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
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
Now that I’ve been back for a while and have had some time to reflect on it, I thought I’d pull together an overall impression of my experience at the recent Storage Field Day Event. I’ll be following up over the next few weeks with posts focusing on the individual vendors and their presentations. This is intended as more of a high-level “what it was like” post.
[DISCLOSURE: The vendor sponsors involved in the event covered my expenses for the event. This included airfare, hotel, and meals. There was no expectation that I post anything in return, nor have I been asked to. No one other than me has previewed my content.]
OK, with that out of the way, let me dive in to: Continue reading
Over the years, I’ve attended many industry technical conferences. I’ve been an attendee. I held a whiteboard session that was livestreamed over the Internet. I’ve done video interviews. I’ve been booth staff. I’ve given presentations in booths. I’ve been responsible for the entire booth.
With all that, there are still a few things I haven’t ever done at a technical conference. I’ve never given a keynote speech (yet), and I’ve never been a guest speaker in a conference keynote.
Earlier this week, that changed when I accidentally ended up with a (very brief) speaking role in the keynote on Day 2 of the Pure//Accelerate event.
If you were there, you may have witnessed it, or if you were following the event on Twitter, you may have read about it more-or-less as it happened, but I’ve been encouraged to share the story of how it came about. Continue reading
Today, Pure Storage made several announcements: new product, new bundled solutions, and a brand-new scale-out architecture. These announcements were timed to coincide with Day One of their first-ever conference event, Pure//Accelerate, which I am attending.
[DISCLAIMER: In the interest of full disclosure, Pure Storage provided me with a complimentary pass to their conference and also covered my plane fare and hotel costs to attend. That said, there was no requirement that I post anything, nor has Pure reviewed anything I’ve written in this post. The only input they’ve had on this content is being very available to answer any questions I’ve asked.]
The announcements that interested me the most are:
I’ll walk through these in order below. Continue reading
If you weren’t able to guess from my previous post about this, I’m very excited to be returning to Storage Field Day as a delegate for SFD9.
If you won’t be there at the event, I figured you might like more info on the presenters and on how you can follow along — in real time.
Continue reading
You may remember that back in November EMC announced new features coming to Isilon. Most of the message focused on the IsilonSD Edge virtual appliance, but a lot of the rest had to do with “OneFS.NEXT” (which we all expected to be numbered 8.0).
About 3 weeks ago, OneFS 8.0 became GA. The availability of the new software happened with very little announcement and absolutely no fanfare. I found this somewhat surprising given how much EMC had hyped up the pre-announcement so far in advance.
With the availability of 8.0, two other new things become available: the new CloudPools software and IsilonSD Edge. This post covers everything that’s new. Continue reading
