Tag: virtualization

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Data Protection Diaries Fundamental Resources Where to Learn More

Data Protection Diaries Fundamental Resources Where to Learn More

Companion to Software Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials – Cloud, Converged, Virtual Fundamental Server Storage I/O Tradecraft ( CRC Press 2017)

server storage I/O data infrastructure trends

By Greg Schulz – www.storageioblog.com November 26, 2017

This is the last in a multi-part series on Data Protection fundamental tools topics techniques terms technologies trends tradecraft tips as a follow-up to my Data Protection Diaries series, as well as a companion to my new book Software Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials – Cloud, Converged, Virtual Server Storage I/O Fundamental tradecraft (CRC Press 2017).

Click here to view the previous post Part 9 – who’s Doing What ( Toolbox Technology Tools).

Software Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials Book SDDC

Post in the series includes excerpts from Software Defined Data Infrastructure (SDDI) pertaining to data protection for legacy along with software defined data centers ( SDDC), data infrastructures in general along with related topics. In addition to excerpts, the posts also contain links to articles, tips, posts, videos, webinars, events and other companion material. Note that figure numbers in this series are those from the SDDI book and not in the order that they appear in the posts.

In this post the focus is around Data Protection Resources Where to Learn More.

SDDC, SDI, SDDI data infrastructure
Figure 1.5 Data Infrastructures and other IT Infrastructure Layers

Software Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials Table of Contents (TOC)

Here is a link (PDF) to the table of contents (TOC) for Software Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials.

The following is a Software Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials book TOC summary:

Chapter 1: Server Storage I/O and Data Infrastructure Fundamentals
Chapter 2: Application and IT Environments
Chapter 3: Bits, Bytes, Blobs, and Software-Defined Building Blocks
Chapter 4: Servers: Physical, Virtual, Cloud, and Containers
Chapter 5: Server I/O and Networking
Chapter 6: Servers and Storage-Defined Networking
Chapter 7: Storage Mediums and Component Devices
Chapter 8: Data Infrastructure Services: Access and Performance
Chapter 9: Data Infrastructure Services: Availability, RAS, and RAID
Chapter 10: Data Infrastructure Services: Availability, Recovery-Point Objective, and Security
Chapter 11: Data Infrastructure Services: Capacity and Data Reduction
Chapter 12: Storage Systems and Solutions (Products and Cloud)
Chapter 13: Data Infrastructure and Software-Defined Management
Chapter 14: Data Infrastructure Deployment Considerations
Chapter 15: Software-Defined Data Infrastructure Futures, Wrap-up, and Summary
Appendix A: Learning Experiences
Appendix B: Additional Learning, Tools, and tradecraft Tricks
Appendix C: Frequently Asked Questions
Appendix D: Book Shelf and Recommended Reading
Appendix E: Tools and Technologies Used in Support of This Book
Appendix F: How to Use This Book for Various Audiences
Appendix G: Companion Website and Where to Learn More
Glossary
Index

Click here to view (PDF) table of contents (TOC).

Data Protection Resources Where To Learn More

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

The following are the various posts that are part of this data protection series:

  • Part 1 – Data Infrastructure Data Protection Fundamentals
  • Part 2 – Reliability, Availability, Serviceability ( RAS) Data Protection Fundamentals
  • Part 3 – Data Protection Access Availability RAID Erasure Codes ( EC) including LRC
  • Part 4 – Data Protection Recovery Points (Archive, Backup, Snapshots, Versions)
  • Part 5 – Point In Time Data Protection Granularity Points of Interest
  • Part 6 – Data Protection Security Logical Physical Software Defined
  • Part 7 – Data Protection Tools, Technologies, Toolbox, Buzzword Bingo Trends
  • Part 8 – Data Protection Diaries Walking Data Protection Talk
  • Part 9 – who’s Doing What ( Toolbox Technology Tools)
  • Part 10 – Data Protection Resources Where to Learn More


    • The following are various data protection blog posts:

  • Welcome to the Data Protection Diaries
  • Until the focus expands to data protection, backup is staying alive!
  • The blame game, Does cloud storage result in data loss?
  • Loss of data access vs. data loss
  • Revisiting RAID storage remains relevant and resources
  • Only you can prevent cloud (or other) data loss
  • Data protection is a shared responsibility
  • Time for CDP (Commonsense Data Protection)?
  • Data Infrastructure Server Storage I/O Tradecraft Trends (skills, experiences, knowledge)
  • My copies were corrupted: The [4] 3-2-1 rule and more about 4 3 2 1 as well as 3 2 1 here and here

    • The following are various data protection tips and articles:

  • Via Infostor Cloud Storage Concerns, Considerations and Trends
  • Via Network World What’s a data infrastructure?
  • Via Infostor Data Protection Gaps, Some Good, Some Not So Good
  • Via Infostor Object Storage is in your future
  • Via Iron Mountain Preventing Unexpected Disasters
  • Via InfoStor – The Many Variations of RAID Storage
  • Via InfoStor – RAID Remains Relevant, Really!
  • Via WservNews Cloud Storage Considerations (Microsoft Azure)
  • Via ComputerWeekly Time to restore from backup: Do you know where your data is?
  • Via Network World Ensure your data infrastructure remains available and resilient

    • The following are various data protection related webinars and events:

