas was a book signing event at the VMware bookstore of my new book Software Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials (CRC Press) available at Amazon.com and other global venues.

September has been a busy month pertaining data infrastructure including server storage I/O related trends, activities, news, perspectives and related topics, so let’s have a look at them.

In This Issue

Enjoy this edition of the Server StorageIO data infrastructure update newsletter.

Cheers GS

Data Infrastructure and IT Industry Activity Trends

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

The month started out with VMworld in Las Vegas (e.g. one of the event bookends for the month). Rather than a long list of announcements in this newsletter, check out this StorageIOblog post covering VMworld, VMware and Dell EMC and related news. As part of VMworld, VMware and Amazon Web Services (AWS) announced news about their partnership. AWS also had several other enhancements and new product announcements during september that can be found in this StorageIOblog post here.

AWS, Dell EMC and VMware were not the only ones making news or announcements during September. Startup NVMe based storage startup Apeiron has announced a Splunk appliance to boost log and analytics processing performance. Gigamon has extended its public cloud monitoring, insight awareness and analytics capabilities including support for Microsoft Azure.

For those looking for the latest new emerging data infrastructure vendors to watch, add Vexta to your list of NVMe based storage systems. Vexta talks a lot about NVMe particular for their backend (e.g. where data stored on NVM based devices accessed via NVMe), access of their storage system is via traditional Fibre Channel (FC) or emerging NVMe over fabric.

Long time data infrastructure server and storage vendor HDS (Hitachi Data Systems) is no more (at least in name) having re branded themselves as Vantara focusing on IoT and Cloud analytics besides their traditional data center focus. Vantara combines what was HDS, Hitachi Insight Group and Pentaho into a single unit effectively based in what was HDS as a new, repackaged, refocused business unit.

Another longtime data infrastructure solution and service provider IBM announced a new Linux only zSeries (ZED) mainframe solution. Some might think the Mainframe is dead, others that it can only run Linux as a virtual guest in a virtual machine. On the other hand some might recall that there are native Linux implementations on the ZED including Ubuntu among others.

Also note that while IBM zOS mainframe operating systems use FICON for storage access, native ZED Linux systems can use open systems based Fibre Channel (FC) e.g. SCSI command set protocols. Is the ZED based Linux for everybody or every environment? Probably not, however for those who have large-scale Linux needs, it might be worth a look to do a total cost of ownership analysis. If nothing else, do your homework, play your cards right and you might have some leverage with the x86 based server crowd when it comes to negotiating leverage.

Cloud storage gateway vendor Nasuni has landed another $38 Million USD in funding, hopefully that will enable them to start landing some new and larger customer revenues growing their business. Meanwhile storage startup Qumulo has announced extending their global file fabric name space to include spanning AWS.

Attala Systems has announced next generation software defined storage for data infrastructures for Telco environments. Percona has added an experimental release of their MySQL engine enhancing performance for high volume, write intensive workloads along with improved cost effectiveness.

Software defined storage vendor Datacore announced enhancements to support fast databases for online transaction processing (OLTP) along with analytics. Meanwhile Linux provider SUSE continues to expand its software defined storage story based around Ceph. Panasas has enhanced its scale out high performance cluster file system global name space for HPC environments with 20 PByte support. Another longtime storage vendor X-IO (formerly known as Xiotech) announced their 4th generation of their Intelligent Storage Element (ISE).

September wrapped up with Microsoft Ignite conference along with many updated, enhancements and new features for Azure, Azure Stack, Windows among others. Read more about those and other Microsoft September announcements here in this StorageIOblog post.

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

Server StorageIO Commentary in the news

Recent Server StorageIO industry trends perspectives commentary in the news.

Via CDW: Comments on Is Your Network About To Fail?
Via EnterpriseStorageForum: Comments on Data Storage and Big Data Analytics
Via InfoGoto: Comments on Cloud FOMO (Fear of missing out)
Via InfoGoto: Comments on Building a Modern Data Strategy
Via InfoGoto: Comments on the future of Multi-Cloud Computing
Via InfoGoto: Comments on AI, Machine Learning and Data management
Via InfoGoto: Comments on Your riskiest data might be in plain sight
Via InfoGoto: Comments on Data Management Too Much To Handle
Via InfoGoto: Comments on Google Cloud Platform Gaining Data Storage Momentum
Via InfoGoto: Comments on Singapore High Rise Data Centers
Via InfoGoto: Comments on New Tape Storage Capacity
Via EnterpriseStorageForum: Comments on 8 ways to save on cloud storage
Via EnterpriseStorageForum: Comments on Google Cloud Platform and Storage

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

Server StorageIOblog Posts

Recent and popular Server StorageIOblog posts include:

In Case You Missed It #ICYMI

View other recent as well as past StorageIOblog posts here

Server StorageIO Data Infrastructure Tips and Articles

Recent Server StorageIO industry trends perspectives commentary in the news.

Via EnterpriseStorageForum: Comments on Who Will Rule the Storage World?
Via InfoGoto: Comments on Google Cloud Platform Gaining Data Storage Momentum
Via InfoGoto: Comments on Singapore High Rise Data Centers
Via InfoGoto: Comments on New Tape Storage Capacity
Via EnterpriseStorageForum: Comments on 8 ways to save on cloud storage
Via EnterpriseStorageForum: Comments on Google Cloud Platform and Storage

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

Server StorageIO Recommended Reading (Watching and Listening) List

In addition to my own books including Software Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials (CRC Press 2017), the following are Server StorageIO recommended reading, watching and listening list items. The list includes various IT, Data Infrastructure and related topics.

Intel Recommended Reading List (IRRL) for developers is a good resource to check out.

Its October which means that it is also Blogtober, check out some of the blogs and posts occurring during October here.

Preston De Guise aka @backupbear is Author of several books has an interesting new site Foolsrushin.info that looks at topics including Ethics in IT among others. Check out his new book Data Protection: Ensuring Data Availability (CRC Press 2017).

Brendan Gregg has a great site for Linux performance related topics here.

