Tech Field Day Calling…! – #SFD8

Posted on October 5, 2015 by admin

Its only just a few days to go for the Storage Field Day 8..!

For me this will be the second Tech Field Day event as a delegate and after a wonderful experience at Storage Field Day 7. Here you can find few posts from me on SFD7.

SFD7

 

The event schedule is 20th-23rd October, at San Jose. This time we have 10 presenting companies. I have heard of the solutions from a few of them, but for me many are new. Be prepared for some great discussions on storage, virtualization, Flash and more and more. The presenters for SFD8 are listed below.

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Cohesity, Coho Data, INFINIDAT, Intel, NexGen, Nimble Storage, Primary Data, Pure Storage, Qumulo, Violin Memory.

Looking forward to hear from these presenters, learning more about their solutions.

We have a rich delegate panel as always. Delegates include Alex Galbraith, Dan Frith , Enrico Signoretti , Howard Marks, Jarett Kulm, Jon Klaus , Josh De Jong, Mark May , Ray Lucchesi, Scott D. Lowe

I’m really honored to be a one among them. It will be great meeting and learning from these masters.

I would like to thank the Tech Field Day team (Stephen Foskett and Claire Chaplais) for inviting me again.

For more details please visit the SFD8 page. You may follow the live streaming of the event also at the SFD8 webpage during the event.

More posts coming soon from Storage Field Day 8..!

Disclaimer: My travel and accommodation expenses for the SFD8 (Storage Field Day 8) event were paid by the Tech Field Day team. I am not requested to post about event content and I am not getting paid for any posts or for the time I spend during the event.

Posted in Events, Tech Field Day | Tagged , , , | 3 Comments

Cloudian HyperStore – S3-compliant, object storage for all your cloud needs

Posted on July 22, 2015 by admin

Cloudian provides their customers with an on-premises Amazon S3 solution with their S3-compliant, object based storage solution. During their  Storage Field Day 7 presentation, the Cloudian team discussed the HyperStore solution and it’s features.

cloudian-logo_vipinvk.in

Cloudian enables the Enterprise customers to build managed private cloud and hybrid cloud solutions with their HyperStore solution. This solution also helps the Cloud Service Providers for building public and private cloud solutions. With the 100% S3-compliance, Cloudian is eyeing the market area where the majority of the cloud customers are.

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Why S3 : Amazon S3, the largest cloud ecosystem is offering many advanced features to their customers. Being the most popular platform, there are thousands of Apps available in the market based on S3 APIs. S3 compliance enables the Cloudian customers to have easier access to these features and make use of available tools. Cloudian is 100% S3-compliant with all the nodes running native S3 APIs, i.e, no translation required.

Hyperstore software and Appliances : Cloudian’s HyperStore software solutions run on commodity hardware. Cloudian also delivers appliances made of Commodity hardware which comes pre-configured. HyperStore appliances are available 3 different models based on Size of the deployments. HyperStore appliances helps the customers with faster deployment and scaling as the hardware comes pre-configured. Each node joins the P2P ring in a HyperStore system.

Multi-tenant, multi-dc : Another important feature to be discussed is the multi-tenant and multi-dc nature with a single HyperStore solution. With this feature each tenant in a solution can have it’s own policies. Based on the nature of the object, customers can decide the protection mechanism (erasure-coding, replication) and these can be changed dynamically. A HyperStore system can span across multiple DCs also.

Cloudian uses Cassandra, for their metadata and distribution, taking the improved scalability and reliability into account. Cassandra have a major role in various features of HyperStore solution including better scaling (scale-out in nature), multi-dc capability etc…

HyperStore solution have a lot of other features including Smart support, higher durability, data protection (Erasure coding, Replication etc…), programmable API etc.. Management is also made easier with the Cloudian user interface.

Free trial : Cloudian gives you a free community edition of the HyperStore software which can be installed on physical machine or a VM. This free software (Up to 10TB’s) gives you the full features and you can design your public/private/hybrid cloud storage solution You can find the environmental requirements and more details from the download page.

Additional resources : 

Additional reading and presentation videos from the Tech Field Day website here.