  • BrightTalk Webinar Data Protection Modernization – Protect, Preserve and Serve you Information
  • BrightTalk Webinar BCDR and Cloud Backup Protect Preserve and Secure Your Data Infrastructure
  • TechAdvisor Webinar (Free with registration) All You Need To Know about ROBO data protection
  • TechAdvisor Webinar (Free with registration) Tips for Moving from Backup to Full Disaster Recovery

    • The following are various data protection tools, technologies, services, vendor and industry resource links:

  • Various Data Infrastructure related news commentary, events, tips and articles
  • Data Center and Data Infrastructure industry links (vendors, services, tools, technologies, hardware, software)
  • Data Infrastructure server storage I/O network Recommended Reading List Book Shelf
  • Software Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials (CRC 2017) Book

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

    What This All Means

    Everything is not the same across environments, data centers, data infrastructures including SDDC, SDX and SDDI as well as applications along with their data.

    Likewise everything is and does not have to be the same when it comes to Data Protection.

    Since everything is not the same, various data protection approaches are needed to address various application performance, availability, capacity economic (PACE) needs, as well as SLO and SLAs.

    Data protection encompasses many different hardware, software, services including cloud technologies, tools, techniques, best practices, policies and tradecraft experience skills (e.g. knowing what to use when, where, why and how).

    Software Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials Book SDDC

    Context is important as different terms have various meanings depending on what they are being discussed with. Likewise different technologies and topics such as object, blob, backup, replication, RAID, erasure code (EC), mirroring, gaps (good, bad, ugly), snapshot, checkpoint, availability, durability among others have various meanings depending on context, as well as implementation approach.

    In most cases there is no bad technology or tool, granted there are some poor or bad (even ugly) implementations, as well as deployment or configuration decisions. What this means is the best technology or approach for your needs may be different from somebody else’s and vice versa.

    Some other points include there is no such thing as an information recession with more data generated every day, granted, how that data is transformed or stored can be in a smaller footprint. Likewise there is an increase in the size of data including unstructured big data, as well as the volume (how much data), as well as velocity (speed at which it is created, moved, processed, stored). This also means there is an increased dependency on data being available, accessible and intact with consistency. Thus the fundamental role of data Infrastructures (e.g. what’s inside the data center or cloud) is to combine resources, technologies, tools, techniques, best practices, policies, people skill set, experiences (e.g. tradecraft) to protect, preserve, secure and serve information (applications and data).

    modernizing data protection including backup, availability and related topics means more than swapping out one hardware, software, service or cloud for whatever is new, and then using it in old ways.

    What this means is to start using new (and old) things in new ways, for example move beyond using SSD or HDDs like tape as targets for backup or other data protection approaches. Instead use SSD, HDDs or cloud as a tier, yet also to enable faster protection and recovery by stepping back and rethinking what to protect, when, where, why, how and apply applicable techniques, tools and technologies. Find a balance between knowing all about the tools and trends while not understanding how to use those toolbox items, as well as knowing all about the techniques of how to use the tools, yet not knowing what the tools are.

    Want to learn more, have questions about specific tools, technologies, trends, vendors, products, services or techniques discussed in this series, send a note (info at storageio dot com) or via our contact page. We can set up a time to discuss your questions or needs pertaining to Data Protection as well as data infrastructures related topics from legacy to software defined virtual, cloud, container among others. For example consulting, advisory services, architecture strategy design, technology selection and acquisition coaching, education knowledge transfer sessions, seminars, webinars, special projects, test drive lab reviews or audits, content generation, videos, podcasts, custom content, chapter excerpts, demand generation among many other things.

    Get your copy of Software Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials here at Amazon.com, at CRC Press among other locations and learn more here.

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

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

    server storage I/O data infrastructure trends

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

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

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

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

    About HPE AMD Powered Gen 10 DL385

    HPE AMD EPYC 7000 Gen 10 DL385 features:

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

    These new HPE servers are positioned for:

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

    Different AMD Powered DL385 ProLiant Gen 10 Packaging Options

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

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

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

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

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

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

    AMD EPYC 7000 Series

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

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

    AMD EPYC 7000 General Features

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

    AMD EPYC 7000 Security Features

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

    Where To Learn More

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

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

    • What This All Means

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

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

    Ok, nuff said, for now.

    Gs

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

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

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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.

    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

    Travel Fun Crossword Puzzle For VMworld 2017 Las Vegas

    Travel Fun Crossword Puzzle For VMworld 2017 Las Vegas

    server storage I/O data infrastructure trends

    Some of you may be traveling to VMworld 2017 in Las Vegas next week to sharpen, expand, refresh or share your VMware and data infrastructure tradecraft (skills, experiences, expertise, knowledge). Here is something fun to sharpen your VMware skills while traveling. Most of these should be pretty easy meaning that you do not have to be a Unicorn, full of vCertifications, vCredentials or a 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2 or 1st time vExpert or top 100 vBlogger. However if you need the answers they are below.

    VMworld 2017 crossword puzzle SDDI, SDDC

    Note that you can also click here to get a PDF version that is larger (or click on the image) that also has the answers.

