Category Archives: Storage

I’m Going to DisneyLand!

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No, I haven’t won the World Series (although, if I had it would certainly be worth bragging about considering that I’m not a member of any professional baseball team). I’ll be attending the Nth Generation Symposium as a guest of HPE and as a Tech Field Day delegate.

This is the 19th annual Nth Generation Symposium. The Symposium focuses on technological innovation. HPE is the Grand Sponsor of this year’s event.

And – yes – it is being held at Disneyland! Well, one of the Disney resort hotels, but that still counts as being on the grounds of Disneyland in Anaheim, CA, so just roll with it.

This will be the sixth Tech Field Day I’ve been invited to attend and the second “Exclusive” one. It’s always great to get an invitation to these events.

This will be both my first Nth Generation Symposium as well as my first HPE event. I’m looking forward to getting to see what this event will be like.

Naturally, I’m also looking forward to seeing some familiar faces and the Tech Field Day delegates I haven’t met yet.

As always, the Tech Field Day event will be livestreamed and recorded. You can get more information about Tech Field Day coverage of this event here. When the event is closer, I’ll post info on how you can follow along even if you’re not attending.

Microsoft Enters Agreement to Purchase Avere Systems

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Yesterday, Microsoft announced that it had entered into an agreement to purchase Avere Systems, a maker of software and hardware appliances that can perform filesystem virtualization, file-to-object gateway services, and allow customers to easily connect their onsite storage to public cloud storage.

If you’re a long-time reader of this blog, you’ll know that I’ve been a big fan of the Avere platform. In my reseller days, I was involved in a few deals on solutions and designs involving Avere filers.

If you’re not familiar with Avere, you can read these quick overviews of their cloud gateway capabilities, their virtual filer, and their complete onsite storage solution.

Avere Systems customers include the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, John Hopkins University, and Sony Corporation’s entertainment division. (I’m fairly familiar with how two of those three customers are employing their Avere filers.)

If I were to sum up what the Avere filers provide for customers, it would be that they provide the performance of local (onsite) storage for data that’s stored remotely (offsite). Clients access the Avere systems front-end using either the NFS or SMB protocols. The back-end can connect to multiple storage sources using either NFS, SMB, S3, or some combination. The Avere filers present clients with a single global namespace, meaning the client has no knowledge of where the data’s source actually is. Data can be migrated between sources on the Avere’s back-end with no interruption of service to clients connecting to the front-end.

With the virtual filers, Avere can also allow offsite compute clients in the cloud to access data in a customer’s private onsite data center…

In all, it’s not difficult to see why Microsoft might want to acquire them — especially since they’ve announced their intent to move it into their Azure division. What’s surprising, really, is that no other cloud provider saw Avere as an acquisition target earlier.

If Microsoft is able to incorporate that ability to have cloud computing resources accessing data from private onsite data centers into Azure, it will be a big differentiator for them as no other cloud providers currently offer a similar capability.

At this time, there’s been no news regarding the purchase price. Estimates and specualtion range from $300 Million to $500 Million. If true, compared to the potential Avere’s intellectual property has to add to a cloud service provider, this could turn out to have been quite the bargain for Microsoft.

Today, Avere Systems supports Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services, and Google Cloud Platform. Obviously we should expect closer integration with Azure in the future, but Microsoft says they’ll continue to support AWS and Google, which I’m sure is welcome news to existing Avere Customers.

Resources

 

Zadara Storage Offers Hurricane Relief to Business Hit by Harvey, Irma, or Maria

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Zadara Storage, a Storage-as-a-Service (STaaS) start-up company, is offering disaster relief to businesses affected by Hurricanes Harvey, Irma, or Maria. The relief Zadara is offering comes in the form of up to 1PB of free data storage for six months. This storage can be installed on-site, in the Cloud, or as a hybrid model.

(I’m so pleased to be writing about some good news related to the hurricanes that have caused so much destruction in Texas, Florida, and Puerto Rico.)

How do businesses qualify for their six months of free storage?

  • Be a business that operates in the hurricane-affected areas and lost storage
  • Be a business that operates elsewhere, but lost storage in a data center or at a colocation site in the hurricane affected areas

If your business meets either of these two conditions, you can apply for your free storage here.

I know what you’re thinking — What’s the catch? There is none. If your company qualifies, Zadara will either ship storage — to your site or to your colocation data center — or provide you with access to cloud-based storage in Zadara’s data centers. When the six months is up, you can choose to sign up for Zadara’s Storage-as-a-Service, or you can return the storage to them, no questions asked.

