I’ve already arranged some meetings with Nexenta representatives and I’ll share with you their point of view about storage and news from the conference. Stay tuned!
Disclaimer: I was invited at this conference by Nexenta and they paid for travel and accommodation, I have not been compensated for my time and am not obliged to blog. Furthermore, the content is not reviewed, approved or published by any other person than the Juku’s team.
Well, this acquisition gives us the final proof that there is a lot of interest about SSD Arrays. Flash Arrays (Flash only) are a new market segment under the spotlight of end users and primary vendors. We often write about SSD storage startups and there are a lot of juicy things that are coming up.
Also EMC tried to fill up their traditional arrays with SSDs but with scarce results. It’s obvious, they are faster than the same array filled with mechanical HDs but, at the same time, we can state that the price/performance ratio is extremely bad.
Actually, SSDs can be efficiently used into traditional arrays, but in small amounts: used for caching purposes or as part of automated multi tier solutions.
It isn’t hard to predict it: actually, there aren’t primary vendors capable of delivering a full fledged SSD solution right now! We will see an acquisitions round that involves many of the small startups that we covered in previous months.
I would only add that I’m not sure if this round will begin immediately: In many cases, these startups don’t have a reference customer or a credible installed base useful to understand how their products truly work in real life. Also on the EMC side, they moved fast but the XtremIO product isn’t ready for shipment yet, it’s probable that we will see it officially available in a bunch of months…
Furthermore, there are more than a couple of solutions out there, so there is time and options to evaluate before placing a bet!
EMC has done well by staying a step ahead of competition, this has put them in a good position. The truth of the matter is that they bought a company without customers and without a sellable product. But I’m sure that they made this move in order to secure the technology and the intellectual property more than for the product itself: it will be very easy to integrate such a small engineering team with the rest of the company.
if I’m being picky, my last thought goes out to project thunder: did it ever exist? who knows, only time (or the next EMC world) will tell.
Drobo was the talk of the town a few years ago when their first 4-bay RAID array stunned the home storage enthusiasts with their BeyondRAID technology, that enabled a very smart use of those drives laying around the house giving the user the power to mix & match different drive sizes using a technology once found only on high-end storage arrays.
Here’s a video recorded during Storage Field Day that shows how BeyondRAID works.
After this breakthrough, Drobo slowly sneaked into the SOHO market with a NAS gateway for the original product, an integrated Block/File 5-bay array and a big 8-bay rackmount-able box aimed at the higher end of the SOHO market. They slowly (but steadily) gained market share, and then took the plunge with a new “business” line officially aimed at the ROBO (Remote Office/Branch Office) market, with the message “My other SAN is a Drobo” willing to not replace high-end storage systems at the business core, but rather exploiting the flourishing ROBO market that is usually not served well by the traditional high-end storage player.
The new systems sport iSCSI or NAS connectivity and the top of the line model (B1200i) can accommodate up to three SSDs (out of 12 total bays) and use them as accelerator (flash as a cache) with their proprietary Automated Data Tiering technology, which is pretty nifty for a ROBO storage!, and it supports NTFS, HFS+, ext3, VMFS, and FAT32 file system formats.
Here you can watch the B1200i demo during Storage Field Day 1.
The tiering demo didn’t work as expected but I heard from the Drobo guys that it was a last minute idea and they didn’t rehearse it enough 
BeyondRAID is an interesting piece of technology that has no match in the market that Drobo serves, I find the mix & match idea really smart for small scale storage needs and the B1200i quite compelling in a ROBO scenario, however, especially in a ROBO environment, other nuances such as full on-site support and array-based replication need to be considered and that could place Drobo in a difficult position.
DISCLAIMER: Drobo was a sponsor of Storage Field Day 1, and as such was partly responsible for my airfare and hotel accommodations. Drobo did not ask for, nor did they receive any consideration for this article.
Enjoy the video!
Disclaimer: I was invited at this meeting by Condor Consulting Group and they paid for travel and accommodation, I have not been compensated for my time and am not obliged to blog. Furthermore, the content is not reviewed, approved or published by any other person than the Juku’s team.