    Software Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials SDDI SDDC

    For those of you who will be in Las Vegas at VMworld next week, stop by the VMworld Book Store at 1PM on Tuesday (the 29th) where I will be doing a book signing event for my new book Software Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials (CRC Press), stop by and say hello. Note there are also Kindle and other electronic versions of my new SDDI Essentials Book on Amazon.com and other venues if you need something to read during your upcoming travels.

    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

    Have a safe and fun trip on your way to Las Vegas for next weeks VMworld, enjoy the crossword puzzle, and if you need the answers, they are located here (PDF), see you at VMworld 2017 in Last Vegas.

    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.

    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.

    Posted on

    Like Data They Protect For Now Quantum Revenues Continue To Grow

    For Now Quantum Revenues Continue To Grow

    server storage I/O data infrastructure trends

    For Now Quantum Revenues Continue To Grow. The other day following their formal announced, I received an summary update from Quantum pertaining to their recent Q1 Results (show later below).

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

    Quantums Revenues Continue To Grow Like Data

    One of the certainties in life is change and the other is continued growth in data that gets transformed into information via IT and other applications. Data Infrastructures fundamental role is to enable an environment for applications and data to be transformed into information and delivered as services. In other words, Data Infrastructures exist to protect, preserve, secure and serve information along with the applications and data they depend on. Quantums role is to provide solutions and technologies for enabling legacy and cloud or other software defined data infrastructures to protect, preserve, secure and serve data.

    What caught my eye in Quantums announcements was that while not earth shattering growth numbers normally associated with a hot startup, being a legacy data infrasture and storage vendor, Quantum’s numbers are hanging in there.

    At a time when some legacy as well as startups struggle with increased competition from others including cloud, Quantum appears for at least now to be hanging in there with some gains.

    The other thing that caught my eye is that most of the growth not surprisingly is non tape related solutions, particular around their bulk scale out StorNext storage solutions, there is some growth in tape.

    Here is the excerpt of what Quantum sent out:

    
Highlights for the quarter (all comparisons are to the same period a year ago):

•	Grew total revenue and generated profit for 5th consecutive quarter
•	Total revenue was up slightly to $117M, with 3% increase in branded revenue
•	Generated operating profit of $1M with earnings per share of 4 cents, up 2 cents
•	Grew scale-out tiered storage revenue 10% to $34M, with strong growth in video surveillance and technical workflows
o	Key surveillance wins included deals with an Asian government for surveillance at a presidential palace and other government facilities, with a major U.S. port and with four new police department customers
o	Established several new surveillance partnerships – one of top three resellers/integrators in China (Uniview) and two major U.S. integrators (Protection 1 and Kratos)
o	Won two surveillance awards for StorNext – Security Industry Association’s New Product Showcase award and Security Today magazine’s Platinum Govies Government Security award
o	Key technical workflow wins included deals at an international defense and aerospace company to expand StorNext archive environment, a leading biotechnology firm for 1 PB genomic sequencing archive, a top automaker involving autonomous driving research data and a U.S. technology institute involving high performance computing  
o	Announced StorNext 6, which adds new advanced data management features to StorNext’s industry-leading performance and is now shipping
o	Announced scale-out partnerships with Veritone on artificial intelligence and DataFrameworks on data visualization and management  
•	Tape automation, devices and media revenue increased 6% overall while branded revenue for this product category was up 14%
o	Strong sales of newest generation Scalar i3 and i6 tape libraries
•	Established new/enhanced data protection partnerships
o	Enhanced partnership with Veeam, making it easier for their customers to deploy 3-2-1 data protection best practices
o	Became Pure Storage alliance partner, providing our data protection and archive solutions for their customers through mutual channel partners

    Where To Learn More

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

    What This All Means

    Keep in mind that Data Infrastructures fundamental role is to enable an environment for applications and data to be transformed into information and delivered as services. Data Infrastructures exist to protect, preserve, secure and serve information along with the applications and data they depend on. Quantum continues to evolve their business as they have for several years from one focused on tape and related technologies to one that includes tape as well as many other solutions for legacy as well as software defined, cloud and virtual environments. For now, quantum revenues continue to grow and diversify.

    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.

    Posted on

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

    Intel Xeon Scalable Processors SDDI and SDDC

    server storage I/O data infrastructure trends

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

    Intel Scalable Xeon Processors
    Image via Intel.com

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

    Data Infrastructures and workloads

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

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

    Features of the new Intel Xeon Scalable Processors include:

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

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

    Software Defined Data Infrastructures, SDDC, SDX and SDDI

    What About Speeds and Feeds

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

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

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

    Various nvme options

    What about NVMe

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

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

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

    server storage data infrastructure sddi

    What About Intel and Storage

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

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

    Image Via Intel.com

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

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

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

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

    Where To Learn More

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

    What This All Means

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

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

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

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

    Ok, nuff said (for now…).

    Cheers
    Gs

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

    Courteous comments are welcome for consideration. First published on https://storageioblog.com any reproduction in whole, in part, with changes to content, without source attribution under title or without permission is forbidden.

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

    Posted on

    Broadcom aka Avago aka LSI announces SAS SATA NVMe Adapters with RAID

    server storage I/O trends

    Broadcom aka Avago aka LSI announces SAS SATA NVMe Adapters with RAID

    In case you missed it, Broadcom formerly known as Avago who bought the LSI adapter and RAID card business announced shipping new SAS, SATA and NVMe devices.

