Category: Scale-out storage

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GreyBeards talk with Pivot3 and NexGen Storage about their recent acquisition announcement

In our 29th episode, we talk with John Spiers (@lefthandsan), Co-founder & CEO of NexGen Storage and Ron Nash (@hronaldnash), Chairman & CEO of Pivot3, a hyper converged infrastructure provider.  We have talked with John before (see last June’s podcast episode) about NexGen Storage technology. Recently, Pivot3 announced they were going to acquire NexGen Storage and Howard and I wanted to talk about to them what brought the two together.

We have discussed hyper converged solutions before (see ScaleComputing and Gridstore podcasts) dating all the way to the first GreyBeardsOnStorage podcast with Nutanix but this is the first time we have talked with Pivot3 and Ron Nash. As discussed in those podcasts hyper converged infrastructure (HCI) brings together compute, storage and sometimes networking under one overarching infrastructure framework and delivers all this as a single solution that customers can then tailor to their own needs. In a typical HCI solution, storage is software defined, compute is under the control of a hypervisor and can include software defined networking.

Sometime last fall both John and Ron were considering additional funding opportunities with their VC’s, when one of them, Brian Smith of S3 Ventures, suggested they look at combining their two operations into one company.

It seemed that John was looking to expand their sales and marketing team to take NexGen Storage to the next level while Ron was looking for some additional differentiation in storage technology that could take their solution beyond where they were today. It seemed to Mr. Smith that each of them had just what the other one was looking for.

As GreyBeardsOnStorage listeners should recall, NexGen Storage is known for their hybrid storage solution with fine grained QoS capabilities. Although, NexGen Storage is delivered as an appliance, their main IP is in storage software and so implementing a Software Defined Storage solution under HCI was certainly an option.

Pivot3 has been around since 2002 and has sale teams around the world with an extensive marketing team. Pivot3 uses Zen and now mostly VMware for their hypervisor environments and typically run on whitebox servers with storage bridge bay boxes running software defined storage. Pivot3 had already implemented scaleable erasure coding which is something NexGen Storage was also looking at.

Pivot3 and the rest of the HC solutions market space seems split into two. That is there is a good market at the low end, where small companies, remote offices, small workgroups, etc. are looking for an easy to deploy, full IT stack solution. And at the high end, large web properties and other IT behemoths  also need an easy to deploy, readily automated solution, that can scale to whatever size they require.

Both Pivot3 and NexGen Storage work well in VDI deployments but NexGen was mostly deployed in currently running VDI environments, whereas Pivot3 primarily went into brand new deployments, that could take advantage of HCI solutions.

In the podcast we discuss some of these large organizations such as Google, Facebook, Etrades and others and what they are looking for in an IT infrastructure. We also discuss some of the technology trends that are impacting both HCI and storage infrastructure. It turns out NexGen’s extensive QoS capabilities are what can make HCI deployments work even better than they do today.

In the past couple of days, the technology teams of the two companies have been hot and heavy, examining possible synergies and discussing how to reconcile their respective roadmaps. John and Ron were sitting in the back during these discussions throwing out ideas which the technical teams ran with as far as they could.

The podcast runs just over 41 minutes and episode covers a lot of ground about both of their products market spaces, technology, and business dynamics and especially, on how they see the two solutions complementing each other. Apparently the acquisition is on a fast path to close soon. Listen to the podcast to learn more.

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Ron Nash 2016[1][1]Ron Nash, Chairman and CEO, Pivot3

Ron brings senior leadership and experience as the chairman and CEO of Pivot3. He has held numerous leadership roles at both start-up and enterprise information technology companies including ExoLink (acquired by Alliance Data Systems), Advanced Telemarketing (now Aegis Global) and Rubicon (acquired by Cerner), Perot Systems (now Dell Services) and EDS (now HP Enterprise Service). More recently, he served as a partner at InterWest Partners, investing in successful breakthrough technology companies like Pivot3 and Lombardi Software (acquired by IBM).

 

John Spiers Headshot[1][1][1][1]John Spiers, Founder and CEO, NexGen Storage

John is a serial entrepreneur based in Boulder, CO. John has been pioneering breakthrough data storage innovations for over 30 years. He co-founded venture-backed LeftHand Networks, a market leader in virtualized, scale-out data storage, and served as LeftHand’s Chief Technology Officer. In 2010 John co-founded NexGen Storage. John supports local entrepreneurs, serving on the boards of local technology startups and as an advisor for the Blackstone Entrepreneurs Network. John is a graduate from Colorado State University with a degree in Engineering.

 

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GreyBeards on Storage year end 2015 podcast

In our annual yearend podcast and it’s the Ray and Howard show, talking about storage futures, industry trends and some storage world excitement of- the past year.

We start the discussion deconstructing recent reductions in year over year revenues at major storage vendors. It seems with the advent of all flash arrays (AFA), and all major vendors and most startups now have AFAs, customers no longer feel the need to refresh old storage hardware with similarly (over-)configured new systems. Instead, most can get by with AFA storage, at smaller capacities that provides the same, if not better, performance. Further9, the fact that AFAs are available from so many vendors and startups, customers no longer have to buy performance storage exclusively from major vendors anymore. This is leading to a decline in major vendor storage revenues, which should play itself out over the next 1-2 years as most enterprise storage systems are refreshed.

Recent and future acquisitions also came up for discussion. NetApp’s purchase of SolidFire was a surprise, but SolidFire had carved out a good business with service providers and web-scale customers which should broaden NetApp’s portfolio. In the mean time, the Dell-EMC acquisition takes them out of the competition for new technology acquisitions, at least until it closes. NetApp’s new CEO, George Kurian, appears more willing than his predecessor to go after good storage technology, wherever it comes from.

Software delivered (defined) storage came up as well. With the compute available in todays micro-processors, there’s very little a software delivered storage system can’t do. And with scale-out storage, there’s even more cores to work with. Software delivered storage and scale-out will continue to play a spoiler role, at least in the low to mid-range, in the storage market throughout the next year.

Nonetheless, hardware still has some excitement left. Intel’s recent acquisition of Altera, now makes Xeon/x86 processing available for embedded applications that previously had to rely on ARM and MIPS processing. Now, there’s nothing an FPGA hardware based system can’t do. Look for lot’s more activity here over the long term.

We talked about recent SMR disks coming out and how they could be used in storage systems today.  There was some adjacent discussion on the flash-disk crossover, and conclude it’s unlikely over the next 3-5 years, at least for capacity drives. Although there’s plenty of analyst that say it’s already happened, on a pure $/GB there’s still no comparison.

We then turned to  3D TLC NAND and the  reliability capabilities available from current controlller technologies. Raw planar NAND available today is much less reliable than what we had 1-2 generations back, but the drives, if anything, have gotten more reliable. This is due to the reliability technology inherent in todays SSD controllers.

We had an aside, on SSD overprovisioning and how this should become a customer level option.  Reducing overprovisioning would decrease drive endurance but it’s a tradeoff that the vendors/distributors make for customers today. We feel that at least for some customers, they could make this decision just as well. Especially if drive replacements were a customer maintenance activity with replacement SSDs shipped in a just-in-time manner.

We conclude on 3D XPoint (3DX) non-volatile memory. We both agreed 3DX adoption depends on pricing which will change over time. In the long term, we see the potential for a new storage system with 3DX or other new non-volatile memory as a top performing storage/caching/non-volatile memory tier, 3D TLC NAND as a middle tier and SMR disk as the bottom tier. When is another question.

Our year end discussion always wanders a bit, from high end business trends to in the weeds technologies and everything in-between. This one is no exception and runs over 49 minutes. We tried to do another Year End video this time but neither of our video recording systems worked out, but we had a good audio recording, so we went with the podcast this year. Next year should be back to video.  Listen to the podcast to learn more.

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Howard Marks

Howard Marks is the Founder and Chief Scientist of howardmarksDeepStorage, a prominent blogger at Deep Storage Blog and can be found on twitter @DeepStorageNet.

 

Ray Lucchesi

Ray Lucchesi is the President and Founder of Silverton Consulting, a prominent blogger at RayOnStorage.com, and can be found on twitter @RayLucchesi.

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GreyBeards talk HPC storage with Molly Rector, CMO & EVP, DDN

oIn our 27th episode we talk with Molly Rector (@MollyRector), CMO & EVP of Product Management/Worldwide Marketing for DDN.  Howard and I have known Molly since her days at Spectra Logic. Molly is also on the BoD of SNIA and Active Archive Alliance (AAA), so she’s very active in the storage industry, on multiple dimensions and a very busy lady.

We (or maybe just I) didn’t know that DDN has a 20 year history in storage and in servicing high performance computing (HPC) customers. It turns out that more enterprise IT organizations are starting to take on workloads that look like HPC activity.

In HPC there are 1000s of compute cores that are crunching on PB of data. For Oil&Gas companies, it’s seismic and wellhead analysis; with bio-informatics it’s genomic/proteomic analysis; and with financial services, it’s economic modeling/backtesting trading strategies. For today’s enterprises such as retailers, it’s customer activity analytics; for manufacturers, it’s machine sensor/log analysis;  and for banks/financial institutions, it’s credit/financial viability assessments. Enterprise IT might not have 1000s of cores at their disposal just yet, but it’s not far off. Molly thinks one way to help enterprise IT is to provide a SuperComputer as a service (ScaaS?) offering, where top 10 supercomputers can be rented out by the hour, sort of like a supercomputing compute/data cloud.

We start early talking about DDN WOS: object store, which can handle archive to cloud or backend tape libraries. Later we discuss DDN ExaScaler and GridScaler, which are NAS appliances for Lustre and massively scale out, parallel file system storage, respectively.

Another key supercomputing storage requirement is  predictable performance. Aside from sophisticated QoS offerings across their products, DDN also offers the IME solution, a bump in the cable, caching system, that can optimize large and small file IO activity for backend DDN NAS scalers. DDN IME is stateless and can be removed from the data path while still allowing IT access  to all their data.

While we were discussing DDN storage interfaces, Molly mentioned they were working on an Omni Path Fabric.  Intel’s new Omni Path Fabric is intended to replace rack scale PCIe networks for HPC.

This months edition is not too technical and runs just over 45 minutes. We only got to SNIA and AAA at the tail end and just for a minute or two. Molly’s always fun to talk to, with enough technical smarts to keep Howard and I at bay, at least for awhile :). Listen to the podcast to learn more.

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HeadshotMolly Rector, CMO and EVP Product Management & Worldwide Marketing,  DDN

With 15 years of experience working in the HPC, Media and Entertainment, and Enterprise IT industries running global marketing programs, Molly Rector serves as DDN’s Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) responsible for product management and worldwide marketing. Rector’s role includes providing customer and market input into the company’s product roadmap, raising the Corporate brand visibility outside traditional markets, expanding the partner ecosystem and driving the end-to-end customer experience from definition to delivery.

Rector is a founding member and currently serves as Chairman of the Board for the Active Archive Alliance. She is also the Storage Networking Industry Association’s (SNIA) Vice Chairman of the Board and the Analytics and Big Data committee Vice Chairman. Prior to joining DDN, Rector was responsible for product management and worldwide marketing as CMO at Spectra Logic. During her tenure at Spectra Logic, the company grew revenues consistently by double digits year-over-year, while also maintaining profitability. Rector holds certifications as CommVault Certified System Administrator; Veritas Certified Data Protection Administrator; and Oracle Certified Enterprise DBA: Backup and Recovery. She earned a Bachelor’s of Science degree in biology and chemistry.

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GreyBeards talk data-aware, scale-out file systems with Peter Godman, Co-founder & CEO, Qumulo

In this podcast we discuss Qumulo’s data-aware, scale-out file system storage with Peter Godman, Co-founder & CEO of Qumulo. Peter has been involved in scale-out storage for a while now, coming from (EMC) Isilon before starting Qumulo. Although, this time he’s adding data-awareness to scale-out storage. Presently, Qumulo is vertically focused on the HPC and media/entertainment market spaces.

Qumulo is the first storage vendor we have heard of that implements their software with Agile development techniques. This allows them to release new functionality to the field every two weeks – talk about rapidly turning out software. We believe this is pretty risky and Ray talks more about Agile development for storage in his Storage on Agile blog post.

But Qumulo mostly sees itself as data aware NAS, using Posix metadata and a neat, internally designed/developed database to store, index and retrieve file system metadata. Qumulo’s proprietary database provides much faster response to queries on meta-data, such as what files have changed since last backup, calculate all the  storage space consumed by a specific owner, supply inclusion/exclusion lists to split the file systems into 100 partitions, etc. The database is not a relational or conventional database, but almost old-school, indexed data structures tailored to providing quick answers to the queries of most interest to customers and their application environment. In a scale-out NAS environment like Qumulo’s, with potentially billions of files, you just don’t have time to walk an inode tree to get these sorts of answers, anymore.

Qumulo supplies both hardware and software to its customers but also offers a software-only or software defined storage (SDS) version for those few customers that want it. SDS versions can help potential customers perform  proofs of concept (PoCs) using VMs.

In their system nodes, Qumulo uses SSDs and disks. SSDs provide a sort of NVM that holds recently written data but can also be used for reading data. Behind the SSDs are 8TB disks. Today, Qumulo provides mirrored storage that’s widely spread or dispersed across all the storage in their system. With this wide-striping of data, rebuild times for (an 8TB) disk failure is ~1:20 for a single QC204 (204TB) system node and halves every time you double the number of nodes.

It was refreshing to hear a startup vendor clearly answer what they have and don’t have implemented in their current system. Some startups try to obfuscate or talk around the lack of functionality but Peter’s answers were always clear and (sometimes to) concise on what’s in and not in current Qumulo functionality.

This months edition runs just over 47 minutes and gets pretty technical in places, but mostly stays at a high functional level.  We hope you enjoy the podcast.

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Peter Godman, Co-founder & CEO Qumulo

pete_7CPeter brings 20 years of industry systems experience to Qumulo. As VP of Engineering and CEO of Corensic, Peter brought the world’s first thin-hypervisor based product to market. As Director of Software Engineering at Isilon, he led development of several major releases of Isilon’s award-winning OneFS distributed file system and was inventor of 18 patented technologies. Peter studied math and computer science at MIT.

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GreyBeards talk Nexgen Storage with John Spiers, CEO and Kelly Long, CTO Nexgen Storage

In this podcast we discuss Nexgen’s hybrid storage with John Spiers, Founder & CEO and Kelly Long, Founder & CTO of Nexgen Storage. Both John and Kelly have had a long and interesting career across multiple companies ranging from startups to major industry organizations, so they bring a unique perspective to what’s happening in the storage industry today.

Nexgen Storage has an unusual history itself, having been acquired by FusionIO, then SanDisk acquired FusionIO and then SanDisk spun out Nexgen Storage as an independent company again. There were good reasons for each of these changes and John goes into some detail in the podcast on these transitions.

Some of Nexgen Storage’s competitive advantages are from a few decisions, made early on in the development of the product. Specically, the use of PCIe Flash storage as a separate storage tier and their vision of the need for highly granular Quality of Service (QoS) functionality.

It turns out that Nexgen Storage was an early adopter of FusionIO’s PCIe flash cards and continues to use SanDisk solutions in their hybrid storage today. John and Kelly discuss some of  their considerations behind using PCIe Flash vs. SSDs in the podcast.

John and Kelly also talk about why QoS is so important to today’s storage systems and and how Nexgen’s QoS differs from the rest of the competition. Some of the data Nexgen gathers about IO and other system activity is pretty impressive and as it turns out, is absolutely essential to providing the level QoS that Nexgen supplies.

Another item discussed on the podcast is Nexgen’s data reduction capabilities which they refer to as “simple dedupe”. It’s not quite dedupe, but it does have some interesting characteristics we haven’t seen in other storage systems.

Finally, at the end of the podcast, there’s some discussion on the hardware innovation coming out around the PCIe bus and what this might mean to future storage systems.

This months editionruns just under 44 minutes and doesn’t get as technical as some of our previous sessions. We even discuss goto market strategies at prior companies and channel changes that transpired during the FusionIO and SanDisk acquisitions.  We hope you enjoy the podcast.

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John Spiers, Founder & CEO, and Kelly Long, Founder & CTO, Nexgen StorageJohn Spiers

John is a serial entrepreneur based in Boulder, CO. John has been pioneering breakthrough data storage innovations for over 30 Years. He co-founded venture-backed LeftHand Newtorks, a market leader in virtualized, scale-out data storage, and served as LeftHand’s Chief Technology Officer. In 2010 John co-founded NexGen Storage. John supports local entrepreneurs, serving on the boards of local technology startups and as an advisor for the Blackstone Entrepreneurs Network. John is a graduate from Colorado State University with a degree in Engineering.

Kelly Long

 

Kelly has been innovating in the storage industry for over 20 years. An expert in architecting and developing storage software, Kelly has contributed to the advancement of a wide range of technologies such as hard drives, high currency multi-thread/multi-processor/multi-computer computing and clustered storage systems. He holds multiple patents, and has worked at leading companies, including Maxtor, StorageTek, LeftHand Networks, Copan, Dot Hill, Crosswalk, MySQL and Sun. He was a co-founder and chief software architect at LeftHand Networks. Kelly has a BS in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Colorado at Boulder.