With your network now reaching much further than the boundaries of your offices, managing an enterprise network is much more complex than ever before.

Kentik’s mission is two-fold.

1. To make life awesome for people building the connected world

2. Deliver one comprehensive observability platform for running all of an enterprise’s infrastructure.

During #TFD27, Kentik presented their SaaS-based Enterprise Network Observability Platform. Their platform can receive telemetry from various sources using integrations and agents. With this data via powerful analytics, they can provide network managers with automated insights to resolve issues, improve performance, control standards and much more.

During the demonstration, they showed a number of powerful tools that were able to troubleshoot various issues, including conducting root cause analysis over an application configured in a hybrid infrastructure.

I liked their platform's ability to configure various tests to help monitor the network and application performance. These are able to be configured to take place from agents you have installed across your network or public agents accessible over the internet across the world. This allows enterprise network admins the ability to receive insight from a variety of standpoints. Further to this, the visualisation capability within the platform was fantastic. The two examples below show visualisations, first of BGP routing and secondly of a complete network topology within AWS.

When managing a largescale complex enterprise network, these tools will be invaluable to ensure you have visibility across not only the networks within the offices but across datacenters, into the cloud and beyond.

You can see my doodle covering Kentik’s presentation below and be sure to check out the presentations on the TFD website.

To learn more about Kentik check out their website here.

Here is my doodle for the @PliopsLtd session at #sfd21 they offer a key-value (KV) based storage processor that accelerates, improve reliability and capacity of SSD storage for data persistence and indexing tasks for transactional DB’s, real-time analytics, edge applications and software-defined storage.. This allows their customers to use more affordable QLC SSD’s, whilst outperforming more expensive alternatives as well as helping overcome the processor bottleneck that you will see in most modern solutions with the workloads mentioned.

Unlock the Full Potential of SSDs – Pliops

Their solution is currently (Jan 2021) around two months away from being mass-produced and whilst theoretically could be used in shared storage solutions or delivered as part of a cloud service will initially focus on directly attached storage workloads.

The Pliops storage processors is a half-height, half-length PCIe card that sits in the storage path between your workload and the onboard SSD storage. You reference the storage using a standard NVMe block interface or via a KV (key-value) library API.

View fullsize

The Pliops card takes your in-efficient dataset, applies data protection, thin provisioning and then compression prior to it being written to the SSD’s. The Pliops processor results in 90% less writes and 77% less reads to your SSD’s.

Today the Pliops card has to be used with Linux based workloads and has a starting point of 3 SSDs within a solution supporting up to a maximum of 64TB per processor, you can scale out with multiple cards. They have future plans to support other platforms including VMware.

Their data protection allows for multiple single drive failures, with rapid recovery whilst delivering performance that is faster than RAID 0 with the SSDs alone.

Pliops is typically utilised with a wide variety of database and analytics workloads, including but not limited to MySQL, MongoDB, Redis, Cassandra and SAP Hana.

Pliops-Storage-Processor-–-Solution-Brief.pdf

Conclusion

It was good to hear from the Pliops team especially so early in their journey, they have an innovative solution and if you are looking to reduce costs and increase performance for your highly critical database and analytical workloads you will want to be considering Pliops.

Hammerspace presented on Day 3 of #SFD21 taking place virtually due to the COVID-19 Pandemic. See my doodle above covering their presentation. I will be following up with a few more thoughts and opinions of the presentation after #SFD21 completes.

Intel presented on Day 3 of #SFD21 taking place virtually due to the COVID-19 Pandemic. Please see my doodle above covering their presentation . I will be following up with a few more thoughts and opinions of the presentation after #SFD21 completes.

Be sure to check out my previous doodles covering the Intel Storage Moment event late last year.