    While SAS and SATA are well established continuing to be deployed for both HDD as well as flash SSD, NVMe continues to evolve with a bright future. Likewise, while there is a focus on software-defined storage (SDS), software defined data centers (SDDC) and software defined data infrastructures (SDDI) along with advanced parity RAID including erasure codes, object storage among other technologies, there is still a need for adapter cards including traditional RAID.

    Keep in mind that while probably not meeting the definition of some software-defined aficionados, the many different variations, permutations along with derivatives of RAID from mirror and replication to basic parity to advanced erasure codes (some based on Reed Solomon aka RAID 2) rely on software. Granted, some of that software is run on regular primary server processors, some on packaged in silicon via ASICs or FPGAs, or System on Chips (SOC), RAID on Chip (RoC) as well as BIOS, firmware, drivers as well as management tools.

    SAS, SATA and NVMe adapters

    For some environments cards such as those announced by Broadcom are used in passthru mode effectively as adapters for attaching SAS, SATA and NVMe storage devices to servers. Those servers may be deployed as converged infrastructures (CI), hyper-converged infrastructures (HCI), Cluster or Cloud in Box (CiB) among other variations. To name names you might find the above (or in the not so distant future) in VMware vSAN or regular vSphere based environments, Microsoft Windows Server, Storage Spaces Direct (S2D) or Azure Stack, OpenStack among other deployments (check your vendors Hardware Compatibility Lists aka HCLs). In some cases these cards may be adapters in passthru mode, or using their RAID (support various by different software stacks). Meanwhile in other environments, the more traditional RAID features are still used spanning Windows to Linux among others.

    Who Is Broadcom?

    Some of you may know of Broadcom having been around for many years with a focus on networking related technologies. However some may not realize that Avago bought Broadcom and changed their name to Broadcom. Here is a history that includes more recent acquisitions such as Brocade, PLX, Emulex as well as LSI. Some of you may recall Avago buying LSI (the SAS, SATA, PCIe HBA, RAID and components) business not sold to NetApp as part of Engenio. Also recall that Avago sold the LSI flash SSD business unit to Seagate a couple of years ago as part of its streamlining. That’s how we get to where we are at today with Broadcom aka formerly known as Avago who bought the LSI adapter and RAID business announcing new SAS, SATA, NVMe cards.

    What Was Announced?

    Broadcom has announced cards that are multi-protocol supporting Serial Attached SCSI (SAS), SATA/AHCI as well as NVM Express (NVMe) as basic adapters for attaching storage (HDD, SSD, storage systems) along with optional RAID as well as cache support. These cards can be used in application servers for traditional, as well as virtualized SDDC environments, as well as storage systems or appliances for software-defined storage among other uses. The basic functionality of these cards is to provide high performance (IOPs and other activity, as well as bandwidth) along with low latency combined with data protection as well as dense connectivity.

    Specific features include:

    • Broadcom’s Tri-Mode SerDes Technology enables the operation of NVMe, SAS or SATA devices in a single drive bay, allowing for endless design flexibility.
    • Management software including LSI Storage Authority (LSA), StorCLI, HII (UEFI)
    • Optional CacheVault(R) flash cache protection
    • Physical dimension Low Profile 6.127” x 2.712”
    • Host bus type x8 lane PCIe Express 3.1
    • Data transfer rates SAS-3 12Gbs; NVMe up to 8 GT/s PCIe Gen 3
    • Various OS and hypervisors host platform support
    • Warranty 3 yrs, free 5×8 phone support, advanced replacement option
    • RAID levels 0, 1, 5, 6, 10, 50, and 60

    Note that some of the specific feature functionality may be available at a later date, check with your preferred vendors HCL

    Specification

    9480 8i8e

    9440 8i

    9460 8i

    9460 16i

    Image

    Internal Ports

    8

     

    8

    16

    Internal Connectors

    2 x Mini-SAS HD x4 SFF-8643

    2 x Mini-SAS HD x4 SFF-8643

    2 x Mini-SAS HD x4 SFF-8643

    4 Mini-SAS HD x4
    SFF-8643

    External Ports

    8

     

     

     

    External Connectors

    2 x Mini-SAS HD SFF8644

     

     

     

    Cache Protection

    CacheVault CVPM05

     

    CacheVault CVPM05

    CacheVault CVPM05

    Cache Memory

    2GB 2133 MHz DDR4 SDRAM

     

    2GB 2133 MHz DDR4 SDRAM

    4GB 2133 MHz DDR4 SDRAM

    Devices Supported

    SAS/SATA: 255, NVMe: 4 x4, up to 24 x2 or x4*

    SAS/SATA: 63, NVMe: 4 x4, up to 24 x2 or x4*

    SAS/SATA: 255, NVMe: 4 x4, up to 24 x2 or x4*

    SAS/SATA: 255, NVMe: 4 x4, up to 24 x2 or x4*

    I/O Processors (SAS Controller)

    SAS3516 dual-core RAID-on-Chip (ROC)

    SAS3408 I/O controller (IOC)

    SAS3508 dual-core RAID-on-Chip (ROC)

    SAS3516 dual-core RAID-on-Chip (ROC)

    In case you need a refresher on SFF cable types, click on the following two images which take you to Amazon.com where you can learn more, as well as order various cable options. PC Pit Stop has a good selection of cables (See other SFF types), connectors and other accessories that I have used, along with those from Amazon.com and others.

