Server StorageIO February 2016 Update Newsletter

Volume 16, Issue II

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

Even with an extra day during the month of February, there was a lot going on in a short amount of time. This included industry activity from servers to storage and I/O networking, hardware, software, services, mergers and acquisitions for cloud, virtual, containers and legacy environments. Check out the sampling of some of the various industry activities below.

Meanwhile, its now time for March Madness which also means metrics that matter and getting ready for World Backup Data on March 31st. Speaking of World Backup Day, check out the StorageIO events and activities page for a webinar on March 31st involving data protection as part of smart backups.

While your focus for March may be around brackets and other related themes, check out the Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) white paper listed below that looks at NAND flash SSD failures at Facebook. Some of the takeaways involve the importance of cooling and thermal management for flash, as well as wear management and role of flash translation layer firmware along with controllers.

Also see the links to the Google White Paper on their request to the industry for a new type of Hard Disk Drive (HDD) to store capacity data while SSD’s handle the IOP’s. The take away is that while Google uses a lot of flash SSD for high performance, low latency workloads, they also need to have a lot of high-capacity bulk storage that is more affordable on a cost per capacity basis. Google also makes several proposals and suggestions to the industry on what should and can be done on a go forward basis.

Backblaze also has a new report out on their 2015 HDD reliability and failure analysis which makes for an interesting read. One of the take away’s is that while there are newer, larger capacity 6TB and 8TB drives, Backblaze is leveraging the lower cost per capacity of 4TB drives that are also available in volume quantity.

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

Cheers GS

In This Issue

  • StorageIOblog posts
  • Industry Activity Trends
  • New and Old Vendor Update
  • Events and Webinars
  • StorageIOblog Posts

    Recent and popular Server StorageIOblog posts include:

    • EMC DSSD D5 Rack Scale Direct Attached Shared SSD All Flash Array Part I
      and Part II – EMC DSSD D5 Direct Attached Shared AFA
      EMC announced the general availability of their DSSD D5 Shared Direct Attached SSD (DAS) flash storage system (e.g. All Flash Array or AFA) which is a rack-scale solution. If you recall, EMC acquired DSSD back in 2014 which you can read more about here. EMC announced four configurations that include 36TB, 72TB and 144TB raw flash SSD capacity with support for up to 48 dual-ported host client servers.
    • Various Hardware (SAS, SATA, NVM, M2) and Software (VHD) Defined Odd’s and Ends
      Ever need to add another GbE port to a small server, workstation or perhaps Intel NUC, however no PCIe slots are available? How about attaching a M2 form factor flash SSD card to a server or device that does not have an M2 port, or, for mirroring two M2 cards together with a RAID adapter? Looking for tool to convert a Windows system to a Virtual Hard Disk (VHD) while it is running? The following are a collection of odd’s and end’s devices and tools for hardware and software defining your environment.
    • Software Defined Storage Virtual Hard Disk (VHD) Algorithms + Data Structures
      For those who are into, or simply like to talk about software defined storage (SDS), API’s, Windows, Virtual Hard Disks (VHD) or VHDX, or Hyper-V among other related themes, have you ever actually looked at the specification for VHDX? If not, here is the link to the open specification that Microsoft published (this one dates back to 2012).
    • Big Files and Lots of Little File Processing and Benchmarking with Vdbench
      Need to test a server, storage I/O networking, hardware, software, services, cloud, virtual, physical or other environment that is either doing some form of file processing, or, that you simply want to have some extra workload running in the background for what ever reason?

    View other recent as well as past blog posts here

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

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

    Some new Products Technology Services Announcements (PTSA) include:

  • Tegile – IntelliFlash HD Now Available To Enterprises Worldwide
  • Via Forbes – Competitors and Cash Bleed Put Pressure on Pure Storage
  • Via HealthCareBusiness – Philips and Amazon team up on cloud-based health record storage
  • Via Zacks – IBM Advances Hybrid Cloud Object Based Storage
  • DataONstorage expands Microsoft Hyper Converged Infrastructure platforms
  • Via ITBusinessEdge – Nimble updates All Flash Array (AFA) storage
  • Carnegie Mellon University – A Large-Scale Study of Flash Memory Failures
  • Cisco Buys Cliqr Cloud Orchestration
  • Backblaze – 2015 Hard Drive Reliability Reports and Analysis
  • Via BusinessCloudNews – Verizon Closing Down Its Public Cloud
  • Via BusinessInsider – US Government Approves Dell and EMC Deal
  • EMC and VMware announce new VCE VxRAIL Converged Solutions
  • EMC announces new IBM zSeries Mainframe enhancements for VMAX
  • EMC announces new DSSD D5 AFA and VMAX AFA enhancements
  • HPE announces enhancements to StoreEasy 1650 storage
  • Seagate now shipping worlds slimmest and fastest 2TB mobile HDD
  • Via VMblog – Oracle Scoops Up Ravello to Boosts Its Public Cloud Offerings
  • Via Investors – SSD and Chinese Investments in Western Digital
  • ATTO announces 32G (e.g. Gen 6) Fibre Channel adapters
  • Google to disk vendors: Make hard drives like this, even if they lose more data
  • Google Disk for Data Centers White Paper (PDF Here)
  • View other recent news and industry trends here

    Vendors you may not have heard of

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

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

    • SkySync – Enterprise File Sync and Share
    • SANblaze – Storage protocol emulation tools
    • OpenIT – DCIM and Data Infrastructure Management Tools
    • Infinit.sh – Decentralized Software Based File Storage Platform
    • Alluxio –
      Open Source Software Defined Storage Abstraction Layer
    • Genie9
      Backup and Data Protection Tools
    • E8 Storage – Software Defined Stealth Storage Startup

