A shorter short take this time, due to SDC conference responsibilities. As always, links were valid at the time of publication.
- Storage Media and Technology
- Storage Companies in the News
- Industry Associations and Standards
- Webinars and Conferences
- Synology Security News
- Bonus Round
Storage Media and Technology
Pure Storage releases a QLC Flash Array (called FlashArray//C) at Pure Accelerate event. From a media perspective, this sits in roughly the same space as the Vast Data solution (see previous Short Takes).
eWeek has a “Steps To Take in Disaster Recovery” article. This is good. Yes, the information has been available for years, but it’s amazing how many people don’t learn the mistakes of the past and get shocked that they will be repeated in the future.
VentureBeat poses a question that is a common theme in the industry, apparently. “Optane: Breakthrough or Broken Promise?”
Enterprise Storage Forum has an article on the Top Fibre Channel hardware, and it’s kind of an interesting read. For one thing, there are a few inaccuracies (if you’re new to the Storage Short Take, here’s a disclaimer: I’m one of the Board Members of the Fibre Channel Industry Association). For one thing, 32GFC does not run at “32Gbps.” This is something that has been covered extensively elsewhere. For another, Cavium was acquired by Marvell last year, so the initial players list is a bit outdated. Still another interesting take is that the article lists specific products for switches, compared to, say, categories of FC switch hardware (e.g., TOR “fabric” switches versus directors). Finally, the “hardware comparison chart” is extremely misleading and woefully non-comprehensive. Fibre Channel products are backwards compatible to 2 previous iterations (e.g., 32GFC can run 16GFC and 8GFC). As such, your mileage may vary with the utility of such an article, as it does give a brief glimpse into the variety of the ecosystem. But it’s a very, very brief glimpse.
On the other hand, Search Storage has done a really decent job laying out the ecosystem players for NVMe-oF. I confess I’ve only scanned the article, but I haven’t seen anything yet that I don’t agree with.
Changing gears, not everyone is enamored with QLC as a prime choice for cold storage. My good friend Hubbert Smith is quite bearish on QLC, for instance.
Storage Companies in the News
I debated whether or not to put this into the “Storage Media and Technology” section, but ultimately decided to put Cody Hosterman’s article on Pure’s Cloud Block Storage (CBS) solution of Purity to AWS. One of the things that I love about Cody’s approach is that while yes, he does talk about Pure’s products, he’s got real gems of information that are worth knowing that are not vendor-related.
DDN has decided to acquire Intelliflash AFA from Western Digital. Search Storage also has a pretty decent take, daring to ask the question, “What is DDN’s end-game?”
Well, this is an interesting consumption model. Want 32GFC SAN and a 25GbE NAS in the same box? We got yo back.
Cisco’s Hyperflex product has overtaken HPE to hit #3 in the HCI market. It’s a distant #3, but compared to this time last year when the playing field was very different (“Cisco who?”), this is quite interesting. (Disclaimer: I work for Cisco, but am only tangentially involved in Hyperflex).
Industry Associations and Standards
SNIA’s Storage Developer Conference was this week. I’ll have an update in the next short take.
Webinars and Conferences
A few years ago I came up with an idea for a SNIA webinar series that I thought would be useful for a lot of people. You see, one of the things that vendors use to sell their wares is performance, and they will throw performance numbers at you seven ways from Sunday. However, unless you know what all of that means, the only thing you can do is look to see if the numbers are bigger or lower than the other numbers. Not very helpful. So, I enlisted the aid of Mark Rogov and Ken Cantrell who took the idea and ran with it. What we have is the Storage Performance Benchmarking Series. one of the best and most popular webinar series I’ve ever been a part of. This is now available on YouTube and should be the first stop for anyone who wants to know what all of that “performance” stuff really means. Here is the first in the series:
[youtube=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NTDZn-ekgl0&list=PLH_ag5Km-YUbeWe1GnuQuC_D8JsH_udx1&index=2&t=0s”]
Silverton Consulting has a summary of the announcements from Pure Accelerate Conference. Saved me from having to do a lot of work, especially considering that I wasn’t able to go. 🙁 The Greybeards even did a podcast about the show, summarizing some of the key memorable elements.
The SNIA Networking Storage Forum is presenting a Webinar on “What Software-Defined Storage Means for Storage Networking” on October 22.
Synology Security News
It appears that there was a bit of a scare with some of the chips that Synology uses in a few of its Diskstation models. The good news (especially for me, as I just bought one of these models) is that Intel posted the Product Change Notification in error. So, if you heard – as I did, that quality issues may strike your Diskstation, as long as Intel is playing fairly it appears everything is all copacetic. Synology immediately released a Product Reliability Statement. For what it’s worth (and for future reference), Synology has made it easy to determine which CPU your Diskstation is using.
By the way, if you are a Synology owner, Synology has a Security Bug Bounty Program. Just saying’.
Bonus Round
Storage Newsletter has bizarrely omitted some phenomenal storage consultants on this list, many of whom deserve to be here more than the choices they made. So, I’ll fix this. In no particular order:
Greg Schulz (author of Software-Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials, Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking, Resilient Storage Networks, The Green and Virtual Data Center, among others, and also the founder and principal for StorageIO).
Rob Peglar {former VP of EMC, Micron, and a current Board Member of SNIA, and founder of Advanced Computation and Storage)
Ray Lucchessi (Founder of Silverton Consulting, and one of the hosts of Greybeards on Storage)
Howard Marks (Founder of DeepStorage.net now at Vast Data, but his material is still available)