    Available via Amazon.com sff 8644 8643 sas mini hd cable
    Left: SFF 8644 Mini SAS HD (External), Right SFF-8643 Mini SAS HD (internal) Image via Amazon.com

    Available via Amazon.com sff 8644 8642 sas mini hd cable
    Left: SFF 8643 Mini SAS HD (Internal), Right SFF-8642 SATA with power (internal) Image via Amazon.com

    Wait, Doesnt NVMe use PCIe

    For those who are not familiar with NVMe and in particular U.2 aka SFF 8639 based devices, physically they look the same (almost) as a SAS device connector. The slight variation is if you look at a SAS drive, there is a small tab to prevent plugging into a SATA port (recall you can plug SATA into SAS. For SAS drives that tab is blank, however on the NVMe 8639 aka U.2 drives (below left) that tab has several connectors which are PCIe x4 (single or dual path).

    What this means is that the PCIe x4 bus electrical signals are transferred via a connector, to backplane chassis to 8639 drive slot to the drive. Those same 8639 drive slots can also have a SAS SATA connection using their traditional connectors enabling a converged or hybrid drive slot so to speak. Learn more about NVMe here (If the Answer is NVMe, then what were and are the questions?) as well as at www.thenvmeplace.com.

    NVMe U.2 8639 driveNVMe U.2 8639 sas sata nvme drive
    Left NVMe U.2 drive showing PCIe x4 connectors, right, NVMe U.2 8639 connector

    Who Is This For?

    These cards are applicable for general purpose IT and other data infrastructure environments in traditional servers among others uses. They are also applicable for systems builders, integrators and OEMs whom you may be buying your current systems from, or future ones.

    Where to Learn More

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

    What this all means

    Even as the industry continues to talk and move towards more software-defined focus, even for environments that are serverless, there is still need for hardware somewhere. These adapters are a good sign of the continued maturing cycle of NVMe to be well positioned into the next decade and beyond, while also being relevant today. Likewise, even though the future involves NVMe, there is a still a place for SAS along with SATA to coexist in many environments. For some environment there is a need for traditional RAID while for others simply the need for attachment of SAS, SATA and NVMe devices. Overall, a good set of updates, enhancements and new technology for today and tomorrow, now, when do I get some to play with? ;).

    Ok, nuff said (for now…).

    Cheers
    Gs

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

    Courteous comments are welcome for consideration. First published on https://storageioblog.com any reproduction in whole, in part, with changes to content, without source attribution under title or without permission is forbidden.

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

    Posted on

    VMware vSAN 6.6 hyper-converged (HCI) software defined data infrastructure

    server storage I/O trends

    VMware vSAN 6.6 hyper-converged (HCI) software defined data infrastructure

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

    VMware vSAN 6.6
    Image via VMware

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

    Software-defined data infrastructure

    Excuse Me, What is vSAN and who is if for

    Some might find it odd having to explain what vSAN is, on the other hand, not everybody is dialed into the VMware world ecosystem, so let’s give them some help, for everybody else, and feel free to jump ahead.

    For those not familiar, VMware vSAN is an HCI software-defined storage solution that converges compute (hypervisors and server) with storage space capacity and I/O performance along with networking. Being HCI means that with vSAN as you scale compute, storage space capacity and I/O performance also increases in an aggregated fashion. Likewise, increase storage space capacity and server I/O performance you also get more compute capabilities (along with memory).

    For VMware-centric environments looking to go CI or HCI, vSAN offers compelling value proposition leveraging known VMware tools and staff skills (knowledge, experience, tradecraft). Another benefit of vSAN is the ability to select your hardware platform from different vendors, a trend that other CI/HCI vendors have started to offer as well.

    CI and HCI data infrastructure

    Keep in mind that fast applications need a fast server, I/O and storage, as well as server storage I/O needs CPU along with memory to generate I/O operations (IOPs) or move data. What this all means is that HCI solutions such as VMware vSAN combine or converge the server compute, hypervisors, storage file system, storage devices, I/O and networking along with other functionality into an easy to deploy (and management) turnkey solution.

    Learn more about CI and HCI along with who some other vendors are as well as considerations at www.storageio.com/converge. Also, visit VMware sites to find out more about vSphere ESXi hypervisors, vSAN, NSX (Software Defined Networking), vCenter, vRealize along with other tools for enabling SDDC and SDDI.

    Give Me the Quick Elevator Pitch Summary

    VMware has enhanced vSAN with version 6.6 (V6.6) enabling new functionality, supporting new hardware platforms along with partners, while reducing costs, improving scalability and resiliency for SDDC and SDDI environments. This includes from small medium business (SMB) to mid-market to small medium enterprise (SME) as well as workgroup, departmental along with Remote Office Branch Office (ROBO).

    Being a HCI solution, management functions of the server, storage, I/O, networking, hypervisor, hardware, and software are converged to improve management productivity. Also, vSAN integrated with VMware vSphere among other tools enable modern, robust data infrastructure that serves, protect, preserve, secure and stores data along with their associated applications.

