In our 30th episode, we talk with Dave Wright (@JungleDave), SolidFire founder, VP & GM SolidFire of NetApp and Lee Casswell (@LeeCaswell), VP Products, Solution & Services Marketing NetApp. Dave’s been on before as CEO of SolidFire back in May of 2014, but this is the first time for Lee. Dave’s also been a prominent guest at Storage Field Day, most recently at SFD9 with Dave Hitz from NetApp. Unclear how Lee managed to avoid TFD/SFD duty but it’s only a matter of time.
Solidfire was recently acquired by NetApp in their largest acquisition ever, signaling a new direction for them (acquisition closed 2 Feb. 2016). Since we had spent a prior podcast on another recent storage acquisition, we thought it only appropriate to talk with these two as well. We started the discussion with Dave and how it feels to be within the NetApp umbrella.
Another topic that came up was how flash gets used in the cloud. Old school had it that flash was just high IO performance but nowadays, next gen application development has a range of IO requirements which all need consistent performance to data. Flash with scale out and QoS can handle this wide range of requirements across cloud applications. Lee mentioned how flash adoption is changing from application specific to more general purpose storage which is removing the “IO bottleneck”.
Google had written a study saying that for the next decade there will not be a flash-disk crossover but the differences are small enough that you almost have to be hyper-scale customers to see significant economic advantages.
We discussed the lack of lot’s of AFA’s doing well on throughput intensive benchmarks. Dave mentioned that throughput was one of disk’s better performing modes and in the past, storage interfaces 3Gbps-6Gbps hid a lot of flash performance. But benchmarks of synthesized pure workloads aren’t real world, workloads in real data centers are much messier.
IO density (IOPS/GB) came up as another discussion topic. At low IO density, disk may still make sense but as IO density increases, all flash makes much more sense.
Google also mentioned the importance of tail-end IO latency (IO latency at 99.9%). Poor tail IO latency has been an ongoing problem holding back the adoption of hybrid storage. All flash has same advantages here but are not all AFAs are immune to the problems in tail-end latency.
The podcast runs just over 39 minutes and episode covers a lot of ground about their products, flash technology advantages, and market dynamics. Listen to the podcast to learn more.
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Dave Wright, SolidFire Founder, Vice President, and GM
Dave Wright left Stanford in 1998 to help start GameSpy Industries, a leader in online video game media, technology, and software. While at GameSpy, Dave led the team that created a backend infrastructure powering thousands of games and millions of gamers. GameSpy merged with IGN Entertainment in 2004 to create one of the largest Internet gaming & entertainment media companies. Dave served as Chief Architect for IGN and led technology integration with FIM / MySpace after IGN was acquired by NewsCorp in 2005.
In 2007 Dave founded Jungle Disk, a pioneer and early leader in cloud-based storage and backup solutions for consumers and businesses. Jungle Disk was acquired by leading cloud provider Rackspace in 2008 and Dave worked closely with the Rackspace Cloud division to build a cloud platform supporting tens of thousands of customers. In December 2009 Dave left Rackspace to start SolidFire.
Lee Caswell, Vice President Product, Solutions, and Services Marketing
Lee Caswell is vice president of Product, Solutions and Services Marketing at NetApp, where he leads a team that speeds the customer adoption of new products, partnerships, and integrations. Lee joined NetApp in 2014 and has extensive experience in executive leadership within the storage, flash and virtualization markets.
Lee was previously vice president of Marketing at Fusion-IO (now SanDisk). Prior to Fusion-IO Lee was a founding member of Pivot3, a company considered to be an early innovator in hyper-converged systems, where he served as the CEO and CMO. Earlier in his career, Lee held marketing leadership positions at VMware, Adaptec, and SEEQ Technology (now LSI Logic). He started his career at General Electric in Corporate Consulting.
Lee holds a bachelor of arts degree in economics from Carleton College and a master of business administration degree from Dartmouth College. Lee is a New York native and has lived in northern California for many years. He and his wife live in Palo Alto and have two children. In his spare time Lee enjoys cycling, playing guitar, and hiking the local hills.
Disclaimer: NetApp and SolidFire have been clients of DeepStorageNet and NetApp is a current client of Silverton Consulting.