Product overview from Cloudian website here.

Here you can find more posts from me on SFD7.

Disclaimer: My travel and accommodation expenses for the SFD7 (Storage Field Day 7) event were paid by the Tech Field Day team. I am not requested to post about event content and I am not getting paid for any posts or for the time I spend during the event.

Posted in Cloud Computing, Events, Tech Field Day | Tagged , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

EMC CloudArray, cloud storage to local SAN/NAS

Posted on July 15, 2015 by admin

CloudArray, a cloud-integrated storage solution from TwinStrata (a company acquired by EMC in 2014) enables the customers to cost-effectively utilize their public/private cloud storage. The solutions are available in both appliance-based and software-only varieties.

CloudArray_vipinvk.in

I recently got a chance to know CloudArray in detail. A quick view of the product in this post.

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Public Cloud to SAN/NAS :  CloudArray supports integration with a list of public cloud providers including Amazon S3, Atmos, Cloudian, Google, HP, NFS, RackSpace etc… and more. Customers can have their space from public cloud and make it usable as local SAN devices or NAS shares with CloudArray. This enables the customers to make use of their existing cloud storage and reduce the expense for the additional storage hardware. Storage being from the cloud, is of unlimited scalability.

The cache for the CloudArray (for virtual edition) operations need to be configured with local disks. This improves the performance in operations by the reduced latency in access. The amount of cache recommendations varies with the various virtual appliances available.

With Release 5 :With the recent major release (release 5, in Jan 2015), CloudArray extended its support to cloud providers including EMC ViPR and ECS . There are improvements in hardware capabilities and also they have enhanced the User Interface. The current version available is 5.1.

CloudArray supports iSCSI (over 10G and 1G with the appliance-based systems), NFSv3, NFSv4, CIFS, SMB and SMB2 protocols. Configuring iSCSI SAN devices or the NAS shares/exports are very simple with CloudArray.

Try, for free : CloudArray free trial version (for 45 days) is available for qualified business end-users via the CloudArray website.

CloudArray_vipinvk.in

Once logged in to the website you can download the version of the virtual appliance of your choice. Software versions available are as shown in the image here (available for both VMware ESX and Microsoft Hyper-V).

Install the software, configure with any of the supported cloud storage available with you, and happy testing..!

Additional Reading :  You may find more details of the product and offerings from the product website.

Posted in Cloud Computing, EMC | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment

Exablox OneBlox Scale-out NAS – an overview

Posted on June 26, 2015 by admin

Exablox presented their object-based scale-out NAS solution on Day-3 of the Storage Field Day 7 event by Tech Field Day. Exablox is a scale-out NAS solution provider in the market from early 2013. Solutions from Exablox got some advanced features compared to the conventional NAS solutions.

Exablox_1

Let’s read more about the solution and some attractions from them. Continue reading →

OneBlox Appliances : OneBlox currently have OneBlox 4312 and 3308 appliances available in the market. Customer is given the freedom to use their own disks in these appliances (Disks can be of different type and sizes). Exablox is not supplying hard disks with their appliances. 4312 supports 12 hard disks (with a maximum capacity of 96TB/appliance supported) and 3308 can have 8 hard disks.

OneBlox appliances form a ring architecture as more appliances are added to the system. These appliances will have a global filesystem running across them. Addition of new appliances to the ring is online and transparent to end users. A single OneBlox ring can scale upto nearly 700TBs.

Exablox

From Exablox R&D Lab

Object-based : OneBlox have an Object-based storage approach, file-based front-end and object-based at back-end. Data from the end users – either SMB or NFS – are mapped to objects by the OneBlox system and stored. Object-based approach adds up flexibility and have a lot of other advantages including their cloud-based management system, CDP snapshots etc…

OneBlox have a future-oriented cloud-based management system, called OneSystem. Management is intended to be completely via cloud. The small LCD panel in front of the appliance is used for the initial setup of the appliance. OneBlox user data firewall ensures the data is not shared with the cloud.