    Where to Learn More

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

    What this all means

    Overall a good set of enhancements as vSAN continues its evolution looking back just a few years ago, to where it is today and will be in the future. If you have not looked at vSAN recently, take some time beyond reading this piece to learn some more.

    Continue reading more about VMware vSAN 6.6 in part II (just the speeds feeds please) is located here, part III (reducing cost and complexity) located here, part IV (scaling ROBO and data centers today) located here, as well as part V here (VMware vSAN evolution, where to learn more and summary).

    Ok, nuff said (for now…).

    Cheers
    Gs

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

    Courteous comments are welcome for consideration. First published on https://storageioblog.com any reproduction in whole, in part, with changes to content, without source attribution under title or without permission is forbidden.

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

    Posted on

    February 2017 Server StorageIO Update Newsletter

    Server and StorageIO Update Newsletter

    Volume 17, Issue II

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

    With world backup (and recovery) day coming up on March 31, it makes sense to plan, review, assess, remediate, test and prepare in advance, to avoid or prevent a disaster later. Some of the themes in this months newsletter thus have a data protection angle which includes availability, resiliency, security, and backup/restore along with associated topics. Keep in mind that there are many aspects to data protection, along with various tools, technologies, techniques along with tradecraft skills (experience).

    Speaking of tradecraft, the tips section has been expanded with more content to help refresh, or expand your fundamental data infrastructure skills and experiences. Watch for more about trade craft in future newsletters as well as elsewhere.

    Speaking of data protection, if you had not heard or forgot, some recent events included the Australian Tax Office (ATO) whose resiliency solution appears to not have been configured for, well, availability, resiliency along with durability. You can read more about the ATO, lessons learned as well as fall out doing a Google search such as "australian tax office disaster". Another recent disaster or disruption was Gitlab (not to be confused with Github) that lost around 300GB of data. Google something like "gitlab disaster" to see more.
    In the case of Gitlab, it seems that a DevOp admin accidentally did something like a rm -rf (e.g. recursive and force) that if you know what that means, you know it might not be good.

    As is the case with many disasters or near disasters and disruptions, they are usually the result of a chain of events, thus the mantra or isolate, contain faults to prevent snowballing into something worse. What’s concerning about Gitlab is that there are decades of lessons to be learned, known and preventable.

    Hopefully Gitlabs experiences will prompt others in or moving to so-called platform 3 or new DevOps environment to use things in new ways, as well as prevent old problems using known tradecraft skills, lessons, experiences.
    Also keep in mind that while technology can and will fail, hardware and software including clouds are defined by people, and when people are involved, human error is also present.

    In This Issue

  • Server StorageIO News Commentary
  • Trade craft Articles, Tips & Tricks Topics
  • Server StorageIOblog posts
  • Various Events and Webinars
  • IT Industry Activity Trends
  • Industry Resources and Links
  • Connect and Converse With Us
  • About Us

    • Enjoy this edition of the Server StorageIO update newsletter.

    Cheers GS

    Data Infrastructure and IT Industry Activity Trends

    Some recent Industry Activities, Trends Announcements

    Cloud and object storage vendor Cloudian announced a new appliance (e.g. tin-wrapped software) that they claim give high density low (cloud service like) pricing.

    Check out iosafe who has a line of fire (and water) proof NAS and Windows Servers as part of availability data protection that can compliment clouds. For those of you who are also Synology fans (or users) take a look at what iosafe is doing for consumer, SOHO, ROBO, workgroup, SMB among other environments.

    Speaking of data protection, how are you going about wiping or digital bleaching your storage including nand flash SSDs? Particularly are you doing deep cleaning including those hard to reach persistent non-volatile memory (NVM) cell locations in SSDs? Check out what Blancco is doing for deep cleaning to wipe or digital bleach your storage including SSDs. Another aspect of data protection includes after your physical assets have been wiped clean (e.g. digital bleach), how will you safely dispose of the items? That’s where various vendors such as OceanTech among others come into play.

    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 SearchDataCenter: New options to evolve your data backup and recovery plan
    Via SmallBusinessComputing: Easy Storage for the Little Guy: Has the Time Come?
    Via InfoStor: 10 More Top Data Storage Applications
    Via Infostor: 10 Top Data Storage Applications

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

    Various Tips, Tools, Technology and Tradecraft Topics

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

    Via IDG/NetworkWorld:  Whats a data infrastructure?
    Via Computerweekly:  NVMe: What to use, PCIe card vs U.2 and M.2
    Via InfoStor:  Cloud Storage Concerns, Considerations and Trends
    Via InfoStor:  SSD Trends, Tips and Topics

    Check out Neil Anderson(@flackboxtv) flackbox.com site to view various video and tutorials about NetApp, Cisco along with VMware among others. Sharpen your data infrastructure server storage I/O tradecraft skills with the various labs and simulators that Neil has covered.

    Speaking of tradecraft skills and experience development, check out VMware Staff Architect William Lam (@lamw) virtuallyghetto.com site for a news software defined data center (SDDC) lab. This new lab focuses on automated deployment for vSphere 6.0u2 along with vSphere 6.5. In other related news, VMware has made generally available (GA) vSphere 6.0 Update 3 including enhancements to vSAN and vCenter. View more details here at Duncan Epping (@DuncanYB) of VMware Yellow Bricks site.

