Tag Archives: Software-Defined

Cisco Announces Intention to Acquire Springpath

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SpringPathOn Monday, Cisco ended over a year of hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) speculation and announced their intent to acquire Springpath.

In this case, instead of Cisco the networking company, we’re looking at Cisco the manufacturer of the Unified Computing System (UCS) compute platform. Springpath makes hyperconvergence software. Cisco has been running that software — rebranded as the Cisco HX Data Platform — on their UCS servers and offering that bundle as their HyperFlex HCI solution. You may remember that I wrote about HyperFlex when it first launched back in March of 2016.

I’ve been a fan of the UCS platform since its launch, and I’ve been a fan of Springpath since they came out of stealth.  HyperFlex has always looked like a great HCI solution to me, and I’ve been surprised it hasn’t taken off more than it has.

Cisco’s been making an overall change to put more emphasis on software and its value-add, and the Springpath acquisition obviously fits well with that shift. The Springpath team will be joining Cisco’s Computing Systems Product Group.

At the price — $320Million in cash — it’s a bargain for Cisco even if they’re only acquiring Springpath to ensure exclusive access to the intellectual property, or ongoing support for HyperFlex. The acquisition is expected to close in Q1 of 2018, pending regulatory review.

Cisco Press Release

Pure Storage Announces NVMe DirectFlash and New FlashArray Model

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Pure Storage logoToday Pure Storage, known for their All-Flash Storage arrays, announced their next Big ThingTM, DirectFlash, as well as a new FlashArray model. DirectFlash is a combination of NVMe hardware and the software to manage it (more details on that below). The new array model, the FlashArray//X, uses exclusively DirectFlash as the storage medium.

A Brief Flash Primer

“Flash” refers to silicon-based memory chips used for storage. It tends to come in one of two form factors.

The first is Solid State Drives (SSD). These typically have the same dimensions as hard-disk drives (HDD) and connect via either SATA or (more typically) SAS interfaces.

The second is Non-Volatile Memory Express (NVMe). These use (not surprisingly) non-volatile memory chips to store data. The “Express” in the name indicates that it connects via PCIe which is not only higher bandwidth than SATA or SAS, but is both physically and logically closer to the storage controllers, making NVMe faster and higher bandwidth than SSD. NVMe is often 5X faster than SSD.

I’ll describe the new offerings from Pure below.

Continue reading →

Cisco Announces New Storage Building Blocks — UCS S3260

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Today, Cisco made some storage-related announcements that may have sounded confusing. On a first read, you might think that Cisco is attempting to re-enter the storage market. Personally, I view their announcement as wanting to ensure that they become — and remain — “storage adjacent”…

I’ll walk through things and hopefully clear up any confusion below. Continue reading →

EMC Announces Plans to Make Isilon Announcements in 2016

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[NOTE: This post has been updated with answers to some of the questions I had at the time of the announcement. The updates are inline, below.]

Today, EMC made some announcements about some new Isilon products that they hope to make Generally Available (GA) in “early 2016”. If you’ve been following Isilon closely like I do, nothing in the announcements will be a big surprise as everything talked about is something the Isilon folks have been talking about in roadmap presentations for a while now.

After presenting more marketing about the Data Lake message (I’ll summarize: Put all your data in one big place. That place is Isilon. That Isilon Data Lake can now (OK, in “early 2016”) be expanded from the Core to the Edge and even to the Cloud”), the announcement covers plans to announce:

  • A software-only version of Isilon called “IsilonSD Edge”
  • An extension to SmartPools allowing tiering to public or private cloud called “CloudPools”
  • An upcoming new version of OneFS

I’ll go through each of these, plus more, in some detail below. Continue reading →

VMTurbo Releases Operations Manager version 5.3

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VMTurbo logoThis week, VMTurbo released version 5.3 of their Operations Manager monitoring / management / automation / Quality of Service (QoS) tool.

Yes, I’ll admit that previous sentence is a little confusing, but Operations Manager has so many features and capabilities packed into it that it defies easy classification.

For those who aren’t familiar with VMTurbo or their Operations Manager, I’ll do an overview of it, then I’ll walk through what’s new in version 5.3. If you’re already familiar with VMTurbo and just want to leap right in, you can download a free trial here. Continue reading →

Avere Announces Software Updates, Adds Virtual FXT Filer

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Today Avere Systems announced an update to the AOS software (version 4.5) that runs on their FXT Edge Filers. The big news in this version is the addition of a Virtual Edge Filer, the vFXT.

Avere’s FXT works by placing an Edge Filer close to the end-user clients. The Edge Filer uses a global name space to virtualize file storage for the Core Filers positioned behind it. AOS 4.0 included support for using public cloud storage as a Core Filer, or Cloud NAS. AOS 4.5 adds support for installing an Edge Filer in the cloud, further extending the functionality. Continue reading →

EMC’s Nile Makes the Leap from Project to Product

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EMC Nile logoEMC’s “Project Nile” was first revealed at EMC’s MegaLaunch event in 2013. The idea was hyper-scale private cloud storage at a cost-per-gigabyte similar to (or lower than) public cloud storage.

The idea was to provide this storage via software running on commodity storage hardware.

It was clear from the beginning that EMC intended Nile to be disruptive and a game-changer. Continue reading →

EMC Announces Major Updates to Their SDS Platform – ViPR 2.0

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EMC ViPR logoIn another of their announcements on the first day of EMC World, EMC announced a series of major updates and new features for their software-defined storage (SDS) platform, ViPR. The new updates will be in ViPR 2.0

While storage solutions will always require that hardware be involved, software-defined storage allows the ability to provide storage services without being tied to any specific hardware.

ViPR works by separating the control plane from the data plane. This means ViPR come in two parts, ViPR Controller, and ViPR Services. ViPR 2.0 makes additions on both sides. Continue reading →

EMC Announces Version 1.30 of ScaleIO

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EMC ScaleIOToday, in one of the many announcements that kicked off EMC World, EMC announced the new version of their ScaleIO product.

If you’re not familiar with ScaleIO, EMC defines it as a “software-only server-based SAN that converges storage and compute resources to form a single-layer, enterprise-grade storage product. You can also think of it as similar to VMware VSAN, but usable for things other than VMware.

What That Means Continue reading →

EMC’s Project Liberty – Hints of Things to Come?

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EMC Project LibertyToday, in addition to announcing a new model VNXe, EMC announced their Project Liberty as part of the pre-EMC World build-up.

What’s Project Liberty? EMC is calling it a “virtualized storage software technology based on VNX”.

What does that mean? Project Liberty is essentially a virtual appliance version of EMC’s VNX.

But, wait, I can hear you thinking this one:

Doesn’t EMC already make a VNX virtual appliance available? Continue reading →