My take : The BYOD (Bring Your-Own Drive) is a big advantage for the customers as they can use (can mix and match also) their own hard disks. I became a fan of the hardware design with lower power consumption and reduced noise. Many of the customers are still hesitant in getting into the cloud, but cloud-based management from OneBlox will be widely accepted as more industries accept the requirement of cloud-based solutions. With the advantages of Object-based storage solution in addition to the scale-out nature, there’s enough scope for Exablox OneBlox in today’s storage market.

Additional links :

Additional reading and more links here

Solution overview from Exablox website here

Here you can find more posts from me on SFD7.

Disclaimer: My travel and accommodation expenses for the SFD7 (Storage Field Day 7) event were paid by the Tech Field Day team. I am not requested to post about event content and I am not getting paid for any posts or for the time I spend during the event.

Posted in Events, Tech Field Day | Tagged , , , , | 1 Comment

EMC vVNX – The hardware-less future…

Posted on June 22, 2015 by admin

Recently, during the EMC World 2015 EMC announced the vVNX ( known as Project Liberty during development phase), the software version of EMC VNXe. With EMC vVNX, customers can take advantage of the unified VNXe solution without having dedicated storage hardware.

Things are going virtual, day-by-day.

vVNX

EMC vVNX solution provides SAN and NAS functionalities running on standard x86 hardware running VMware ESX. vVNX community edition is for test and development environments and is free for unlimited period of time. You can download it Continue reading →

 here

vVNX runs on VMware ESXi 5.5 or later versions. More environmental requirements from the product site below.

  • VMware infrastructure: VMware vCenter and ESXi Server, release 5.5 or later
  • Network infrastructure: 2x 1 GbE OR 2x 10 GbE
  • Battery-backed Hardware RAID controller required (512MB NV Cache recommended)

The current version is limited to 4 TB of storage and 32 Filesystems. But the system gives features including virtual provisioning and snapshots. You may refer the product page for more reading on configuration and support. Also, You may watch the EMC World demo of the vVNX by Chad Sakac.

My take : As the environments are going towards software-defined solutions, EMC took a very good step forward which may have a huge impact in the storage market. Even though it is not a multi hypervisor solution, the choice of the most commonly used solution – VMware – may attract more customers towards this solution. The standard x86 hardware support and the market value for the hardware solutions – VNX and VNXe – , will give an edge in marketing for EMC among others. With the non-commercial version today in market, we should expect the entry of the production version soon.

EMC VNX solutions getting delivered in CD’s instead of big wooden cartons, really..!

Posted in Announcements, EMC, VNXe | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment

Hyper-converged solutions – The Maxta way…!

Posted on June 12, 2015 by admin

The final presentation from the event – SFD7 – was by Maxta , known for their Hyper-converged solutions in the market. Maxta is offering both appliance based and software-only solutions to the customers. These solutions are targeting customers with a variety of use-cases including Business Applications, Test/Dev, DR, VDI etc… Let’s discuss more about these products here in this post.

maxta

 

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Solutions Overview : MaxDeploy and MxSP are the appliance-based and software-only solutions from Maxta respectively. MxSP runs on x86 hardwares and supports KVM, OpenStack and VMware platforms. Hyper-V platform is not supported by Maxta solutions. The MaxDeploy appliances comes with factory-configured Maxta software, which enables faster installation and initial configuration. Maxta claims the customers can have their VMs created by 15 minutes from power ON. oh, that’s really fast.!

Scale up or Sclae Out:  Customers can add compute nodes without disks (adds processing power) or nodes with disks installed. Disks supported include HDDs and SSDs (Best practice : SSD capcity should be a minimum of 5% or 10% of HDD capacity depending on the configuration).Maxta solutions are optimized for a hybrid configuration, so going with a full-flash configuration may not give the best performance.

The portion of the SSD capacity will be used as protected cache (intent logs and metadata), across all the nodes. Maxta favors any new incoming writes to be forwarded to the underutilized/new nodes/drives. Data will be re-balanced periodically across all the nodes to avoid hotspots on nodes. Also the system does proactive relocation to reduce issues like disk-full condition etc…

Snapshots/clones functionality.available with Maxta is great and they allows quick recovery from snapshots. They have tested environments with 5K snapshots for a single VM. These are one of the functionality enables the Maxta solutions to have Enterprise-class data services.