    If you are interested in Microsoft Azure, check out this piece on SQL Server failover clustering, along with other Windows Server, Hyper-V, Nano, Powershell and related topics here. Want to build a software defined data center (SDDC) or software-defined data infrastructure (SDDI) based on Microsoft Windows Server, Hyper-V and related technologies, check out this Github lab as well as this one for S2D among others.

    View more tips and articles here

    Events and Activities

    Recent and upcoming event activities.

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

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

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

    January 11, 2017 Webinar – Redmond Magazine
    Dell Software – Presenting – Tailor Your Backup Data Repositories to Fit Your Needs

    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/performance – Various server, storage and I/O benchmark and tools
    VMware Technical Network – Various VMware related items

    Ok, nuff said

    Cheers
    Gs

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

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

    Posted on

    Top vblog voting V2.015 (Its IT award season, cast your votes)

    Top vblog voting V2.015 (Its IT award season, cast your votes)

    Storage I/O trends

    It’s that time of the year again for award season:

    • The motion picture association Academy awards (e.g. the Oscars)
    • The Grammys and other entertainment awards
    • As well as Eric Siebert (aka @ericsiebert) vsphere-land.com top vblog

    Vsphere-land.com top vblog

    Eric has run for several years now an annual top VMware, Virtualization, Storage and related blogs voting now taking place until March 16th 2015 (click on the image below). You will find a nice mix of new school, old school and a few current or future school theme blogs represented with some being more VMware specific. However there are also many blogs at the vpad site that have a cloud, virtual, server, storage, networking, software defined, development and other related themes.

    top vblog voting
    Click on the above image to cast your vote for favorite:

    • Ten blogs (e.g. select up to ten and then rank 1 through 10)
    • Storage blog
    • Scripting blog
    • VDI blog
    • New Blogger
    • Independent Blogger (e.g. non-vendor)
    • News/Information Web site
    • Podcast

    Call to action, take a moment to cast your vote

    My StorageIOblog.com has been on the vLaunchPad site for several years now as well as having syndicated content that also appears via some of the other venues listed there.

    Six time VMware vExpert

    In addition to my StorageIOblog and podcast, you will also find many of my fellow VMware vExperts among others at the vLaunchpad site so check them out as well.

    What this means

    This is a people’s choice process (yes it is a popularity process of sorts as well) however also a way of rewarding or thanking those who take time to create and share content with you and others. If you take time to read various blogs, listen to podcasts as well as consume other content, please take a few moments and cast your vote here (thank you in advance) which I hope includes StorageIOblog.com as part of the top ten, as well as being nominated in the Storage, Podcast and Independent blogger categories.

    Ok, nuff said, for now…

    Cheers gs

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

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

    Posted on

    VMware announces vSphere V6 and associated virtualization technologies

    VMware announces vSphere V6 and associated virtualization technologies

    server storage I/O trends

    VMware has announced version 6 (V6) of its software defined data center (SDDC) server virtualization hypervisor called vSphere aka ESXi. In addition to a new version of its software defined server hypervisor along with companion software defined management and convergence tools.

    VMware

    VMware vSphere Refresh

    As a refresh for those whose world does not revolve around VMware, vSphere and software defined data centers (believe it or not there are some who exist ;), ESXi is the hypervisor that virtualizes underlying physical machines (PM’s) known as hosts.

    software defined data center convergence
    The path to software defined data center convergence

    Guest operating systems (or other hypervisors using nesting) run as virtual machines (VM’s) on top of the vSphere hypervisor host (e.g. ESXi software). Various VMware management tools (or third-party) are used for managing the virtualized data center from initial configuration, configuration, conversion from physical to virtual (P2V) or virtual to virtual (V2V) along with data protection, performance, capacity planning across servers, storage and networks.

    virtual machines

    VMware vSphere is flexible and can adapt to different sized environments from small office home office (SOHO) or small SMB, to large SMB, SME, enterprise or cloud service provider. There are a free version of ESXi along with paid versions that include support and added management tool features. Besides the ESXi vSphere hypervisor, other commonly deployed modules include the vCenter administration along with Infrastructure Controller services platform among others. In addition, there are optional solution bundles to add support for virtual networking, cloud (public and private), data protection (backup/restore, replication, HA, BC, DR), big data among other capabilities.

    What is new with vSphere V6

    VMware has streamlined the installation, configuration and deployment of vSphere along with associated tools which for smaller environments makes things simply easier. For the larger environments, having to do less means being able to do more in the same amount of time which results in cost savings. In addition to easier to use, deploy and configure, VMware has extended the scaling capabilities of vSphere in terms of scaling-out (larger clusters), scaling-up (more and larger servers), as well as scaling-down (smaller environments and ease of use).

    cloud virtual software defined servers

    • Compute: Expanded support for new hardware, guest operating systems and general scalability in terms of physical, and virtual resources. For example increasing the number of virtual CPU (vCPUs), number of cluster nodes among other speeds and feeds enhancements.

    server storage I/O vsan

    • Storage: This is an area where several enhancements were made including updates for Storage I/O controls (Storage QoS and performance optimizations) with per VM reservations, NFS v4.1 with Kerberos client, Virtual SAN (VSAN) improvements (new back-end underlying file system) as well as new Virtual Volumes (vVOLs) for Storage Policy Based Management.
    • Availability: Improvements for vMotion (ability to live move virtual machines between physical servers (vmware hosts) including long distance fault-tolerance. Other improvements include faster replication, vMotion across vCenter servers, and long distance vMotion (up to 100ms round trip time latency).
    • Network: Network I/O Control (NIOC) provides per VM and dat (VM and data repository) bandwidth reservations for quality of service (QoS) performance optimization.
    • Management: Improvements for multi-site, virtual data centers, content-library (storage and versioning of files and objects including ISOs and OVFs (Open Virtualization Format files) that can be on a VMFS (VMware File System) dat or NFS volume, policy-based management and web-client performance enhancements.