Kaminario was our first host, Kaminario is a relatively new play in the flash array market, being founded in 2008, Dani Golan, Founder and CEO of the company, presented the company and their product to #SFD1 audience in an engaging and technical manner, he initially laid out what, I believe, everybody knows already: flash needs a completely new architecture at the storage array side, otherwise regular legacy arrays are simply not able to leverage the speeds and low latencies of flash.
I especially loved a point that Dani made during the presentation “what is high end storage anymore?”, we could debate months (years even) on this question, but in my mind everything reliable enough and fast enough can be considered “high end”, this is not something that has to do with big name brands anymore.
The system is completely software-based and completely distributed, the hardware that is currently qualified to run Kaminario’s K2 is Dell M1000e blade chassis, where each blade carry flash storage capacity and I/O connections and can scale across chassis and racks but Dani stressed out that there are no ties to the underlying hardware.
Their software storage architecture is called “SPEAR”, that encompass (as they say) a granular scale-out architecture, best of breed x86 hardware and solid-state media choice, which means that at the storage array level they’re free to use every kind of x86 hardware mixed with every kind of solid state media: from PCIe flash to SAS SSDs, on top of that lies their “DataProtect” layer that describe what the storage array gives back in terms of features and reliability: N+1 HA, Thin Provisioning, Non-disruptive operation, Redirect-on-write Snapshots and High speed replication (not synchronous though).
Dani showed us a pre-recorded demo of how the system can cope with a node failure by pulling an entire blade from the enclosure, the system dropped down from 500K to zero IOPS and then went back to a steady 400000 IOPS (80% of the original capacity) after less than 10 seconds, and then recovered immediately after a brand new blade got pulled, going back to a steady 500000 IOPS. Definitely an impressive stunt even if the drop down to zero concerned a few #SFD1 delegates.
Kaminario showed some interesting muscles during their presentation, they’re definitely addressing a specific pain point for companies: accelerate I/O intensive applications by going all-flash in a next-generation storage that can deliver high amounts of IOPS while keeping operational costs down with next-generation features that enable operations to run smooth. Kaminario is surely a company to put in your shortlist if you’re looking for a high performance storage system to accelerate your IO-driven workloads.
You can watch the Kaminario presentation here.
DISCLAIMER: Kaminario was a sponsor of Storage Field Day 1, and as such was partly responsible for my airfare and hotel accommodations. Kaminario did not ask for, nor did they receive any consideration for this article.
Pure isn’t new to me. I had already met met them for the first time few months ago and I was left with a really good impression. From the strategic point of view they involved Samsung among the investors: The Korean corporation brings them money, flash technology to build the arrays and access to the firmware code of flash devices. These firmwares are modified and optimized to get the maximum advantage from the underlaying (cheap MLC) technology. On the other side, if you look at Pure from a business standpoint, you’ll find the classic well financed Silicon Valley startup, with a lot of money in the bank for early stages of their business development.
The array is still in beta, and not publicly available, but there are some customers that have already useed it in production environments.
The product gestation has been long but the goal is to come out directly with a stable and mature technical proposition. The company is positioning its product at the medium to large enterprise level and they claim a sustained 200K IOps at the maximum configuration. It’s important to notice that Purestorage always talks about real world workloads and not theoretical ones, something that I like very much!
The product is in constant development and it already has all the features that you can expect from a next generation SSD array: data reduction capabilities (thin provisioning, dedupe, compression, etc.), snapshots (redirect-on-write unlimited snapshots that you can schedule every few seconds for each volume!), and replication soon. They are also working on integration with the upper layers like VMware VAAI or Microsoft VSS.
Controllers are now Active/Active while the supported protocols are FC and iSCSI. FCoE will come shortly when customers ask for it and, if I’ve heard correctly, Infiniband is also a possible option.
The overall architecture is simple (based on standard x86 hardware) and it has already been designed for a future scale-out growth. The use of NVRAM on every disk tray is also very interesting for caching and writes optimization, aimed to avoid SAS channels saturation.
Economically speaking, when we go through $/GB, the positioning will be similar to traditional HDD based arrays , but with an enormous advantage in terms of IOps and low latency (indeed, many SSD array vendors are claiming the same). It’s clear to me that now, until they release a price list, we can’t do more than have faith and trust their words.
Probably, one of the most visible flaws (also to Pure representatives) is the lack of a NAS option, but they have decided that it isn’t a top prioritie at the moment.
