Posts in Storage & Data Protection
#SFD21 - Storage Field Day 21 - Pliops
Pliops

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.

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

Pliops use cases

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.


Intel Memory & Storage Moment 2020 #IMS20

I am lucky enough to be taking part in another Field Day event, this time a special event dedicated to Intel’s latest innovations in memory and storage. You are able to watch the presentations from Intel’s event over on their website here.

During the keynote presentations there were a number of key product announcements regarding their Optane Storage and Memory portfolio as well as NAND based offerings. You can see my doodle below covering these updates.

Intel Storage and Memory Annoucments for Optane and NAND.

Most impressive to me was the evolution in these critical technologies and particularly the advancements in the Optane technologies allowing for new and innovative use cases, in both storage and memory ecspecially when looking at benefits of persistent memory on the DDR bus.

Products Announced

Client

  • Intel Optane Memory H20

  • Intel 3D NAND SSD QLC 670P

Data Center

  • Intel Optane SSD P5800X

  • Intel 3D NAND SSD TLC - D7-P5510

  • Intel 3eD NAND SSD QLC - D5-P5316

#CFD9 - NetApp - Azure NetApp Files and NetApp Virtual Desktop Service

Alongside VMware I have found the NetApp presentation to be one of the most interesting and relevant for myself. NetApp presented the Microsoft Azure NetApp Files services as well their Virtual Desktop Services offering. This was a really refreshing presentation for me, I had assumed with NetApp presenting we would have seen traditional storage solutions running in the cloud but I was presently surprised by the content presented.

Azure NetApp Files

Firstly we saw the Microsoft Service named Azure NetApp Files. A service ran by Microsoft natively in Azure (Not through the marketplace) allowing you to run Windows and Linux workloads in the cloud with high performance, as well as offering enterprise grade storage management including snapshots, clones, replication and tiering)

Azure NetApp Files supports NFS v3 and v4.1 as well as SMB3 allowing for a range of file based use cases, discussed was use cases around Enterprise File Repositories, Databases, HPC and VDI

https://cloud.netapp.com/azure-netapp-files

NetApp Virtual Desktop Services (VDS)

NetApp VDS comes from the acquisition of CloudJumper earlier this year. VDS is SaaS control plane allowing you to deploy, manage and optimise virtual desktop environment across on-premises and public clouds. Unlike Citrix and VMware Horizon, VDS leaves the brokering up to Microsoft RDS or WVD in the native cloud infrastructures and concentrates on the management capabilities mentioned previously.

With Microsoft’s release and continued improvement of WVD I am increasingly seeing customers wanting to look at the native Microsoft offering without rapping a third party brokering service. As such NetApp VDS sits nicely in this gap allowing admins to rely on WVD for the element it is best at whilst adding full lifecycle management capabilities.

https://cloud.netapp.com/virtual-desktop-service

Conclusion

It was refreshing to see cloud services from a traditional storage vendor like NetApp and I look forward to learning more and covering more about these technologies.

#CFD9 - StorPool Software Defined, High Performance, Scale Out, Block-Storage

StorPool installs on standard servers, running on Linux it pools all performance and capacity across nodes starting initially from 3 nodes. It offers high throughput with up to 1 million IOPS per node offering in excess of 10million IOPS in a 10 node system, critically with extremely low latency. StorPool is focused on new-age IT workloads including KVM and Kubernetes but also support vSphere and Hyper-V. Due to it’s high performance, low latency and software defined nature StorPool is often utilised by Hosting Providors and MSPs to deliver multi-tenant cloud solutions.

#CFD9 - Scality Scale-Out File and Object Storage

Scality offer Scale-Out File and Object Storage Solutions with Support for On-Premises, AWS S3, Google Cloud and Azure.

Scality presented their experiences with kubernetes as they redesigned the distriubtion of their key offering Scality RING from RPM packages to their own bespoke MetalK8’s offering. Their Zenko solution stood out to me, Zenko offers the freedom to use object and file storage solutions on-premises and in the cloud whilst having unified management, single namespace, metadata search, flexible replication between clouds, all whilst still storing data in the native cloud formats.

Zenko supports, Amazon S3, Azure Blob Storage, Google Cloud Storage, Wasabi, as well as on-premises solutions such as their own RING offering and legacy NAS.

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#CFD9 - Pure Storage PortWorx - Kubernetes Storage Platform

Pure Storage presented their software defined storage management platform for Kubernetes PortWorx. PortWorx was acquired by Pure Storage in September this year after working closely within many customers utilising PortWorx for Kubernetes projects on top of Pure Storage. PortWorx will continue to be agnostic of the underlying storage platform and offers Kubernetes centric, Backup, DR, Migration, Security and Automation tools alongside software defined storage. Another of it’s USPs is its application centric approach aligned with how containers are deployed apposed to a machine centric approach that other solutions take.

An interesting presentation from a solution that ticks a number of boxes for those looking at storage management solutions for Kubernetes, if you would like to try PortWorx out yourself check out the interactive demos https://central.portworx.com/.

Runecast at vRetreat September 2020

Today I attended the virtual vRetreat event with Runecast and 10Zig, above you can see my doodle covering the Runecast presentation by @kev_johnson.

Runecast allows VMware administrators to proactively manage their vSphere patching, security compliance and HCL compatibility. By doing this it is predicted up to 90% of known issues can be prevented.

#TFDx Dell Technologies: Power Up the Portfolio - Day Two

As discussed yesterday I am lucky enough to be one of the delegates during the current Dell EMC Storage, Tech Field Day Exclusive event. Today the presentations focused on Dell EMC Power Scale, Power Protect and Power Scale use cases.

You can see my doodles from todays session below. Keep an eye out for posts covering my thoughts and opinions of the demonstrated technologies.

Dell Power Scale
Dell Power Scale and Dell Power Protect
Dell Power Scale Cloud Use Cases
#TFDx Dell Technologies: Power Up the Portfolio - Day One

I am lucky enough to be one of the delegates for the current Tech Field Day virtual event with Dell Technologies.

TFDx Attendees

You can learn more about the event over on the Tech Field Day website at the link below.

https://techfieldday.com/event/powerup/

I am joined on Tech Field Day with some amazing people

Below you will find my doodles from the first days presentations including Dell EMC PowerStore and Dell EMC PowerFlex. Keep an eye on the blog for some more thoughts and opinions regarding the content covered during the presentations.

PowerStore

Dell Power Store
Dell EMC Power Store

PowerFlex

Dell EMC PowerFlex
Dell EMC PowerFlex
Dell Customer Solution Centre Limerick Visit - Feb 2019 - VxRail, IoT, Customer Solutions and more

I spent the day with the fantastic Paul Wynne at the Dell Customer Solution Center in Limerick Ireland. The trip was planned as a training exercise for some of the members of my team but as ever the trip was really informative and it was great to see the latest new technologies and business solutions available from Dell. During our visit we covered both VMware SDDC solutions and how VxRail interacts and enhances these capabilities, we visited the innovation center looking at the business aligned IoT solutions and much more.