Storage

One of the big draws towards any cloud-based storage is expandability: you aren’t responsible for maintaining drives, adding shelves, or even for the cooling and caring of the arrays. The biggest downside is typically speed. Moving data to the cloud usually means that what used to be sub-millisecond to access can now take significantly longer. ClearSky Data saw this challenge and wanted to provide a solution. We went for a bit of a deep into their storage offering at Tech Field Day 14 in order to get a better understanding of how their platform works. ...

One presentation that I was looking forward to at Tech Field Day 14 was from NetApp. Best known as a long-lived storage company, in recent times NetApp has been making a big push for DevOps. Considering NetApp’s history, it was shockingly refreshing to sit through an excellent presentation while only hearing the term ONTAP a couple of times. I outlined some of the existing DevOps-ish material and projects in my NetApp primer post, but I wanted to focus on their Trident project. Andrew Sullivan ( @andrew_ntap) was able to set the tone with a great overview of some DevOps initiatives and Kapil Arora ( @kaparora) gave us a great walkthrough of how NetApp’s Trident project works. ...

Although not part of the initial announcement, NetApp stepped up to the challenge and will be joining us for Tech Field Day 14. I was quite happy to see them added to the list as they are a company that I have been following for a long time. Although I am no longer a customer of theirs, I do know that they have a lot of very smart people doing very cool things there. ...

Datrium is a company that I have heard of, but I am not overly familiar with. Even though they were founded in 2012, admittedly the first time I really paid attention to them was at VMWorld 2016. Now in all fairness, I was talking to the engineers there as I was picking up my vExpert Raspberry Pi. Then again recently, at the Toronto VMware UserCon, I struck a conversation with an SE to get a better idea of what Datrium does, but more specifically, what makes them different. ...

A glimpse of IOFabric’s dashboard Trevor Pott recently introduced me to some of the fine folks at IOFabric and suggested that I have chat with them. Going into the call, I didn’t know a heck of a lot about their flagship product, Vicinity. I did a bit of research and gathered that Vicinity allows you to use existing storage and manage it via one interface. It turns out that is only part of the picture. Note that this is not any sort of sponsored post, and I was not compensated in any way to write this, but rather it is a cool product that I thought I would share. Also, writing helps me understand and digest information. ...

When I first looked at the lineup for Tech Field Day 12 (which was before I was asked to join), I was excited to see the list of companies. Some of them I know reasonably well, while there were a few on there that I had never heard of. DriveScale was one of them. When I wrote my ’ primer’ post about them, it was a bit challenging as there is not a ton of information out there about them, but that also makes it fun. Having a bit of background on the presenting companies is great, but it is also engaging to learn about them during these presentations, in most cases from their founders or lead engineers. ...

A few weeks ago, I wrote a post covering Tintri’s recently announced synchronous replication. At the time, I was also given a walkthrough of another upcoming feature: snapshot replication to S3 data stores. This is another big feature that I was glad to see previewed at VMWorld, and even more excited to see an in-depth demo of. For a quick bit of background, S3 is Amazon Web Services’ (AWS) Simple Storage Service which is an object storage system. Although S3 was designed by Amazon, there are many providers out there that offer S3-compliant data stores. This is definitely an emerging market, and the fact that you can have cloud-capable data stores in your datacenters has it’s own curiosities. All of that, however, is beyond the scope of this post - I just wanted to point out that AWS is not the only S3 provider. ...

I recently posted about the process I took to get data from an old FreeNAS to a new one. Truth be told, that process did work (and reasonably well), but I ended up tweaking things a bit more … actually a lot more. I won’t go into details about it, as it isn’t really relevant, but as I was mucking about, I found myself running a handful of commands over and over. ...

The first stop for us at Tech Field Day 12 was Cohesity’s office, where we had a nice breakfast waiting for us (along with a great delegate gift consisting of a multi-end USB cable, a notebook, a portable battery, and a Polaroid Snap camera). Soon after settling in, we got straight down to business. I had previously written a ’ primer’ regarding Cohesity, and I saw them present recently at the Toronto VMUG, but I still wasn’t fully familiar with the brand or their offering. Cohesity markets itself as secondary storage, a market that its founder, Mohit Aron, felt was being underserved. Without repeating everything from my previous post, the common use-cases for secondary storage include data sets such as backup targets, cold data, and test / dev. ...

Igneous Systems recently presented at Tech Field Day 12, and honestly, I was quite looking forward to learning more about them. All I really knew going into the presentation was that they provided ‘cloud storage, on premises’. Once we started picking into the details, things definitely got interesting, along with some mind-crippling moments when trying to digest what was presented. A Quick Overview Igneous’ stance is that data is growing at a tremendous rate. Things such as IoT sensors, media (4K video for example), and just raw data (think bio-medical or mineral data), chew up lots of space. In fact, one of the delegates I was talking to mentioned that he goes through petabytes a year! So, the problem is very real, even though it may not be common. ...