When it comes to purchasing Maxta solutions, customers can have their desired hardware configuration for the Maxta MaxDeploy Appliances. And the software cost is based on the total raw capacity across the entire cluster, not on the usable capacity.

Additional Links :

Maxta Presentation on YouTube

Blog post by Dan Frith

Blog post by Keith Townsend

Product overview from Maxta website

Here you can find more posts from me on SFD7. Comment your thoughts…

Disclaimer: My travel and accommodation expenses for the SFD7 (Storage Field Day 7) event were paid by the Tech Field Day team. I am not requested to post about event content and I am not getting paid for any posts or for the time I spend during the event.

Posted in Events, Tech Field Day | Tagged , , , , | 1 Comment

SDS from Springpath – hyper-convergence with greater flexibility

Posted on June 9, 2015 by admin

On Day-2 SFD-7, we had a presentation from Springpath – a startup in Software defined Data platform. With the HALO (Hardware Agnostic Log-structure Objects) architecture and multi-platform support, Springpath Data Service (SDS) platform is soon going to be a big competitor to any of the market leaders in near future.

Springpath_logo_300_120

 

The technical discussion was lead by Mallik Mahalingam and Krishna Yadappanavar the founders of the company. As they know their product very much, they were able to get into detail about all the features, architecture and implementation. In this post here, let us discuss about the features of SDS from Springpath.

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The Cluster : Springpath offers a hyper-convergence software solution – SDS – which can be run on various platforms including VMware vSphere, Hyper-V, KVM, Docker Containers etc… This multi-platform support is a great advantage for Springpath Data platform compared with the competitors. Springpath gives a software-only solution which can run on hardwares from majority of the vendors. SDS cluster makes use of the HDD and Flash drives from the hardware for datastores and the cache layer.

Springpath Data Platform is very simple and easy to manage as it is leveraging existing management tools and being basically a software-only solution. It can run on a minimum of three node cluster. And the system allows independent scaling of HDD nodes, SSD nodes (contributes towards the caching layer) or the compute nodes. The data gets automatically re-balanced across the tiers as new nodes are getting added to the cluster.

Caching : The caching system is really complex with the SDS platform and it plays an integral role in making the system work as cool as it is. The cache leveraged architecture reduces hotspots on a specific node and allows the content to be addressed across multiple nodes. The caching tier contains cache vNodes over the physical SSD nodes. The data striping is done internal to the VM layer (underlying VMDK layer) and is being distributed across the nodes. All the incoming writes are mirrored at the caching tier.

Features ++ : Multi-platform support, quick installation and provisioning, linear scale-out capability, easy addition/removal of nodes etc… are some of the big positives of SDS platform. Easier snapshot handling (Faster creation and deletion of pointer-based snapshots), faster inline dedupe and compression capabilities, advanced caching system which reduce the hotspot nodes, easy and used-to management with the use of existing management tools etc… also deserve a note.

Additional links :

Springpath Presentation on YouTube

A preview post by Keith Townsend

Blog post by Dan Frith

Blog post by Ray Luchessi

Blog post by Arjan Timmerman

An overview to the solution from the Springpath website

Here you can find more posts from me on SFD7. Comment your thoughts…

Disclaimer: My travel and accommodation expenses for the SFD7 (Storage Field Day 7) event were paid by the Tech Field Day team. I am not requested to post about event content and I am not getting paid for any posts or for the time I spend during the event.

Posted in Events, Tech Field Day | Tagged , , , , , | 3 Comments

Administering a VMAX-3 series system ? A few things you have to consider..

Posted on June 8, 2015 by admin

EMC VMAX-3 series systems were launced almost an year back, and more and more customers are going for VMAX-3 now. From an administration perspective there are few differences with VMAX-3 from the previous VMAX series.

vmax3

You may read the architectural differences in my previous posts on VMAX-3 series. Let’s discuss some of the most important things to be taken into consideration while creating new devices with the new product series..

