Tfd12 on The IT Hollow

What Capabilities are Needed for a Startup Storage Company?

Tue, 10 Jan 2017 15:00:51 +0000

At this point I assume everyone is tired of hearing about storage arrays. They seem to have saturated the market to the point where the new storage companies have all but evaporated, or got bought by a larger company. Couple that with a focus on moving to public clouds and the storage array seems to have been beaten to death.

While I was at Tech Field Day 12 I had the opportunity to see the folks over at StorageOS present on their fancy new storage solution. I was fully prepared to be lulled to sleep with another storage device but StorageOS had an interesting new take on the storage array. Their solution is to use containers to provide a global namespace to a clustered file system. Having a lightweight 40MB container acting as a controller for your virtual storage array could be an interesting topic all by itself. Off of the top of my head the use cases would include:

Is Everything Pay-as-You-Go?

Mon, 12 Dec 2016 15:05:29 +0000

A recent vendor product briefing during Tech Field Day 12 got me thinking about the term “pay-as-you-go”. In my line of work, I talk about public cloud a decent amount and maybe I take pay-as-you-go for granted. When I think about this term it means that as soon as I’m done with a resource, I can destroy it and no longer have to pay for it anymore. It also means that I can scale when I need to and just start paying for the new resources as I start consuming them.

Decouple Disks and Compute with DriveScale

Mon, 05 Dec 2016 15:05:15 +0000

I was pretty unsure of the value proposition from DriveScale in the weeks preceding Tech Field Day 12. Maybe the reason is because I’m not a Hadoop expert by any means. They have a pretty interesting idea though, so I wanted to make sure others were clear about what their solution was capable of.

In a virtualized world, we’re pretty familiar with decoupling disks from our storage. It’s done via storage arrays that present iSCSI, Fibre Channel, NFS or whatever. Once we’ve presented a pool of disks to our hypervisor, we can carve up small virtual disks to be used with our virtual machines. In a Hadoop world, we want to have direct access to our drives so that HDFS can manage the storage. For this, we usually have rack mounted pizza box type servers with a certain amount of storage in them and then we can add multiples of them to form a cluster. DriveScale wanted to give HDFS some extra flexibility by allowing a pool of disks to be added, or removed to our servers.

Throw Your Isilon in the Data Lake

Wed, 16 Nov 2016 18:10:59 +0000

Customers have a ton of requirements around log aggregation, file shares, media streaming repositories, and just a simple place to store objects. It can be difficult to manage all of these different use cases but Dell EMC Isilon might just be the solution that can help to manage these requirements. Many times customers have several small islands of storage used for different purposes. Maybe this is because of a brand new requirement like “all security camera data will be stored for seven years”, which might require some additional storage space. Whatever the reason, companies many times will have small islands of storage, possibly even from different storage companies. This can become tough to manage and require more storage administrators with differing skill sets.