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38: GreyBeards talk with Rob Peglar, Senior VP and CTO, Symbolic IO

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.

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peglar_robert_160x200Rob Peglar, Senior VP and CTO, Symbolic IO

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.

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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.