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

     

    StorageIO Webinars and Industry Events

    EMCworld (Las Vegas) May 2-4, 2016

    Interop (Las Vegas) May 4-6 2016

    NAB (Las Vegas) April 19-20, 2016

    March 31, 2016 Webinar (1PM ET) – Smart Backup and World Backup Day

    February 25, 2016 Webinar (11AM PT) – Migrating to Hyper-V including from Vmware

    February 24, 2016 Webinar (11AM ET) – How To Become a Data Protection Hero

    February 23, 2016 Webinar (11AM PT) – Rethinking Data Protection

    January 19, 2016 Webinar (9AM PT) – Solve Virtualization Performance Issues Like a Pro

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

    Server StorageIO Industry Resources and Links

    Check out these useful links and pages:

    storageio.com/links,
    objectstoragecenter.com, storageioblog.com/data-protection-diaries-main/,
    thenvmeplace.com, thessdplace.com and storageio.com/performance among others.

    Ok, nuff said

    Cheers
    Gs

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

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

    Worried about IT M&A, here come the new startups!

    Storage I/O trends

    Late last year , I did a post (see here) countering the notion that there is a lack of innovation in IT and specifically around data storage. Recently I did a post about a Funeral for Friend, not to mention yesterdays post about Summer marriages.

    For those who are concerned about lack of innovation, or, that consolidation will result in just a few big vendors, here’s some food for thought. Those big vendors in addition to growing via internal organic growth, also grow by buying or merging with other vendors. Those other vendors emerge as startups, some grow, blossom and are bought, some make a decent business on their own, some are looking to be bought, some need to be bought, some will see fire sales, liquidation or simply closing their doors and perhaps re-launching as a new company.

    With all the M&A activity currently that has taken place, and I’m sure (speculation only ;) ) that there will be plenty more, here’s a short and far from comprehensive list of some startups or companies you may not have heard of yet. There are additional ones who are still in deep stealth, some on the list are still in stealth, yet talking and letting information trickle out, thus only non-NDA information is being shown here. In other words, you can find out about these via publicly available information and sources.

    Something that I have noticed and talked with others in the industry about is that this generation of startups, at least for now are taking a far more low-key approach to their launches than in the past. Gone at least for now are the Dot COM era over the top announcements in some cases before there was even a product or shipping for actual customer production deployment scenario. This crop or corps of startups are taking their time leveraging the current economic situation to further incubate their technologies and go to market strategies, not to mention minimizing the amount of over the top VC funding we have seen in the past. Some of these may not appear to be storage related and that would be correct. This list includes those associated with data infrastructure technolgies from servers, to storage to networking, hardware, software and services among othes as a common theme.

    Disclosure Notice: None of these companies mentioned are nor have ever been clients of StorageIO. Why do I mention this, why not!

    Balesio – File compression solutions
    Box.net – Internet/web/cloud storage service with high availability and backup
    Cirrustore – Backup data protection tools
    Dataslide – Hard rectangular disk (HRD)
    Enclarity – Healthcare CRM and analysis tools
    Enstratus – Amazon cloud computing management tools
    Exludas – Multi core optimize
    Firescope – CMDB data solutions
    Greenbytes – ZFS based storage management solutions
    Likewise – Open backup software for macs/linux/windows
    Liquidcomputing – High density servers
    Maxiscale – Web infrastructure (Stealth)
    Metalogix – Archiving solutions
    Neptuny – Capacity Planning
    Netronome – Network and I/O optimization technology
    Newboundary – IT policy management and IRM tools
    Nexenta ZFS – based storage management solutions
    Pergamumsystems – Archive solutions (Stealth)
    Pranah – SMB Storage vendor formerly known as Marner
    Procedo – Archiving and migration solutions
    Rebit – Backup and data protection solutions
    Rightscale – Amazon cloud computing management tools
    Rmsource – Cloud backup solutions
    RNAnetworks – Virtual memory management solutions
    Scale Computing – Clustered storage management software
    ScaleMP – Multi-core virtualization for scale out
    SiberSystems – Goodsync data protection solutions
    Sparebackup – Backup data protection solutions
    StorageFusion – Storage resource analysis
    Storspeed – NAS/NFS optimization solutions (Stealth)
    Sugarsync – Backup and data protection solutions
    Surgient – Cloud computing solutions
    Synology – SMB storage solutions
    TwinStrata – BC/DR analysis and assessment tools
    Vadium – Security and encryption tools
    Vembu – Backup data protection tools
    Versant – Object database management solutions
    Vipre – Security, data loss, data leak prevention
    VirtenSys – Virtual I/O and I/O virtualization (IOV)
    Vizrt – Video management software tools
    WhipTail – Flash SSD solutions
    Xenos – Archive and data footprint reduction solutions

    Links to the above along with many other companies including manufactures and vars can be found on the Interesting Links page at StorageIO.

    Food for thought for your summer technology picnic fun.

    Nuf said for now.

    Ok, nuff said.

    Cheers gs

    Greg Schulz – Author Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking (CRC Press, 2011), The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC Press, 2009), and Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier, 2004)

    twitter @storageio

    All Comments, (C) and (TM) belong to their owners/posters, Other content (C) Copyright 2006-2012 StorageIO and UnlimitedIO All Rights Reserved