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58: GreyBeards talk HCI with Adam Carter, Chief Architect NetApp Solidfire #NetAppHCI

Sponsored by: NetApp

In this episode we talk with Adam Carter (@yoadamcarter), Chief Architect, NetApp Solidfire & HCI (Hyper Converged Infrastructure) solutions. Howard talked with Adam at TFD16 and I have known Adam since before the acquisition. Adam did a tour de force session on HCI architectures at TFD16 and we would encourage you to view the video’s of his session.

This is the third time NetApp has been on our show (see our podcast with Lee Caswell and Dave Wright and our podcast with Andy Banta) but this is the first sponsored podcast from NetApp. Adam has been Chief Architect for Solidfire for as long as I have known him.

NetApp has FAS/AFF series storage, E-Series storage and SolidFire storage. Their HCI solution is based on their SolidFire storage system.

NetApp SolidFire HCI Appliance

 

NetApp’s HCI solution is built around a 2U 4-server configuration where 3 of the nodes are actual denser, new SolidFire storage nodes and the 4th node is a VMware ESXi host. That is they have a real, fully functional SolidFile AFA SAN storage system built directly into their HCI solution.

There’s probably a case to be made that this isn’t technically a HCI system from an industry perspective and looks more like a well architected, CI  (converged infrastructure) solution. However, they do support VMs running on their system, its all packaged together as one complete system, and they offer end-to-end (one throat to choke) support, over the complete system.

In addition, they spent a lot of effort improving SolidFire’s, already great VMware software integration to offer a full management stack that fully supports both the vSphere environment and the  embedded SolidFire AFA SAN storage system.

Using a full SolidFire storage system in their solution, NetApp  gave up on the low-end (<$30K-$50K) portion of the HCI market. But to supply the high IO performance, multi-tenancy, and QoS services of current SolidFire storage systems, they felt they had to embed a full SAN storage system.

With other HCI solutions, the storage activity must contend with other VMs and kernel processing on the server. And in these solutions, the storage system doesn’t control CPU/core/thread allocation and as such, can’t guarantee IO service levels that SolidFire is known for.

Also, by configuring their system with a real AFA SAN system, new additional ESXi servers can be added to the complex without needing to purchase additional storage software licenses. Further, customers can add bare metal servers to this environment and there’s still plenty of IO performance to go around. On the other hand, if a customer truly needs more storage performance/capacity, they can always add an additional, standalone SolidFire storage node to the cluster.

The podcast runs ~23 minutes. Adam was very easy to talk with and had deep technical knowledge of their new solution, industry HCI solutions and SolidFire storage.  It’s was a great pleasure for Howard and I to talk with him again. Listen to the podcast to learn more.

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Adam Carter, Chief Architect, NetApp SolidFire

Adam Carter is the Chief Product Architect for SolidFire and HCI at NetApp. Adam is an expert in next generation data center infrastructure and storage virtualization.

Adam has led product management at LeftHand Networks, HP, VMware, SolidFire, and NetApp bringing revolutionary products to market. Adam pioneered the industry’s first Virtual Storage Appliance (VSA) product at LeftHand Networks and helped establish VMware’s VSA certification category.

Adam brings deep product knowledge and broad experience in the software defined data center ecosystem.

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36: GreyBeards discuss VMworld2016 with Andy Banta, Storage Janitor, NetApp Solidfire

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Thanks Andy Warfield, Coho Data

In this episode, we talk with Andy Banta (@andybanta), Storage Janitor (Principal Virt. Architect), Netapp SolidFire. Andy’s been involved in Virtual Volumes (VVOLs) and other VMware API implementations at SolidFire and worked at VMware and other storage/system vendor companies before that.

Howard and I were at VMworld2016 late last month and we thought Andy would be a good person to discuss what went there this year.

No VVOLs & VSAN news at the show

Although, we all thought there’d be another release of VVOLs and VSAN announced at the show, VMware announced Cloud Foundation and Cross-Cloud Services. If anything the show was a bit mum about VMware Virtual Volumes (VVOLs) and Virtual SAN™ (VSAN) this year as compared to last.

On the other hand, Andy’s and other VVOL technical sessions were busy at the conference. And one of them ended up having standing room only and was repeated at the show, due to the demand. Customer interest in VVOLs seems to be peaking.

Our discussion begins with why VVOLs was sidelined this year. One reason was that there was a  focus from VMware and their ecosystem on Hyper Converged Infrastructure (HCI) and HCI doesn’t use storage arrays or VVOL.

Howard and I suspected with VMware’s ecosystem growing ever larger, validation and regression testing is starting to consume more resources. But Andy, suggested that’s not the issue, as VMware uses self-certification, where vendors run tests that VMware supplies to show they meet API requirements. VMware does bring in a handful of vendor solutions (5 for VVOLs) for reference architectures and to insure the APIs meet (major) vendor requirements but after that, it’s all self certification.

Another possibility was  that the DELL-EMC acquisition (closed 9/6) could be  a distraction. But Andy said VMware’s been and will continue on as an independent company and the fact that EMC owned ~84% of the stock never impacted VMware’s development before. So DELL’s acquisition shouldn’t either.

Finally we suggested that executive churn at VMware could be the problem. But Andy debunked that and said the amount of executive transitions hasn’t really accelerated over the years.

After all that, we concluded that just maybe the schedule had slipped and perhaps we will see something new in Barcelona for VVOLs and VMware APIs for Storage Awareness (VASA), at VMworld2016 Europe.