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No Thick devices:

VMAX-3 series does not support thick devices. All devices are thin devices and space will only be allocated when the system start writing data into it. And the thin device extent is 128KB (improved granularity from 768KB in previous models).

No Meta :

VMAX-3 series does not support meta device creation. With the maximum size of single device support in TBs (240GB is the max size of a single device in VMAX 2nd gen), there’s no need of a meta creation.. 🙂

As meta is not supported, auto meta feature also is not available with VMAX-3 series. You will find N/A for the auto meta feature in symcfg list -v output instead of enabled/disabled.

Increased track size :

VMAX-3 now have a track size of 128KB. It is now doubled from 64KB (1 track = 64KB with the previous generation of VMAX systems) and hence a Cylinder in VMAX-3 is 1920 KB (With VMAX series it was 960KB). This is very much important to remember this during device creations.

More in coming posts… Your thoughts in comments. Thanks.

Posted in EMC, Symmetrix, VMAX | Tagged , , , , , | 4 Comments

Vote now for the top virtualization blogs for 2015

Posted on March 5, 2015 by admin

This is time for you to vote for the top virtualization blogs for the year of 2015. Voting started on Sunday, 1st March 2015 and the results for this year is expected to be out by 19th March. Vote now for your best ones from different categories .

TopVBlog2015

About the contest

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An yearly voting system carried out by the vsphere-land.com, for identifying the best rated virtualization blogs. This year’s program is sponsored by Infinio. The voting is based on the blogs listed in the vLaunchpad website and those which were nominated within the given deadline. You can select the top blogs in different categories including Storage,Scripting, VDI, Podcast, New blog etc..

My blog is also participating the contest in the storage blog category. But I would like to mention that, this is not a request to vote for my blog site. As requested in the voting page, be fair and objective while voting so that we can ensure the most deserved will be getting listed.

The Winners

Getting listed in the top 10,25,50 or 100 is a huge, really huge accomplishment for any blogger, considering the recognition you will be getting in the technical blogging world. In addition to the recognition the top 50 bloggers this year will receive special coins from Infinio. More details about the coin can be found here.

The result for last year’s edition can be found here.

So now it is you to decide the best blogs for this year. Vote now..!

Posted in General, Vitulization | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

It’s Storage Field Day again…! – #SFD7

Posted on March 4, 2015 by admin

In less than a week now, it’s Storage Field Day again..! I am extremely excited to join the team next week at San Jose, California. A small post here on the event highlights .

SFD7

At first a few lines about the event in case if the program is new for you. Storage Field Day is conducted by Gestalt IT as part of the Tech Field Day events. SFD will have presentations from leading storage vendors on their products. Selected delegates – usually those whose voice is being heard via their blogs, speeches, podcasts and other technical community engagements – will be invited to attend the event.

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About Tech Field Day from the website :

“Our Field Day events bring together innovative IT product vendors and independent thought leaders to share information and opinions in a presentation and discussion format. Independent bloggers, speakers, freelance writers, and podcasters have a public presence that has immense influence on the ways that products and companies are perceived and by IT practitioners. …”

SFD7 is happening next week (11-13 March) at San Jose. This will be my first SFD event. There will be a lot of learning, fun and more…

Presenters this time include,

Catalogic Software ,  Cloudian , Exablox , Kaminario , maxta , Primary Data , Springpath  and there may be sessions from few more vendors.

Now let’s come to the delegates. I am really honored to join these experts, as a delegate.

Arjan Timmerman , Chris M Evans , Christopher Kusek , Dan Frith , Dave Henry , Enrico Signoretti , Howard Marks , Jon Klaus , Keith Townsend , Mark May , Ray Lucchesi

Assured best updates from storage arena, follow them..!

Stephen Foskett , Claire Chaplais and the rest of the event staff are doing a fantastic job behind the scenes.

For live streaming of the program and for more details, visit the SFD7 event webpage.

More news and updates on SFD7 in coming posts. Stay tuned…

Posted in Events, Tech Field Day | Tagged , , | 2 Comments