Greg Knieriemen has a must read weekly blog, post, column collection of whats going on in and around the IT and data infrastructure related industries, Check it out here.

Interested in file systems, CIFS, SMB, SAMBA and related topics then check out Chris Hertels book on implementing CIFS here at Amazon.com

For those involved with VMware, check out Frank Denneman VMware vSphere 6.5 host resource guide-book here at Amazon.com.

I often mention in presentations a must have for anybody involved with software defined anything, or programming for that matter which is the Niklaus Wirth classic Algorithms + Data Structures = Programs that you can get on Amazon.com here.

Another great book to have is Seven Databases in Seven Weeks which not only provides an overview of popular NoSQL databases such as Cassandra, Mongo, HBASE among others, lots of good examples and hands on guides. Get your copy here at Amazon.com.

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

Events and Activities

Recent and upcoming event activities.

Nov. 2, 2017 – Webinar – Modern Data Protection for Hyper-Convergence
Sep. 21, 2017 – MSP CMG – Minneapolis MN
Sep. 20, 2017 – Webinar – BC, DR and Business Resiliency (BR) tips
Sep. 14, 2017 – Fujifilm IT Executive Summit – Seattle WA
Sep. 12, 2017 – SNIA Software Developers Conference (SDC) – Santa Clara CA
Sep. 7, 2017 – Wipro SDX – Enabling, Planning Your Software Defined Journey
August 28-30, 2017 – VMworld – Las Vegas

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/downloads – Various presentations and other download material
storageio.com/protect – Various data protection items and topics
thenvmeplace.com – Focus on NVMe trends and technologies
thessdplace.com – NVM and Solid State Disk topics, tips and techniques
storageio.com/converge – Various CI, HCI and related SDS topics
storageio.com/performance – Various server, storage and I/O benchmark and tools
VMware Technical Network – Various VMware related items

Ok, nuff said, for now.

Cheers
Gs

Greg Schulz – Multi-year Microsoft MVP Cloud and Data Center Management, VMware vExpert (and vSAN). 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 2006-2023 Server StorageIO(R) and UnlimitedIO. All Rights Reserved.

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Getting Caught Up What Happened In September 2017

server storage I/O data infrastructure trends

Getting Caught Up, What Happened In September?

Seems like just yesterday it was the end of August with the start of VMworld in Las Vegas, now its the end of September and Microsoft Ignite in Orlando is wrapping up. Microsoft has made several announcements this week at Ignite including Azure cloud related, AI, IoT, Windows platforms, O365 among others. More about Microsoft Azure, Azure Stack, Windows Server, Hyper-V and related data infrastructure topics in future posts.

Like many of you, September is a busy time of the year, so here is a recap of some of what I have been doing for the past month (among other things).

vmworld 2017

VMworld Las Vegas

During VMworld US VMware announced enhanced workspace, security and endpoint solutions, Pivotal Container Service (PKS) with Google for Kubernetes serverless container management, DXC partnership for hybrid cloud management, security enablement via its AppDefense solutions, data infrastructure platform enhancements including integrated OpenStack, vRealize management tools, vSAN among others. VMware also made announcements including expanded multi-cloud and hybrid cloud support along with VMware on AWS as well as Dell EMC data protection for VMware and AWS environments.

xxxx

Software Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials (CRC Press) at VMworld bookstore

In other VMworld activity, my new book Software Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials (CRC Press) made its public debut in the VMware book store where I did a book signing event. You can get your copy of Software Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials which includes Software Defined Data Centers (SDDC) along with hybrid, multi-cloud, serverless, converged and related topics at Amazon among other venues. Learn more here.

Software Defined Everything (x)

In early September I was invited to present at the Wipro Software Defined Everything (x) event in New York City. This event follows Wipro invited me to present at in London England this past January at the inaugural SDx Summit event. At the New York City event my presentation was Planning and Enabling Your Journey to SDx which bridged the higher level big picture industry trends to the applied feet on the ground topics. Attendees of the event included customers, prospects, partners, various analyst firms along with Wipro personal.

At the Wipro event during a panel discussion a question was asked about definition of software defined. After the usual vendor and industry responses, mine was a simple, put the emphasis on Define as opposed to software, with a focus on what is the resulting outcome. In other words how and what are you defining (e.g. x) which could be storage, server, data center, data infrastructure, network among others to make a particular result, outcome, service or capability. While the emphasis is around defined, that also can mean curate, compose, craft, program or whatever you prefer to create an outcome.

Image via snia.org

Role of Storage in a Software Defined Data Infrastructure

At the Storage Network Industry Association (SNIA) Storage Developers Conference (SDC) in Santa Clara I did a talk about the role of Storage in Software Defined Data Infrastructures. The theme was that not only is there a role, storage is fundamental and essential for any software defined data infrastructure (as well as legacy) from cloud to container, serverless to virtual servers, converged and hybrid among others. Other themes included the changing role of storage along with how hardware needs software, software needs hardware, and serverless has hardware and software somewhere in the stack. Tradecraft along with other related data infrastructure topics were also discussed.

Data Infrastructures Protect Preserve Secure and Serve Information
Various IT and Cloud Infrastructure Layers including Data Infrastructures

While promoted as an event for storage developers by storage developers, based on a lot of the content presented, SNIA could easily increase attendance to a broader audience with some slight tweaks as well as messaging. If SNIA is looking to focus the event only for vendor storage developers, surprise surprise, there were developers there, however I also talked with IT customers who were there among other non developers. SDC IMHO is not a replacement for SNW, however with some simple adjustments in messaging from who shouldn’t attend to who should or could attend, more attendees and sponsors might just happen appear.

Check out the SNIA SDC presentations here, along with my presentation from the 2017 event here (among others).

tape and cloud storage

Tape in a Software Defined and Hybrid Cloud World

I was invited by Fujifilm to present at their recent 9th annual executive summit in Seattle. The Fujifilm event was attended by various partners, customers and industry folks covering a diverse set of topics. Focus areas spanned from legacy IT to hyper-scale to public cloud and High-Performance Compute (HPC) among others. Magnetic Tape (e.g. tape) may be going away from your data center, however, chances are if you are doing or storing things in the cloud, your data may end up on tape. In other words, not only does tape continue to evolve, its place and how used (as well as accessed) is also changing. Check out the Fujifilm site here where you can scroll down and check out mine and other presentations from the event.

