In this episode, the Greybeards discuss the year in storage and naturally we kick off with the consolidation trend in the industry and the big one last year, the DELL-EMC acquisition. How the high margin EMC storage business is going to work in a low margin company like Dell is the subject of much speculation. That and which of the combined companies storage products will make it through the transition make for interesting discussions. And Finally what exactly is Dell’s long term strategy is another question.
We next turn to the coming of age of object storage. A couple of years ago, object storage was being introduced to a wider market but few wanted to code to RESTful interfaces. Nowadays, that seems to be less of a concern and the fact that one can have onsite/offsite/cloud based object storage repositories from open source, proprietary solutions and everything in between is making object storage a much more appealing option to enterprise IT.
Finally, we discuss the new Tier 0. What with NVMe SSDs and the emergence of NVMe over Fabric coming out last year, Tier 0 has never looked so promising. You may recall that Tier 0 was hot about 5 years with TMS and Violin and others coming out with lightning fast storage IO. But with DELL-EMC DSSD: startups (E8 storage, Mangstor, Apeiron data systems, and others); NVMDIMMs, CrossBar, and Everspin coming out with denser offerings; and other SCM (Micron, HPE, IBM, others?) technologies on the horizon, Tier 0 has become red hot again.
Sorry about the occasional airplane noise and other audio anomalies. The podcast runs over 47 minutes. Howard and I could talk for hours on what’s happening in the storage industry. Listen to the podcast to learn more.
In this episode, we talk with Rob Peglar (@PeglarR), Senior VP and CTO of Symbolic IO, a computationally defined storage vendor. Rob has been around almost as long as the GreyBeards (~40 years) and most recently was with Micron and prior to that, EMC Isilon. Rob is also on the board of SNIA.
Symbolic IO has emerged out of stealth earlier this year and intends to be shipping products by late this year/early next. Rob joined Symbolic IO in July of 2016.
What’s computational storage?
It’s all about symbolic representation of bits. Symbolic IO has come up with a way to encode bit streams into unique symbols that offer significant savings in memory space, beyond standard data compression techniques.
All that would be just fine if it was at the end of a storage interface and we would probably just call it a new form of data reduction. But Symbolic IO also incorporates persistent memory (NV-DIMMs, in the future 3D XPoint, RERam, others) and provides this symbolic data inside a server, directly through its processor data cache, in (decoded) raw data form.
Symbolic IO provides a translation layer between persistent memory and processor cache that decodes the symbolic representation of the data in persistent memory for data reads on the way into data cache and encodes the symbolic representation of the raw data for data writes on the way out of cache to persistent memory.
Rob says that the mathematics are there to show that Symbolic IO’s data reduction is significant and that the decode/encode functionality can be done in a matter of a few clock cycles per cache (line) access on modern (Intel) processors.
The system continually monitors the data it sees to determine what the optimum encoding should be and can change its symbolic table to provide more memory savings for new data written to persistent memory.
All this reminds the GreyBeards of Huffman encoding algorithms for data compression (which one of us helped deploy on a previous [unnamed] storage product). Huffman encoding transformed ASCII (8-bit) characters into variable length bit streams.
Symbolic IO will offer 3 products:,
IRIS™ Compute, which provides a persistent memory storage, accessed using something like the Linux pmem library and includes Symbolic StoreModules™ (persistent memory hardware);
IRIS Vault, which is an appliance with its own (IRIS) infused Linux (Symbolic’s SymCE™) OS plus Symbolic IO StoreModules, that can run any Linux application without change accessing the persistent memory and offers full data security, next generation snapshot-/clone-like capabilities with BLINK™ full storage backups, and offers enhanced physical security with the removable, IRIS Advanced EYE ASIC; and
IRIS Store, which extends the IRIS Vault and IRIS Compute above with more tiers of storage, using Symbolic IO StoreModules as Tier1, PCIe (flash) storage as Tier 2 and external SSD storage as Tier 3 storage.
For more information on Symbolic IO’s three products, so we would encourage you to read their website (linked above).
The podcast runs long, over 47 minutes, and was wide ranging, discussing some of the history of processor/memory/information technologies. It was very easy to talk with Rob and both Howard and I have known Rob for years, across multiple vendors & organizations. Listen to the podcast to learn more.
Rob Peglar is the Senior Vice President and Chief Technology Officer of Symbolic IO. Rob is a seasoned technology executive with 39 years of data storage, network and compute-related experience, is a published author and is active on many industry boards, providing insight and guidance. He brings a vast knowledge of strategy and industry trends to Symbolic IO. Rob is also on the Board of Directors for the Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) and an advisor for the Flash Memory Summit. His role at Symbolic IO will include working with the management team to help drive the future product portfolio, executive-level forecasting and customer/partner interaction from early-stage negotiations through implementation and deployment.
Prior to joining Symbolic IO, Rob was the Vice President, Advanced Storage at Micron Technology, where he led next-generation technology and architecture enablement efforts of Micron’s Storage Business Unit, driving storage solution development with strategic customers and partners. Previously he was the CTO, Americas for EMC where he led the entire CTO functions for the Americas. He has also held senior level positions at Xiotech Corporation, StorageTek and ETA Systems.
Rob’s extensive experience in data management, analytics, high-performance computing, non-volatile memory, distributed cluster architectures, filesystems, I/O performance optimization, cloud storage and replication and archiving, networking, virtualization makes him a sought after industry expert and board member. He was named an EMC Elect in 2014, 2015 and 2016. He was one of 25 senior executives worldwide selected for the CRN ‘Storage Superstars’ Award in 2010.
Ray Lucchesi is the President and Founder of Silverton Consulting, a prominent blogger at RayOnStorage.com, and can be found on twitter @RayLucchesi.
DeepStorage, a prominent blogger at Deep Storage Blog and can be found on twitter @DeepStorageNet.
Rob Peglar, Senior VP and CTO, Symbolic IO