Well, it’s clear that I like the company and the product. They both seemed to have their feet on the ground, I touched the array with my hands and attended some impressive demo sessions.
Based on the informations I gathered, the product is aligned, with other competitors who have similar ambitions: this means that a good part of the success will derive from good business/technical development and a lot of marketing.
In any case, when the product is available in Europe, it wouldn’t be a bad idea to consider it as a viable option. On the other hand, as for every new startup, it will be very important to carefully evaluate support quality and presence… those two could be very weak points.
Disclaimer: I was invited at this meeting by Condor Consulting Group and they paid for travel and accommodation, I have not been compensated for my time and am not obliged to blog. Furthermore, the content is not reviewed, approved or published by any other person than the Juku’s team.
Enjoy the video!
Disclaimer: I was invited at this meeting by Condor Consulting Group and they paid for travel and accommodation, I have not been compensated for my time and am not obliged to blog. Furthermore, the content is not reviewed, approved or published by any other person than the Juku’s team.
Enjoy the video!
Disclaimer: I was invited at this meeting by Condor Consulting Group and they paid for travel and accommodation, I have not been compensated for my time and am not obliged to blog. Furthermore, the content is not reviewed, approved or published by any other person than the Juku’s team.
Enjoy the video!
Disclaimer: I was invited at this meeting by Condor Consulting Group and they paid for travel and accommodation, I have not been compensated for my time and am not obliged to blog. Furthermore, the content is not reviewed, approved or published by any other person than the Juku’s team.
We will meet eight very interesting companies: Kaminario (@Kaminario), Nimbus Data (@NimbusData), Drobo (@Drobo), Coraid (@Coraid), Dell (@Dell_Storage), Brocade (@BRCDcomm), Tintri (@TintriInc), PureStorage (@PureStorage) while Quest Software (@Quest) will sponsor the party on Thursday night. Many of them have interesting cutting-edge products based on SSD technology, that has been the talk of the town lately.
I would like to thank both Stephen Foskett and Matt Simmons for letting me be part of this.
But what is Tech Field Day anyway? read it in their own words:
Our Field Day events bring together innovative IT product vendors and independent thought leaders to share information and opinions in a presentation and discussion format. Independent bloggers, freelance writers, and podcasters have a public presence that has immense influence on the ways that products and companies are perceived and by the general public.
As you can see it sounds like fun!
It will be a pleasure to share the same space with such a wonderful bunch of gifted technical folks and industry pundits, here’s the delegates list, I’m sure you will recognize most of the names:
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Robin Harris | StorageMojo ZDNet |
@StorageMojo |
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Hans De Leenheer | HansDeLeenheer | @HansDeLeenheer |
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Chris M Evans | The Storage Architect | @ChrisMEvans |
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Dwayne Lessner | IT Blood Pressure | @dlink7 |
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Scott D. Lowe | TechRepublic Virtualization Admin |
@OtherScottLowe |
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Ray Lucchesi | Ray on Storage Silverton Consulting |
@RayLucchesi |
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Howard Marks | DeepStorage Network Computing |
@DeepStorageNet |
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Robert Novak | rsts11 Google+ |
@gallifreyan |
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Nigel Poulton | InfoSmack Podcast NigelPoulton.com |
@NigelPoulton |
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Fabio Rapposelli | Juku P2V IT |
@FabioRapposelli |
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Derek Schauland | Technically Speaking TechRepublic |
@WebJunkie |
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Arjan Timmerman | VDICLOUD ITQ |
@Arjantim |
Make sure to follow the event on Twitter using the #TechFieldDay or #SFD1 hashtag, the @TechFieldDay account and the official delegate Twitter list; there will also be a live video stream of the event at the Tech Field Day website.
The day before Storage Field Day begins (April 25th) there is going to be an interesting SSD-themed Symposium taking place at the DoubleTree Hotel in San Jose (where the Tech Field Day crew is staying), attendance is free but you need to RSVP here, the Symposium will feature a keynote by Mr. StorageMojo: Robin Harris as well as a panel with notorious storage folks Chris Evans, Nigel Poulton and Howard Marks, the event will be sponsored by SolidFire, Nimble Storage, Nimbus Data, Violin Memory, Virident and Velobit. I’ll hang around the event so if you’re near San Jose and want to meet up just RSVP and show up!.