Focus on Data Protection (and recovery)

September also saw hurricanes, tropical storms, flooding, earthquakes, and acts of natural events, to man-made accidental as well as intentional including software-defined threats such as ransomware, malware, virus, Equifax data information breaches, leaks, loss among other security concerns. A reminder that there are the headline-making news events, as well as those that may be more common yet not widely talked about. What this means is that big or small, full or partial damage, destruction, loss or loss of access, data protection should be proactive to enable recovery instead of an afterthought.

Think of data protection as an investment instead of cost overhead, however that also means finding ways to spread costs out while gaining more benefit. Also remember that if something can occur, fail or happen, it probably will. In other words, the question should not be if, rather when, with what impact. This also means evolving from backup/restore, disaster recovery to business resiliency that enables your applications and data to stay available as well as accessible. In other words, how well are you prepared?

Additional data protection related topics and content include:

  • Free Webinar (registration required) with tips for disaster recovery (DR) and business resiliency (BR)
  • Preventing Unexpected Disasters article tip via Iron Mountain
  • Server StorageIO data infrastructure data protection diaries (various tips and content)
  • Free webinar (registration required) planning for GDPR
  • Time to recover, do you know where backup data is (article from Computerweekly)
  • Ensuring your data infrastructure remains available (article from Networkworld)
  • Tips on preparing for Hurricane and storm season (via IronMountain)

Expanding Your Data Infrastructure Tradecraft

At the September Minneapolis St. Paul (MSP) Computer Measurement Group (CMG) event, I gave a presentation discussing industry trends perspectives, buzzword bingo updates including software defined, NVM (the media) vs. NVMe (the interface) benchmarking, tools, cloud, serverless and tradecraft. Tradecraft as a refresher are those skills and fundamental experiences you acquire over time including what tools, techniques to use for different scenarios.

As part of the CMG presentation, the discussion looked at expanding your data infrastructure tradecraft into adjacent areas around your current focus. Also discussed were the importance of context as different words have two or more meanings. For example SAS can mean Scandinavian Air System, Statistics Analysis Software the original unstructured and big data tool, as well as for storage Serial Attached SCSI. However there is another meaning for SAS which spans server, storage, networking, cloud, security and other focus areas which is Shared Access Signature.

Downloads the CMG and other presentations from the Server StorageIO website here.

Where To Learn More

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

What This All Means

The above are some of the things I was involved with during September with themes of data infrastructure, data protection, software defined cloud, virtual, serverless containers, servers, storage, I/O networking, SSD including NVMe, performance and capacity planning, metrics that matter, management among other topics. It was great meeting many new people at the various venues this past month, likewise seeing old acquaintances and friends. Also thanks to all who have ordered copies of my new book Software Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials along with your comments. Check out the Server StorageIO data infrastructure update newsletter for other related activity, industry trends among other topics. Now lets see how fast October and the rest of 2017 goes.

Ok, nuff said, for now.
Gs

Greg Schulz – Microsoft MVP Cloud and Data Center Management, VMware vExpert 2010-2017 (and vSAN). 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 2006-2023 Server StorageIO(R) and UnlimitedIO. All Rights Reserved.

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August 2017 Server StorageIO Data Infrastructure Update Newsletter



Server StorageIO August 2017 Data Infrastructure Update Newsletter

Volume 17, Issue VII (Pre VMworld 2017)

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

Its end of summer season here in north america which means wrapping up holidays, vacations, back to school shopping (and going to school), as well as the start of the fall IT technology conference season. VMworld 2017 USA is this week in Las Vegas and there will be several announcements coming out of that event. Given all of the activity so far this month, I’m going to cover the VMworld and related topics in a special early September issue of this newsletter.

Speaking of VMworld 2017, if you are going to be there in Las Vegas, stop by the book store located in the community village area on Tuesday at 1PM I will be doing a book signing, meet and greet, stop by and say hello.

Thanks to all who participated in the recent thevPad top 100 vBloggers event, I am honored to have StorageIOblog listed in the top 100 vBlogs. Also congratulations to new and returning fellow Microsoft MVPs and VMware vExperts. There is a lot going on in the industry, lets get to it in this Server StorageIO Data Infrastructure Update Newsletter.

In This Issue

Enjoy this edition of the Server StorageIO update newsletter (pre VMworld edition).

Cheers GS

Data Infrastructure and IT Industry Activity Trends

Acronis announced True Image 2018 for home based data protection (backup), while Crashplan aka code42 announced they were getting out of the consumer, small office home office (SOHO) backup and data protection space to focus on the enterprise.

Cisco bought software defined storage converged infrastructure software vendor Springpath for about $320M USD. Cisco and Swiftstack (object storage software) also announced interoperability news with the UCS S32600 storage server platform.

GPU vendor NVIDIA announced Quadro Virtual Data Center workstation technology.

Meanwhile ioFABRIC announced their new Vicinity 3.0 software defined management solution.

Microsemi (remember PMC Sierra) announced release of its Flashtec PCIe controllers to help speed adoption deployment of SSDs including NVMe based.

Microsoft bought Cycle Computing to enhance Azure services, while also making Azure Blob storage tiering available as part of an ongoing public preview. For those not aware, Azure Blob is similar to what other services call objects. Get in on the public preview here. For those who live in a hybrid world where your environment and experience include both Windows and Linux, check out Windows Services for Linux here. With this service which can install onto an Windows 10 system along side Win32 (e.g. it co-exists, its not a virtual machine), you can choose from the Windows Store which Linux distro you want (e.g. Centos, Ubuntu, etc).

Need to learn, refresh or simply gain a better understanding of Microsoft PowerShell for software defined management of Windows, Azure and other environments? Check out this great post from Microsoft Blogs.

