You can vote on which one you prefer in the bonus section below!
In this Short Take: trying out a new featured image, major shifts in storage company management positions, and a must read white paper on ransomware for the storage administrator.
As always, links were live at the time of publication.
- Storage Media and Technology
- Storage Companies in the News
- Industry Associations and Standards
- Webinars and Conferences
- Bonus Round
Storage Media and Technology
I've always been in awe of LightBits Labs. They're the people (well, Sagi Grimberg, mostly) who wrote NVMe/TCP. Believe it or not, NVMe/TCP is (to me) the least interesting technology they develop. Right now, though, they received a patent on how to find the optimal overprovisioning ratio for NVMe devices. For those who may not live in this world, the debate on how to find the sweet spot for overprovisioning drives is non-trivial. This is pretty neat. Well, to me, anyway.
ICYMI, OpenZFS 2.1 is out.
MIT was issued a patent for a "system for de-duplicating network coded distributed storage and related techniques."
Could HCI be growing up?
This is a really good blog by ArchitectingIT on why Object Storage performance varies greatly.
An Ode to the HDD.
With all the conversation about ransomware recently, there is a way to understand what's going on and learn how to find telltale signs about what's going on when ransomware attacks. My friend Chris Lionetti from HPE wrote a brilliant white paper on how to understand what's going on by looking at the read/write characteristics of your storage. It's a fascinating outlook on recognizing not just what is going wrong, but when. I highly recommend reading his white paper. Don't let the HPE logo fool you - this is applicable to storage and ransomware.
Storage Companies in the News
Silk (née Kaminario), just secured $55M in a Series B financing round. It seems the company has been able to gain some traction since the name change.
Acronis CEO and founder Serguei Beloussov steps down, to be replaced by Patrick Pulvermeuller (who comes from GoDaddy).
Dave Wright (photo stolen from Blocks and Files) is actually 288 years old.
Dave Wright, the Peter Pan of the Storage industry (seriously, this guy must have found the Fountain of Youth and drinks it like Gatorade), has left SolidFire to go work in the Financial Industry. (I'm teasing Dave, for whom I have the most utmost and profound respect.)
Computational Storage company NGD Systems is now using its considerable computational power to work on Chia cryptocurrency.
I really, really like LINBIT. I think they have incredible technology and are just great people as well. I don't normally do straight-up press releases, but there's a lot in this release to like. It introduces the CNCF Sandbox to many people, as well as perhaps a new model of doing block storage in an ephemeral, programmable world.
Fungible has a new CEO. Pradeep Sindhu is moving to a Chief Development Officer role (though staying in the Executive Chairman of the Board role). Eric Hayes is joining the company as the new chief, having experience in both Marvell and Broadcom.
Industry Associations and Standards
Hitachi Ventara's Vijeth Shivappa has joined SNIA India's Technical Council.
Webinars and Conferences
First and foremost, there won't be an Flash Memory Summit in 2021. It's been pushed out to 2022.
FMS intends to go live and in person in 2022.
Did you see the Debate on Hyperconverged vs. Disaggregated vs. Centralized storage? The Q&A was just published.
SNIA is putting on a webinar on how to deploy Confidential Computing. If you haven't heard about Confidential Computing, you will. It's an emerging topic that will have particular importance in a world of unsafe actors.
NVM Express put on a webinar on July 14 about Conformance Testing. This is truly a geek-out webinar, and primarily geared towards developers. However, there is also a section on what's new in NVMe 2.0 (compared to 1.4). That means this webinar puts a practical spin on the protocol and how it gets deployed.
The OpenCompute Summit is happening November 9-10 (in person), and the Call For Papers is still open.
Bonus Round
So, I hired a couple of people on Fiverr to see if they could come up with something interesting and new instead of the old logos. But which one should I choose? Leave a comment below and let me know which one is your favorite!
Old one:
Original Design
Version 1:
Version 2:
