Category: Software defined storage

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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.

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GreyBeards talk EMCWorld2015 news with Chad Sakac, Pres. EMC System Eng.

In this podcast we discuss some of the more interesting storage announcements to come out of EMCWorld2015 last week with Chad Sakac, (@sakacc on twitter and VirtualGeek blogger) President, EMC Global Systems Engineering. Chad’s was up on the “big stage” at EMCWorld helping to introduce much of the news we found thought provoking.

Chad said he was growing out his greybeard for the podcast, but we had to shut off the video to record the talk. But from the picture below, there’s no doubt he has a beard growing.

EMCWorld2015 in Las Vegas had over 14,000 participants and is EMC’s premier customer event. As such, there are always a lot of interesting news revealed at the show. This years event was no exception. I listed about a dozen topics to discuss with Chad but had to cut it down to just four major areas to fit into a reasonable time.

Chad at his VirtualGeek blog discussed many of these topics at length, across multiple posts and Ray reviewed some EMCWorld2015 news over two posts on his RayOnStorage blog as well.

In the podcast, Howard,  Ray and Chad discuss EMC’s new rack-scale flash storage, the DSSD, their new VxRack hyper converged system, the new XtremIO 4.0  and their new free & frictionless delivery model for Emerging Technology Devision software defined solutions.

I would have to say the DSSD drew the most interest from the analyst community but the new VxRack and the Emerging Technology Division’s move to open sourcing ViPR Controller caught many of us by surprise.

Just about at the end of the call Ray’s Internet service dropped out so Howard and Chad were kind enough to end the session by themselves. Thanks to my co-host for picking up the ball, after I fell off and my apologies for going missing at the end.

This months episode runs long, just under an hour and that’s after we cut about 5 minutes of discussion on the problems in open sourcing proprietary products. Chad can talk for hours on this stuff and pretty much at any level of technical detail we could possibly want. Probably need to invite him back someday to discuss more.

Sorry this podcast is so late but we had to wait for EMCWorld2015 to be over. Hopefully, next month we will be back on schedule.

We hope you enjoy the podcast.

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ChadSakac_Cropped-resizedChad Sakac, President Global EMC Systems Engineering

Chad Sakac leads EMC’s technology, architecture and strategy team across the world. He is a global thought leader and evangelist, with a background and skill set in IT strategy, innovation, disruption and organizational change.  He is intimately involved in driving EMC’s technology roadmap, acquisition strategy and R&D direction.

As a leading mind in IT, Chad is the author of one of the top 20 virtualization blogs “VirtualGeek”.  He holds Electrical Engineering and Computer Science degrees from the University Of Western Ontario, Canada.

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Greybeards talk about Storage Trends in our 2014 Yearend Podcast-part 3

In this our end of year video podcast Howard and I discuss some of the trends impacting the storage industry today.  Which include Cloud, SSD/Flash, software defined storage and converged server-storage systems and object storage.

The video comes in at a little more than 43 minutes and is available to be streamed, from Vimeo

or as a downloadable podcast in as a 3 videos.

Part 3 (~8 minutes) discusses the state of object storage and some of the trends impacting it’s adoption.

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