For those who work in a Windows or Azure environment, here are some useful icons for Powerpoint, Visio, PNG and SVG from Microsoft. With Microsoft Ignite coming up in September, watch for some interesting update enhancements to Windows Server from a server storage I/O perspective.

NextPlatform.com has an interesting article on Exascale Timeline for Storage and I/O systems worth a read. Panzura global name space and scale out software defined storage management software announced mobile client file sharing. After dropping their own cloud business, Verizon is now a virtual network services partner with Amazon.

Over at all flash array (AFA) SSD vendor Pure, revenues are growing closer to an annual $1B USD rate despite loss per share, Pure also announced a change in leadership with current CEO Scott Dietzen stepping aside for Charles Giancarlo to take the lead spot.

VMware has been talking about the continued increase in customer adoption and deployment of VSAN now they are showing they eat their own dog food. Check out this post here from VMware that shows how many and what size VSAN clusters they are using for various internal operations. Also on the VMware storage front, learn more about enhancements for large and small file allocation blocks with vSphere VMFS6.

With all of the pre and post VMworld related announcements, remember to check out the tools available over at the VMware flings site including vSphere HTML5 Web Client, HCIBench, vRealize Operations Export, VisualEsxtop, ESXi Embedded Host Client, VMware OS Optimization Tool and many others. Watch for VMworld coverage in the September newsletter along with posts at www.storageioblog.com

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

Server StorageIO Commentary in the news

Recent Server StorageIO industry trends perspectives commentary in the news.

Via EnterpriseStorageForum: Comments on Who Will Rule the Storage World?
Via InfoGoto: Comments on Google Cloud Platform Gaining Data Storage Momentum
Via InfoGoto: Comments on Singapore High Rise Data Centers
Via InfoGoto: Comments on New Tape Storage Capacity

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

Server StorageIOblog Posts

Recent and popular Server StorageIOblog posts include:

In Case You Missed It #ICYMI

View other recent as well as past StorageIOblog posts here

Server StorageIO Data Infrastructure Tips and Articles

Recent Server StorageIO industry trends perspectives commentary in the news.

Via NetworkWorld: Do you have an IT trade craft skills gap?

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

Events and Activities

Recent and upcoming event activities.

Sep. 21, 2017 – MSP CMG – Minneapolis MN
Sep. 20, 2017 – Redmond Data Protection and Backup – Webinar
Sep. 14, 2017 – Fujifilm IT Executive Summit – Seattle WA
Sep. 12, 2017 – SNIA Software Developers Conference (SDC) – Santa Clara CA
Sep. 7, 2017 – WiPro – Planning Your Software Defined Journey – New York City
August 29, 2017 – VMworld – Las Vegas

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 – Multi-year Microsoft MVP Cloud and Data Center Management, VMware vExpert (and vSAN). 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 2006-2023 Server StorageIO(R) and UnlimitedIO. All Rights Reserved.

Posted on

Hot Popular New Trending Data Infrastructure Vendors To Watch

Hot Popular New Trending Data Infrastructure Vendors To Watch

server storage I/O data infrastructure trends

Updated 1/21/2018

A common question I get asked is who are the hot popular new trending data infrastructure vendors to watch. This post looks at some data infrastructure vendors to watch and keep an eye on.

Keep in mind that there is a difference between industry adoption and customer deployment, the former being what the industry (e.g. Vendors, resellers, integrators, investors, consultants, analyst, press, media, analysts, bloggers or other influences) like, want and need to talk about. Then there is customer adoption and deployment which is what is being bought, installed and used.

Some Popular Trending Vendors To Watch

The following is far from an exhaustive list however here are some that come to mind that I’m watching.

Apcera – Enterprise class containers and management tools
AWS – Rolls our new services like a startup with size momentum of a legacy player
Blue Medora – Data Infrastructure insight, software defined management
Broadcom – Avago/LSI, legacy Broadcom, Emulex, Brocade acquisition interesting portfolio
Chelsio – Server, storage and data Infrastructure I/O technologies
Commvault – Data protection and backup solutions
Compuverde – Software defined storage
Data Direct Networks (DDN) – Scale out and high performance storage
Datadog – Software defined management, data infrastructure insight, analytics, reporting
Datrium – Converged software defined data infrastructure solutions
Dell EMC Code – Rexray container persistent storage management
Docker – Container and management tools
E8 Storage – NVMe based storage solutions
Elastifile – Scale out software defined storage and file system
Enmotus – MicroTiering that works with Windows, Linux and various cloud platforms
Everspin – storage class memories and NVDIMM
Excelero – NVMe based storage
Hedvig – Scale out software defined storage
Huawei – While not common in the US, in Europe and elsewhere they are gaining momentum
Intel – Watch what they do with Optane and storage class memories
Kubernetes – Container software defined management
Liqid – Stealth Colorado startup focusing on PCIe fabrics and composable infrastructure
Maxta – Hyper converged infrastructure (HCI) and software defined data infrastructure vendor
Mellanox – While not a startup, keep an eye on what they are doing with their adapters
Micron – Watch what they do with 3D XPoint storage class memory and SSD
Microsoft – Not a startup, however keep an eye on Azure, Azure Stack, Window Server with S2D, ReFS, tiering, CI/HCI as well as Linux services on Windows.
Minio – Software defined storage solutions
NetApp – While FAS/Ontap and Solidfire get the headlines, E series generates revenue, keep an eye on StorageGrid and AltaVault
Neuvector – Container management and security
Noobaa – Software defined storage and more
NVIDA – No longer just another graphics process unit based company
Pivot3 – An original HCI software defined players, granted, some of their competitors might not think so
Pluribus Networks – Software Defined Networks for Software Defined Data Infrastructures
Portwork – Container management and persistent storage
Rozo Systems – Scale out software defined storage and file system
Rubrik – Data Protection software, reminds me of a startup called Commvault 20 years ago.
ScaleMP – Composable scale out software defined servers
Storpool – Scale out software defined storage
Stratoscale – Software defined data infrastructure and hybrid solutions
SUSE – Linux distribution looking to expand their offerings, gain more insight
Tidalscale – Composable software defined data infrastructures
Turbonomic – Software Defined Management, insight, analytics and automation
Ubuntu – Known for their Linux distribution, check out their Metal as a Service (MaaS) technology
Veeam – Data protection and backup solutions
technology
Virtuozzo – Software defined storage and data infrastructure technologies
VMware – AWS, vSAN, NSX, Integrated Containers and much more
WekaIO – Scale out software defined storage and file system