I spoke with Zadara’s CEO and co-founder, Nelson Nahum, last week. He told me that as he was watching news coverage of the hurricane disasters, he and other members of the company’s management team found themselves inspired by things people were doing to help each other: sharing food and resources, working together to rescue people who were trapped, opening their homes to shelter strangers who lost their homes to the storm. Seeing this caused the management team to ask themselves and each other what they could do to help. The answer was: up to 1PB of Storage-as-a-Service for six months, either on-site or in the Cloud, for free, no strings attached.

Zadara’s Storage-as-a-Service supports multiple data types (block, file, and object), providing access via multiple storage protocols (FC, iSCSI, iSER, NFS, SMB, S3, and Swift). (I’ll do a follow-up blog post later to take a closer look at how they accomplish this.)

So, if you’re with a business that could use a hand getting back on its feet following the triple-whammy of hurricanes — or know someone in that situation — go here to have the business apply.

Summary of Monday’s Announcements at Dell EMC World 2017

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As you might have expected from a conference that was essentially created by combining two huge tech events (Dell World and EMC World), there were a large number of announcements made on the first day of Dell EMC World 2017. To help you manage the influx of so much information, this post will attempt to summarize them for you.

Dell EMC made announcements across the following areas:

  • New PowerEdge Servers
  • New VxRail Hyperconverged Hardware, Software, and Pricing Model
  • Software-Defined Storage
  • New Storage Arrays
  • New Integrated Data Protection Appliance
  • New Open Networking Products
  • New Flexible Consumption Models
  • Dell Technologies Venture Practice Emerges from Stealth

I’ll review each of these in more detail below: Continue reading →

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 →

Qumulo Secures Round C Prime Funding – My Conversation with Bill Richter

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Qumulo logoToday, Qumulo, vendor of the software-defined scale-out storage platform Qumulo Core, announced the completion a funding round of $30 Million. This C Prime round of funding brings the total amount invested in Qumulo to date to $130 Million.

This new funding round was led by Northern Light Venture Capital and other first-time investors in Qumulo. Previous Qumulo investors Kleiner Perkins Caufield and Byers (KPCB), Madrona Venture Group, Top Tier Capital Partners, and Tyche Partners also participated in this round.

This new round of investment in Qumulo follows some recent management changes that include the appointments of

  • Bill Richter (formerly of Isilon) as CEO
  • Jay Wampold as Vice President of Marketing
  • Eric Scollard as Vice President of Worldwide Sales

As long-time readers will know, I’ve been a fan of Qumulo since the beginning. At my previous employer, I was the PreSales Engineer in a deal where we sold a Qumulo cluster even before the company had emerged from stealth mode. At Qumulo’s invitation, I attended the company’s launch party.

So, you can imagine my excitement when Bill Richter and Jay Wampold took some time out of their busy day yesterday to spend some time speaking with me about today’s announcement and anything else I felt like asking them. Continue reading →

Confirmed: I’ll be a Delegate at Storage Field Day 12 (#SFD12)

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Storage Field DayA number of things had my status for this event up in the air for a little bit, but I’m very happy to announce that I am now officially confirmed as a Delegate at Storage Field Day 12 next week.

I’m very happy about this. To me the Tech Field Day events have always been in the “It’s an Honor Just to Have Been Invited” category. I’m excited (and curious about) seeing what the event’s sponsors will be presenting.

I’m also excited to see and spend time with the other delegates, many of whom are colleagues and friends, and some I’ll be meeting for the first time.

Presenters

Continue reading →

Pure Storage’s FlashBlade is now GA

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Pure Storage logoToday, Pure Storage, an All-Flash storage vendor, announced the General Availability (GA) of their FlashBlade, a scalable, All-Flash, NFS storage platform, as well as the GA of version 1.2 of Elasticity, the software that runs the FlashBlade.

I wrote about FlashBlade when it was first announced in 2016. At the time I was very excited about the possibilities of this platform. I wasn’t able to get hands-on with the platform. The closest I got was being able to hold and examine one of the blades — encased in a Lucite box. (Really. They handed it to me all boxed up. I was tempted to use my multitool to open the box up to conduct a more-thorough examination, but not only did it feel like it would be rude, they also seemed to always make sure I was within arms-reach of at least three Pure employees at any point the blade was within arms-reach of me… (Kudos to them on having done their advance research.))

At that time, not all of the specifications had been solidified, but those details are available now. Continue reading →

A Closer Look at the All-Flash Isilon, aka Nitro

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isilon-all-flashOn 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.

Continue reading →

Qumulo Core 2.5 is Now GA

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Qumulo logoOn 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.

Continue reading →