Cloud Foundation and Cross-Cloud Services

What VMware did announce was VMware Cloud Foundation and Cross-Cloud Services. This seems to signal a shift in philosophy to be more accommodating to the public cloud rather than just competing with them.

VMware Cloud Foundation is a repackaging of  VMware Software Defined Data Center (SDDC), NSX®,  VSAN and vSphere® into a single bundle that customers can use to spin up a private cloud with ease.

VMware Cross-Cloud Services is a set of targeted software for public cloud deployment to ease management and migration of services . They showed how NSX could be deployed over your cloud instances to control IP addresses and provide micro-segmentation services and how other software allows data to be easily migrated between the public cloud and VMware private cloud implementations. Cross Cloud Services was tech previewed at the show and Ray wrote a  post describing them in more detail (please see VMworld2016 Day 1 Cloud Foundation & Cross-Cloud Services post).

Cloud services

Howard talked about how difficult it can be to move workloads to the cloud and back again. Most enterprise application data is just too large to transfer quickly and to complex to be a simple file transfer.  And then there’s legal matters for data governance, compliance and regulatory regimens that have to be adhered to which make it almost impossible to use public cloud services.

On the other hand, Andy talked about work they had done at SolidFire to use cloud in development. They moved some testing to the cloud to spin up 1000s of (SolidFire simulations) instances to try to catch an infrequent bug (occurring once every 10K runs).  They just couldn’t do this in their lab. In the end they were able to catch and debug the problem much more effectively using public cloud services.

Howard mentioned that they were also using AWS as an IO trace repository for benchmark development work he is doing. AWS S3 as a data repository has been a great solution for his team, as anyone can upload their data that way. By the way, he is looking for a data scientist to help analyze, this data if anyone’s interested.

In general, workloads are becoming more transient these days. Public cloud services are encouraging this movement but Docker and micro services are also having an impact.

VVOLs

One can even see this sort of trend in VMware VVOLs, which can be  another way to enable more transient workloads. VVOLs can be created and destroyed a lot quicker than Vdisks in the pasts. In fact, some storage vendors are starting to look at VVOLs as transient storage and are improving their storage and meta-data garbage collection accordingly.

Earlier this year Howard, Andy and I were all at a NetApp SolidFire Analyst event in Boulder. At that time, SolidFire said that they had implemented VVOLs so well they considered “VVOLs done right”.  I asked Andy what was different with SolidFire’s VVOL implementation. One thing they did was completely separate the Protocol endpoints from the storage side. Another was to provide QoS at the VM level that could be applied to a single or 1000s of VMs

Andy also said that SolidFire had implemented a bunch of scripts to automate VVOL policy changes across 1000s of objects. SolidFire wanted to make use of these scripts for their own VVOL implementation but as they could apply to any vendors implementation of VVOLs, they decided to open source them.

The podcast runs over 42 minutes and covers a broad discussion of the VMware ecosystem, the goings on at VMworld and SolidFire’s VVOL implementation. Listen to the podcast to learn more.

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Andy Banta, Storage Janitor, NetApp SolidFire

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Andy is currently a Storage Janitor acting as a Principal Virtualization Architect at NetApp SolidFire, focusing on VMware integration and Virtual Volumes.  Andy was a part of the Virtual Volumes development team at SoldiFire.

Prior to SolidFire, he was the iSCSI Tech Lead at VMware, as well as being on the engineering teams at DataGravity and Sun Microsystems.

Andy has presented at numerous VMworlds, as well as several VMUGs and other industry conferences. Outside of work, and enjoys racing cars, hiking and wines. Find him on twitter at @andybanta.

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GreyBeards talk with Lee Caswell and Dave Wright of NetApp

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_201506-0063Dave 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

LeeLee 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.

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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 all-flash arrays with Dave Wright, CEO and founder of SolidFire

Welcome to our eight episode where we discuss all-flash storage with Dave Wright, CEO and founder of SolidFire. The Greybeards  just talked with Dave at the SDDC14  and Storage Field Day 5 in San Jose, CA last month.

In this podcast, we learn a lot about SolidFire and other storage arrays from a leading light in the all-flash storage industry. Dave seems to have been around a lot longer than his years and has worked extensively in the cloud gaming and service provider industries. All of which gives him a unique perspective on the needs of storage today.

This months episode comes in at just under 40 minutes. 

We had a wide ranging talk about the virtues of SolidFire’s scale-out, deduplicating Tier 1 & 2 storage, detour into flash technology and the problems benchmarking data reducing, all-flash arrays, and end up with a lengthy discussion on SolidFire’s QoS.

However, If you want to learn about Dave’s technical musings on all-flash architectures, the Greybeards suggest viewing his great video sessions at Storage Field Day 5. Dave did a presentation where he explains the inner workings of SolidFire and some of the other, competitive all-flash storage systems on the market today. The Greybeards seldom find CEO’s with this level of technical understanding of their own product, let alone the competition.

Somewhere during all this Ray learned yet another new acronym, listen to the podcast to learn more…

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DaveWright_SF_portraits-16Dave Wright, CEO and founder SolidFire

Dave Wright, SolidFire CEO and founder, left Stanford in 1998 to help start GameSpy Industries, a leader in online videogame 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 lead 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.  Dave leads the team at SolidFire in the creation of the only storage architecture built specifically to guarantee true Quality of Service (QoS) in a multi-tenant cloud infrastructure.