Some Popular Trending Technology Trends

  • ARM, ASIC, FPGA, GPU servers among others
  • Converged Infrastructure (CI), Hyper Converged Infrastructure (HCI), Composable Infrastructure
  • Analytics, reporting, insight, machine learning (ML), artificial intelligence (AI), automation
  • Software Defined including Cloud, Virtual, Containers, Docker, kubernetes, mesos, serverless, micro services
  • Data protection, backup/restore, archive, security, business resiliency (BR), business continuance (BC), disaster recovery (DR)
  • Non-volatile memory (NMV), NVM Express (NVMe), storage class memories (SCM), persistent memory, nand flash, SSD

Where To Learn More

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

Data Infrastructures Protect Preserve Secure and Serve Information
Various IT and Cloud Infrastructure Layers including Data Infrastructures

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

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

There are always more hot popular new or trending data infrastructure vendors to watch, which ones are you keeping an eye on?

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

Announcing Software Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials Book by Greg Schulz

New SDDI Essentials Book by Greg Schulz of Server StorageIO

Cloud, Converged, Virtual Fundamental Server Storage I/O Tradecraft

server storage I/O data infrastructure trends

Update 1/21/2018

Over the past several months I have posted, commenting, presenting and discussing more about Software Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials aka SDDI or SDDC and SDI. Now it is time to announce my new book (my 4th solo project), Software Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials Book (CRC Press). Software Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials is now generally available at various global venues in hardcopy, hardback print as well as various electronic versions including via Amazon and CRC Press among others. For those attending VMworld 2017 in Las Vegas, I will be doing a book signing, meet and greet at 1PM Tuesday August 29 in the VMworld book store, as well as presenting at various other fall industry events.

Software Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials Book Announcement

(Via Businesswire) Stillwater, Minnesota – August 23, 2017  – Server StorageIO, a leading independent IT industry advisory and consultancy firm, in conjunction with publisher CRC Press, a Taylor and Francis imprint, announced the release and general availability of “Software-Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials,” a new book by Greg Schulz, noted author and Server StorageIO founder.

Software Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials

The Software Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials book covers physical, cloud, converged (and hyper-converged), container, and virtual server storage I/O networking technologies, revealing trends, tools, techniques, and tradecraft skills.

Data Infrastructures Protect Preserve Secure and Serve Information
Various IT and Cloud Infrastructure Layers including Data Infrastructures

From cloud web scale to enterprise and small environments, IoT to database, software-defined data center (SDDC) to converged and container servers, flash solid state devices (SSD) to storage and I/O networking,, the book helps develop or refine hardware, software, services and management experiences, providing real-world examples for those involved with or looking to expand their data infrastructure education knowledge and tradecraft skills.

Software Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials book topics include:

  • Cloud, Converged, Container, and Virtual Server Storage I/O networking
  • Data protection (archive, availability, backup, BC/DR, snapshot, security)
  • Block, file, object, structured, unstructured and data value
  • Analytics, monitoring, reporting, and management metrics
  • Industry trends, tools, techniques, decision making
  • Local, remote server, storage and network I/O troubleshooting
  • Performance, availability, capacity and  economics (PACE)

Where To Purchase Your Copy

Order via Amazon.com and CRC Press along with Google Books among other global venues.

What People Are Saying About Software Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials Book

“From CIOs to operations, sales to engineering, this book is a comprehensive reference, a must-read for IT infrastructure professionals, beginners to seasoned experts,” said Tom Becchetti, advisory systems engineer.

"We had a front row seat watching Greg present live in our education workshop seminar sessions for ITC professionals in the Netherlands material that is in this book. We recommend this amazing book to expand your converged and data infrastructure knowledge from beginners to industry veterans."

Gert and Frank Brouwer – Brouwer Storage Consultancy

"Software-Defined Data Infrastructures provides the foundational building blocks to improve your craft in several areas including applications, clouds, legacy, and more.  IT professionals, as well as sales professionals and support personal, stand to gain a great deal by reading this book."

Mark McSherry- Oracle Regional Sales Manager

"Greg Schulz has provided a complete ‘toolkit’ for storage management along with the background and framework for the storage or data infrastructure professional (or those aspiring to become one)."
Greg Brunton – Experienced Storage and Data Management Professional

“Software-defined data infrastructures are where hardware, software, server, storage, I/O networking and related services converge inside data centers or clouds to protect, preserve, secure and serve applications and data,” said Schulz.  “Both readers who are new to data infrastructures and seasoned pros will find this indispensable for gaining and expanding their knowledge.”

SDDI and SDDC components

More About Software Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials
Software Defined Data Infrastructures (SDDI) 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, Software Defined Data Centers (SDDC), Software Data Infrastructures (SDI) or Software Defined Anything (SDx) 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 content

This book is the definitive source providing comprehensive coverage about IT and cloud Data Infrastructures for experienced industry experts to beginners. Coverage of topics spans from higher level applications down to components (hardware, software, networks, and services) that get defined to create data infrastructures that support business, web, and other information services. This includes Servers, Storage, I/O Networks, Hardware, Software, Management Tools, Physical, Software Defined Virtual, Cloud, Docker, Containers (Docker and others) as well as Bulk, Block, File, Object, Cloud, Virtual and software defined storage.

Additional topics include Data protection (Availability, Archiving, Resiliency, HA, BC, BR, DR, Backup), Performance and Capacity Planning, Converged Infrastructure (CI), Hyper-Converged, NVM and NVMe Flash SSD, Storage Class Memory (SCM), NVMe over Fabrics, Benchmarking (including metrics matter along with tools), Performance Capacity Planning and much more including whos doing what, how things work, what to use when, where, why along with current and emerging trends.