    What is vVOL?

    The quick synopsis of VMware vVOL’s overview:

    • Higher level of abstraction of storage vs. traditional SCSI LUN’s or NAS NFS mount points
    • Tighter level of integration and awareness between VMware hypervisors and storage systems
    • Simplified management for storage and virtualization administrators
    • Removing complexity to support increased scaling
    • Enable automation and service managed storage aka software defined storage management

    server storage I/O volumes
    How data storage access and managed via VMware today (read more here)

    vVOL’s are not LUN’s like regular block (e.g. DAS or SAN) storage that use SAS, iSCSI, FC, FCoE, IBA/SRP, nor are they NAS volumes like NFS mount points. Likewise vVOL’s are not accessed using any of the various object storage access methods mentioned above (e.g. AWS S3, Rest, CDMI, etc) instead they are an application specific implementation. For some of you this approach of an applications specific or unique storage access method may be new, perhaps revolutionary, otoh, some of you might be having a DejaVu moment right about now.

    vVOL is not a LUN in the context of what you may know and like (or hate, even if you have never worked with them), likewise it is not a NAS volume like you know (or have heard of), neither are they objects in the context of what you might have seen or heard such as S3 among others.

    Keep in mind that what makes up a VMware virtual machine are the VMK, VMDK and some other files (shown in the figure below), and if enough information is known about where those blocks of data are or can be found, they can be worked upon. Also keep in mind that at least near-term, block is the lowest common denominator that all file systems and object repositories get built-up.

    server storage I/O vVOL basics
    How VMware data storage accessed and managed with vVOLs (read more here)

    Here is the thing, while vVOL’s will be accessible via a block interface such as iSCSI, FC or FCoE or for that matter, over Ethernet based IP using NFS. Think of these storage interfaces and access mechanisms as the general transport for how vSphere ESXi will communicate with the storage system (e.g. their data path) under vCenter management.

    What is happening inside the storage system that will be presented back to ESXi will be different than a normal SCSI LUN contents and only understood by VMware hypervisor. ESXi will still tell the storage system what it wants to do including moving blocks of data. The storage system however will have more insight and awareness into the context of what those blocks of data mean. This is how the storage systems will be able to more closely integrate snapshots, replication, cloning and other functions by having awareness into which data to move, as opposed to moving or working with an entire LUN where a VMDK may live.

    Keep in mind that the storage system will still function as it normally would, just think of vVOL as another or new personality and access mechanism used for VMware to communicate and manage storage. Watch for vVOL storage provider support from the who’s who of existing and startup storage system providers including Cisco, Dell, EMC, Fujitsu, HDS, HP, IBM, NetApp, Nimble and many others. Read more about Storage I/O fundamentals here and vVOLs here and here.

    What this announcement means

    Depending on your experiences, you might use revolutionary to describe some of the VMware vSphere V6 features and functionalities. Otoh, if you have some Dejavu moments looking pragmatically at what VMware is delivering with V6 of vSphere executing on their vision, evolutionary might be more applicable. I will leave it up to you do decide if you are having a Dejavu moment and what that might pertain to, or if this is all new and revolutionary, or something more along the lines of technolutionary.

    VMware continues to execute delivering on the Virtual Data Center aka Software Defined Data Center paradigm by increasing functionality, as well as enhancing existing capabilities with performance along with resiliency improvements. These abilities enable the aggregation of compute, storage, networking, management and policies for enabling a global virtual data center while supporting existing along with new emerging applications.

    Where to learn more

    If you were not part of the beta to gain early hands-on experience with VMware vSphere V6 and associated technologies, download a copy to check it out as part of making your upgrade or migration plans.

    Check out the various VMware resources including communities links here
    VMware vSphere Hypervisor getting started and general vSphere information (including download)
    VMware vSphere data sheet, compatibility guide along with speeds and feeds (size and other limits)
    VMware vExpert
    VMware Blogs and VMware vExpert page

    Various fellow VMware vExpert blogs including among many others vsphere-land, scott lowe, virtuallyghetto and yellow-bricks among many others found at the vpad here.

    StorageIO Out and About Update – VMworld 2014 (with Video)
    VMware vVOL’s and storage I/O fundamentals (Storage I/O overview and vVOL, details Part I and Part II)
    How many IOPs can a HDD or SSD do in a VMware environment (Part I and Part II)
    VMware VSAN overview and primer, DIY converged software defined storage on a budget

    Wrap up and summary

    Overall VMware vSphere V6 has a great set of features that support both ease of management for small environments as well as the scaling needs of larger organizations.

    Ok, nuff said, for now…

    Cheers gs

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

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