On 19 October, Dell EMC made an announcement about the All-Flash Isilon nodes. This product line has been code-named “Project Nitro”. The announcement was timed to occur during the first-ever Dell EMC World event.
I’ll walk through what was announced, and then provide additional details.
On 15 November, Qumulo announced the availability of version 2.5 of their Qumulo Core software layer for their scale-out NAS platform.
I’ve been involved with Qumulo since they came out of stealth approximately 18 months ago — I actually helped sell a Qumulo cluster to one of our customers while Qumulo was still operating in stealth mode — so it will come as no surprise that I’m a fan.
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
Guess who’s heading to Storage Field Day 11?
OK, you’ve already read the title, so you know it’s me, but that doesn’t make me any less excited about it.
It’s an honor to be chosen as a delegate for an event like this. This will be my third time as a Storage Field Day delegate, so this time I at least have some idea of what I’m getting myself into. Continue reading
Today, Avere Systems announced its first complete storage solution. Avere is known for their Edge Filers that virtualize NAS systems and/or act as a file-access gateway to object storage.
The just-announced C2N solution combines Avere FXT Edge Filers with Avere’s own new scale-out object storage platform. This combination allows the C2N to be used as a standalone storage solution, while still using the FXT as to virtualize other NAS devices and as a gateway to other object storage platforms — either on- or off-premises. I’ll walk through the solution below. Continue reading
On Monday at EMC World, I had the opportunity to sit down with Ed Beauvais, EMC’s Director of Isilon Product Marketing. Ed was gracious enough to agree to be interviews for the MiniCast. We talked about new features in Isilon OneFS 8.0 and how they fit into EMC’s “Edge to Core to Cloud” message.
At one point in the interview, it appears that Ed and I confused each other about CloudPools functionality. Ed and I chatted about that after the 15-minute time limit and cleared it up pretty quickly. Turns out we were talking about two similar but different things.
Ed was saying that CloudPools does not, at this time, allow you to use an IsilonSD Edge virtual instance running in the Cloud as your remote tier. I neither confirm or deny whether or not that functionality is on the Isilon roadmap. (No, seriously, I can’t. Sometimes I use that phrase to be cute and let folks know that I know something I’m not allowed to talk about yet, but in this case I can’t tell you anything because I really don’t know. Ed gave me nothing on this one at all…)
What I was talking about was using a physical Isilon cluster at another site as your remote CloudPools tier. That is supported, and can be done today.
With that clarification in mind, take a listen to Ed and I talking Isilon.
Being part of the Media program at EMC World gave me the opportunity to sit down and talk with Mark Geel on the same day EMC announced their Unity unified storage platform.
Take a listen to what mark and I had to say about Unity below.
Today, at EMC World, EMC announced their new mid-range unified storage platform, called Unity.
Some time last summer, I remember thinking that it was weird that we hadn’t seen a “Mega-Launch” event announcement from EMC. VNX2 seemed due for a refresh, but nothing happened. Now I know why — the EMC team was working on Unity instead.
I’ll be clear up-front: Unity is NOT “VNX3”. This is a completely-new architecture, and one that finally actually delivers on the “Unified” promise that VNX never quite achieved. Continue reading
[DISCLOSURE: Cohesity was one of the sponsors of the Storage Field Day 9 event (SFD9) that I was a delegate for. As such, they helped to pay for my travel, accommodations, and meals for that event. There was no requirement or even expectation that I write anything about them. No one from Cohesity (or anywhere else for that matter) has reviewed the content of this post.]
Today, Cohesity announced the addition of Cloud integration with their storage platform.
Cohesity is a storage startup that, quite frankly, I hadn’t even heard of before receiving the invitation to Storage Field Day. In what may turn out to be a very clever strategy, Cohesity has made the conscious decision to let the existing players fight over the hotly-contested primary storage space. Instead, Cohesity is concentrating on capturing the less “sexy” — but just as important — secondary storage space.
In discussing this, Cohesity makes a “storage iceberg” analogy, wherein primary storage is only the part of the iceberg that’s visible above the surface, while secondary storage is everything below the surface: Tier 2/3 applications, copies of data, backups, archives, etc. Continue reading
Today, Qumulo, a scale-out NAS vendor, announced a major new version of their operating environment, Qumulo Core 2.0, and three new hardware models.
Qumulo is hybrid storage, meaning each node has both Flash and spinning disks. The Flash layer (in this case SSDs) is used for performance and the HDD layer for capacity. Data is moved between these two tiers automatically without end-user action or even awareness.
I’ve written about Qumulo before: I was there at their launch party when they emerged from stealth, and, more recently, I wrote about their new high-density node. I was also directly involved in my company’s first sale of a Qumulo cluster — while the company was still in stealth mode.
I mention this partly to get the “yes, I’m a fan” out of the way early, and partly to give some weight to this statement: this is (in my debatably humble opinion) their best announcement to date. Continue reading