Book Features

ISBN-13: 978-1498738156
ISBN-10: 149873815X
Hardcover: 672 pages
(Available in Kindle and other electronic formats)
Over 200 illustrations and 70 plus tables
Frequently asked Questions (and answers) along with many tips
Various learning exercises, extensive glossary and appendices
Publisher: Auerbach/CRC Press Publications; 1 edition (June 19, 2017)
Language: English

SDDI and SDDC toolbox

Where To Learn More

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

Data Infrastructures Protect Preserve Secure and Serve Information
Various IT and Cloud Infrastructure Layers including Data Infrastructures

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

Data Infrastructures exist to protect, preserve, secure and serve information along with the applications and data they depend on. With more data being created at a faster rate, along with the size of data becoming larger, increased application functionality to transform data into information means more demands on data infrastructures and their underlying resources.

Software-Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials: Cloud, Converged, and Virtual Fundamental Server Storage I/O Tradecraft is for people who are currently involved with or looking to expand their knowledge and tradecraft skills (experience) of data infrastructures. Software-defined data centers (SDDC), software data infrastructures (SDI), software-defined data infrastructure (SDDI) and traditional data infrastructures are made up of software, hardware, services, and best practices and tools spanning servers, I/O networking, and storage from physical to software-defined virtual, container, and clouds. The role of data infrastructures is to enable and support information technology (IT) and organizational information applications.

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

Everything is not the same in business, organizations, IT, and in particular servers, storage, and I/O. This means that there are different audiences who will benefit from reading this book. Because everything and everybody is not the same when it comes to server and storage I/O along with associated IT environments and applications, different readers may want to focus on various sections or chapters of this book.

If you are looking to expand your knowledge into an adjacent area or to understand whats under the hood, from converged, hyper-converged to traditional data infrastructures topics, this book is for you. For experienced storage, server, and networking professionals, this book connects the dots as well as provides coverage of virtualization, cloud, and other convergence themes and topics.

This book is also for those who are new or need to learn more about data infrastructure, server, storage, I/O networking, hardware, software, and services. Another audience for this book is experienced IT professionals who are now responsible for or working with data infrastructure components, technologies, tools, and techniques.

Learn more here about Software Defined Data Infrastructure (SDDI) Essentials book along with cloud, converged, and virtual fundamental server storage I/O tradecraft topics, order your copy from Amazon.com or CRC Press here, and thank you in advance for learning more about SDDI and related topics.

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.

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Chelsio Storage over IP and other Networks Enable Data Infrastructures

Chelsio Storage over IP Enable Data Infrastructures

server storage I/O data infrastructure trends

Chelsio and Storage over IP (SoIP) continue to enable Data Infrastructures from legacy to software defined virtual, container, cloud as well as converged. This past week I had a chance to visit with Chelsio to discuss data infrastructures, server storage I/O networking along with other related topics. More on Chelsio later in this post, however, for now lets take a quick step back and refresh what is SoIP (Storage over IP) along with Storage over Ethernet (among other networks).

Data Infrastructures Protect Preserve Secure and Serve Information
Various IT and Cloud Infrastructure Layers including Data Infrastructures

Server Storage over IP Revisited

There are many variations of SoIP from network attached storage (NAS) file based processing including NFS, SAMBA/SMB (aka Windows File sharing) among others. In addition there is various block such as SCSI over IP (e.g. iSCSI), along with object via HTTP/HTTPS, not to mention the buzzword bingo list of RoCE, iSER, iWARP, RDMA, DDPK, FTP, FCoE, IFCP, and SMB3 direct to name a few.

Who is Chelsio

For those who are not aware or need a refresher, Chelsio is involved with enabling server storage I/O by creating ASICs (Application Specific Integrated Circuits) that do various functions offloading those from the host server processor. What this means for some is a throw back to the early 2000s of the TCP Offload Engine (TOE) era where various processing to handle regular along with iSCSI and other storage over Ethernet and IP could be accelerated.

Chelsio data infrastructure focus

Chelsio ecosystem across different data infrastructure focus areas and application workloads

As seen in the image above, certainly there is a server and storage I/O network play with Chelsio, along with traffic management, packet inspection, security (encryption, SSL and other offload), traditional, commercial, web, high performance compute (HPC) along with high profit or productivity compute (the other HPC). Chelsio also enables data infrastructures that are part of physical bare metal (BM), software defined virtual, container, cloud, serverless among others.

Chelsio server storage I/O focus

The above image shows how Chelsio enables initiators on server and storage appliances as well as targets via various storage over IP (or Ethernet) protocols.

Chelsio enabling various data center resources

Chelsio also plays in several different sectors from *NIX to Windows, Cloud to Containers, Various processor architectures and hypervisors.

Chelsio ecosystem

Besides diverse server storage I/O enabling capabilities across various data infrastructure environments, what caught my eye with Chelsio is how far they, and storage over IP have progressed over the past decade (or more). Granted there are faster underlying networks today, however the offload and specialized chip sets (e.g. ASICs) have also progressed as seen in the above and next series of images via Chelsio.

The above showing TCP and UDP acceleration, the following show Microsoft SMB 3.1.1 performance something important for doing Storage Spaces Direct (S2D) and Windows-based Converged Infrastructure (CI) along with Hyper Converged Infrastructures (HCI) deployments.

Chelsio software environments

Something else that caught my eye was iSCSI performance which in the following shows 4 initiators accessing a single target doing about 4 million IOPs (reads and writes), various size and configurations. Granted that is with a 100Gb network interface, however it also shows that potential bottlenecks are removed enabling that faster network to be more effectively used.

Chelsio server storage I/O performance

Moving on from TCP, UDP and iSCSI, NVMe and in particular NVMe over Fabric (NVMeoF) have become popular industry topics so check out the following. One of my comments to Chelsio is to add host or server CPU usage to the following chart to help show the story and value proposition of NVMe in general to do more I/O activity while consuming less server-side resources. Lets see what they put out in the future.

Chelsio

Ok, so Chelsio does storage over IP, storage over Ethernet and other interfaces accelerating performance, as well as regular TCP and UDP activity. One of the other benefits of what Chelsio and others are doing with their ASICs (or FPGA by some) is to also offload processing for security among other topics. Given the increased focus around server storage I/O and data infrastructure security from encryption to SSL and related usage that requires more resources, these new ASIC such as from Chelsio help to offload various specialized processing from the server.

The customer benefit is that more productive application work can be done by their servers (or storage appliances). For example, if you have a database server, that means more product ivy data base transactions per second per licensed software. Put another way, want to get more value out of your Oracle, Microsoft or other vendors software licenses, simple, get more work done per server that is licensed by offloading and eliminate waits or other bottlenecks.

Using offloads and removing server bottlenecks might seem like common sense however I’m still amazed that the number of organizations who are more focused on getting extra value out of their hardware vs. getting value out of their software licenses (which might be more expensive).

Chelsio

Where To Learn More

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

Data Infrastructures Protect Preserve Secure and Serve Information
Various IT and Cloud Infrastructure Layers including Data Infrastructures

What This All Means

Data Infrastructures exist to protect, preserve, secure and serve information along with the applications and data they depend on. With more data being created at a faster rate, along with the size of data becoming larger, increased application functionality to transform data into information means more demands on data infrastructures and their underlying resources.

This means more server I/O to storage system and other servers, along with increased use of SoIP as well as storage over Ethernet and other interfaces including NVMe. Chelsio (and others) are addressing the various application and workload demands by enabling more robust, productive, effective and efficient data infrastructures.

Check out Chelsio and how they are enabling storage over IPO (SoIP) to enable Data Infrastructures from legacy to software defined virtual, container, cloud as well as converged, oh, and thanks Chelsio for being able to use the above images.

Ok, nuff said, for now.
Gs

Greg Schulz – Multi-year Microsoft MVP Cloud and Data Center Management, VMware vExpert (and vSAN). 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 2006-2023 Server StorageIO(R) and UnlimitedIO. All Rights Reserved.

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Data Infrastructure Industry Trends WekaIO Matrix Software Defined Storage SDS

WekaIO Matrix Scale Out Software Defined Storage SDS

server storage I/O trends

Updated 2/11/2018

WekaIO Matrix is a scale out software defined solution (SDS).

WekaIO Matrix software defined scale out storage SDS

This Server StorageIO Industry Trends Perspective report looks at common issues, trends, and how to address different application server storage I/O challenges. In this report, we look at WekaIO Matrix, an elastic, flexible, highly scalable easy to use (and manage) software defined (e.g. software based) storage solution. WekaIO Matrix enables flexible elastic scaling with stability and without compromise.

Matrix is a new scale out software defined storage solution that:

  • Installs on bare metal, virtual or cloud servers
  • Has POSIX, NFS, SMB, and HDFS storage access
  • Adaptable performance for little and big data
  • Tiering of flash SSD and cloud object storage
  • Distributed resilience without compromise
  • Removes complexity of traditional storage
  • Deploys on bare metal, virtual and cloud environments

Where To Learn More

View additional SDS and related topics via the following links.

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

Software Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials Book SDDC

What This All Means

Read more about WekaIO Matrix in this (free, no registration required) Server StorageIO Industry Trends Perspective (ITP) Report compliments of WekaIO.

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.

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Like IT Data Centers Do You Take Trade Show Exhibit Infrastructure For Granted?

Do You Take Trade Show Exhibit Infrastructure For Granted?

server storage I/O data infrastructure trends

Think about this for a moment; do you assume that Information Technology (IT) and Cloud based data centers along with their associated Data Infrastructure supporting various applications will be accessible when needed. Likewise, when you go to a trade show, conference, symposium, user group or another conclave is it assumed that the trade show, exposition (expo), exhibits, booths, stands or demo areas will be ready, waiting and accessible?

IT industry cloud software defined events

Fire Disrupts Flash Memory Summit Conference Exhibits

This past week at the Flash Memory Summit (FMS) conference trade show event in Santa Clara California, what normally would be taken for granted (e.g. expo hall and exhibits) were disrupted. The disruption (more here and here) was caused by an early morning fire in one of the exhibitor’s booths (stand) in the expo hall (view some photos here via Toms Hardware.com).

Fortunately, nobody was hurt, at least physically, and damage (physically) appears to have been isolated.

However while the key notes, panels, and other presentations did take place as part of the show must go on, the popular exhibit expo hall did not. Granted for some people who only attend conferences or seminar events for the presentation content, lack of the exhibition hall simply meant no free giveaways.

On the other hand, for those who attend events like FMS mainly for the exhibition hall experience, the show did not go on, perhaps resulting in a trip in vain (e.g. how you might be able to recoup some travel costs in some scenarios) for some people. For example, those who were attending to meet with a particular vendor, see a product technology, conduct some business or other meetings, do an interview, video, podcast, take some photos, or simply get some free stuff were disrupted.

Likewise those behind the scenes, from conference organizers, event staff not to mention the vendor’s sponsors who put resources (time, money, people, and equipment) into an exhibit were disrupted. Vendors were still able to issue their press releases and conduct their presentations, keynotes, panel discussions, however what about the lack of the expo.

Do We Take Data and Event Infrastructures For Granted

This begs the question of if trade show exhibits still have value, or can an event function without one?

I am not sure as some events can and do stand on their merit with presentation content being the primary focus, others the expo is the draw, many are hybrid with a mix of both.

A question and point of this piece is that how many people take conferences in general, and exhibits along with their associated Infrastructure for granted?

How many know or understand the amount of time, money, people resources and various tradecraft skills across different disciplines go into event planning, staging, coordination, the execution, so they occur?

This also ties into the theme of how many people only think and assume that IT data centers and clouds along with their data Infrastructure resources, services are available supporting applications along with data access to give information?

The same holds true for your telephone (plain old telephone system [POTS] and cellular or mobile) service, gas, electric, sewer, water, waste (garbage), traditional or network based television, internet provider, highways, railroads, airports, the list goes on.

Where To Learn More

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

What This All Means

The good news is that nobody physically was injured this past week.

Granted some may have incurred emotional, monetary or public and marketing related injuries, however, those can be dealt with over time.

My point is, do we assume too much (perhaps rightfully so) that events, exhibits and other trade show conference related items are always on, always available, accessible open on time? With IT data center and clouds, you have different expectation levels of access, availability, durability, survivability for a given cost to meet service expectations.

Data center, cloud and data infrastructure SDC, SDDI, SDI, SDx

Next time you attend a webinar, seminar, conference, symposium, trade show, presentation, exhibit or expo, take a moment and look around at what you see, as well as what you do not see. Having been in involved in and around conferences, conventions, seminars, expos across different industries, both behind the scenes as well as on the public side, I do not take these events for granted.

Knowing what goes into the planning, coordination, scheduling, promotion, logistics, all the things behind the scenes, next time you go to an event, look around. What you can see that perhaps are not meant to be seen as part of their Infrastructure. In event venue exhibit halls as well as data centers, there are those things you see such as data infrastructure resources including racks of servers, storage, I/O networking, monitors, displays, work areas, heating ventilation air conditioning (HVAC) along with those you might not see.

What you might not see and take for granted are the smoke and fire detection along with suppression systems which at the Santa Clara convention center appeared to have done their job. There are also the electrical power and distribution systems; perhaps battery backed uninterruptible power systems (UPS) along with standby alternate generator power.

How about a big round of applause, thank you, Atta boy and Atta girl, acknowledgment and other signs of appreciation for all those involved behind the scenes who do the planning, preparation, coordination, setup, tear down and in person what you see at events.

Thank you to all who have, and continue to enable trade shows, conferences, seminars, exhibits, road shows among other events to take place, after all, the show must go on. In other words, like IT and cloud Data Centers, do you take trade show exhibit infrastructures for granted?

Ok, nuff said, for now.

Greg Schulz – Multi-year Microsoft MVP Cloud and Data Center Management, VMware vExpert (and vSAN). 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 2006-2023 Server StorageIO(R) and UnlimitedIO. All Rights Reserved.

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June 2017 Server StorageIO Data Infrastructures Update Newsletter

Volume 17, Issue VI

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

For those of you in the northern hemisphere it is time for summer holidays, while in the southern hemisphere its winter time. That means there is a lot going on outside of work, however June has also seen a lot of activity in and around IT data infrastructure along with data centers. Check out some of the industry trends news and updates below.

Software-Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials SDDI SDDC

A quick update following up from the May newsletter is that my new book is now available via Amazon.com, CRC Press and other venues in hardcopy hardcover as well as electronic versions. Think of this as the soft launch with a formal launch and more information being rolled out soon. For now, you can visit the landing page for Software Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials – Cloud, Converged, and Virtual Fundamental Server Storage I/O Tradecraft (CRC PRess/Taylor Francis/Auerbach) at storageio.com/book4 to learn more including view table of contents, preface, how organized among other items.

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:

Cavium announced 10, 25, 50 and 50Gbps Ethernet server storage I/O NIC solutions (e.g. FastLine 41000 series).

The NVMe Express trade group (e.g. nvmexpress.org) announced the completion of NVMe 1.3 specification. New optional features include support for mobile platforms and book, along with scaling for enterprise as well as cloud environments. Learn more about specifications at the NVMexpress.org site as well as more NVMe material at thenvmeplace.com.

Keep in mind that if the answer is NVMe, what are the questions along with various options from front end to back-end, NVMe and PCIe, NVMeoF, U.2/8639, M2/NGFF among others.

The Fibre Channel Industry Association announced FC-NVMe interoperability plugfest and Gen 6 32GFC activity to support next generation data infrastructures and data centers.

Storage vendor Tegile announced they are joining the growing ranks of vendors adding NVMe support with their InteliFlash OS 3.7 along with other enhancements.

For those of you who are involved with Windows Servers environments along with server, storage and I/O networks, check out Darryl VanderPeijl multi-part series on RDMA, DCB, PFC, ETS and related topics.

HPE and Hedvig announced solutions combing forces to address hybrid cloud storage needs.

IBM and Cisco announced enhancements around their converged (Cisco powered servers) solution for VDI and Hybrid cloud workloads.

Big Data and Analytics vendor Mapr announced enhancements to their converged data management platform for cloud scale data fabrics.

Panzura has enhanced its Freedom software defined storage management solution with version 7 to support expanded unstructured data growth while easing management functions, along with performance updates.

Red Hat announced Ceph Storage 2.3 including Ceph 10.2 (Jewel) combing an NFS gateway.

Scality announced enhancements to its Ring software defined storage cloud and object solution including enhanced security along with data protection capabilities.

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: 5 Hot Storage Technologies to Watch
Storage can be held back by slow I/O performance, which caused expensive compute resources and memory to be consumed. NVMe reduces wait time while increasing the amount of effective work, enabling higher-profitability compute. The storage I/O capabilities of flash can be fed across PCIe faster to enable multi-core processors to complete more useful work in less time.

Via EnterpriseStorageForum: 10-Year Review of Data Storage
The adoption of hybrid cloud and hybrid converged server storage has appeared more rapidly than many expected. And despite firm pronouncements of their demise, FC, tape and HDD are still very much with us.

Via CDW: Your IT Department Can Help Your Companys Bottom Line Heres How
Not only are the servers more robust performance wise, but they’ve got more compute capability, can handle more workloads, have more memory and also have better resiliency.

Via EnterpriseStorageForum: Top 10 Tips for Software-Defined Storage Deployment
Dell 14g PowerEdge Servers give you greater compute and IO capability, as well as the density you need, NVMe and 25 Gig Ethernet on board,

Via CDW: Meeting IoTs Demands for Networking

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

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

Cheers
Gs

Greg Schulz – Multi-year Microsoft MVP Cloud and Data Center Management, VMware vExpert (and vSAN). 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 2006-2023 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.