Fall SNWUSA wrap-up

Attended SNWUSA this week in San Jose,  It’s hard to see the show gradually change when you attend each one but it does seem that the end-user content and attendance is increasing proportionally.  This should bode well for future SNWs. Although, there was always a good number of end users at the show but the bulk of the attendees in the past were from storage vendors.

Another large storage vendor dropped their sponsorship.  HDS no longer sponsors the show and the last large vendor still standing at the show is HP.  Some of this is cyclical, perhaps the large vendors will come back for the spring show, next year in Orlando, Fl.  But EMC, NetApp and IBM seemed to have pretty much dropped sponsorship for the last couple of shows at least.

SSD startup of the show

The best, new SSD startup had to be Skyera. A 48TB raw flash dual controller system supporting iSCSI block protocol and using real commercial grade MLC.  The team at Skyera seem to be all ex-SandForce executives and technical people.

Skyera’s team have designed a 1U box called the Skyhawk, with  a phalanx of NAND chips, there own controller(s) and other logic as well. They support software compression and deduplication as well as a special designed RAID logic that claims to reduce extraneous write’s to something just over 1 for  RAID 6, dual drive failure equivalent protection.

Skyera’s underlying belief is that just as consumer HDAs took over from the big monster 14″ and 11″ disk drives in the 90’s sooner or later commercial NAND will take over from eMLC and SLC.  And if one elects to stay with the eMLC and SLC technology you are destined to be one to two technology nodes behind. That is, commercial MLC (in USB sticks, SD cards etc) is currently manufactured with 19nm technology.  The EMLC and SLC NAND technology is back at 24 or 25nm technology.  But 80-90% of the NAND market is being driven by commercial MLC NAND.  Skyera came out this past August.

Coming in second place was Arkologic an all flash NAS box using SSD drives from multiple vendors. In their case a fully populated rack holds about 192TB (raw?) with an active-passive controller configuration.  The main concern I have with this product is that all their metadata is held in UPS backed DRAM (??) and they have up to 128GB of DRAM in the controller.

Arkologic’s main differentiation is supporting QOS on a file system basis and having some connection with a NIC vendor that can provide end to end QOS.  The other thing they have is a new RAID-AS which is special designed for Flash.

I just hope their USP is pretty hefty and they don’t sell it someplace where power is very flaky, because when that UPS gives out, kiss your data goodbye as your metadata is held nowhere else – at least that’s what they told me.

Cloud storage startup of the show

There was more cloud stuff going on at the show. Talked to at least three or four cloud gateway providers.  But the cloud startup of the show had to be Egnyte.  They supply storage services that span cloud storage and on premises  storage with an in band or out-of-band solution and provide file synchronization services for file sharing across multiple locations.  They have some hooks into NetApp and other major storage vendor products that allows them to be out-of-band for these environments but would need to be inband for other storage systems.  Seems an interesting solution that if succesful may help accelerate the adoption of cloud storage in the enterprise, as it makes transparent whether storage you access is local or in the cloud. How they deal with the response time differences is another question.

Different idea startup of the show

The new technology showplace had a bunch of vendors some I had never heard of before but one that caught my eye was Actifio. They were at VMworld but I never got time to stop by.  They seem to be taking another shot at storage virtualization. Only in this case rather than focusing on non-disruptive file migration they are taking on the task of doing a better job of point in time copies for iSCSI and FC attached storage.

I assume they are in the middle of the data path in order to do this and they seem to be using copy-on-write technology for point-in-time snapshots.  Not sure where this fits, but I suspect SME and maybe up to mid-range.

Most enterprise vendors have solved these problems a long time ago but at the low end, it’s a little more variable.  I wish them luck but although most customers use snapshots if their storage has it, those that don’t, seem unable to understand what they are missing.  And then there’s the matter of being in the data path?!

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If there was a hybrid startup at the show I must have missed them. Did talk with Nimble Storage and they seem to be firing on all cylinders.  Maybe someday we can do a deep dive on their technology.  Tintri was there as well in the new technology showcase and we talked with them earlier this year at Storage Tech Field Day.

The big news at the show was Microsoft purchasing StorSimple a cloud storage gateway/cache.  Apparently StorSimple did a majority of their business with Microsoft’s Azure cloud storage and it seemed to make sense to everyone.

The SNIA suite was hopping as usual and the venue seemed to work well.  Although I would say the exhibit floor and lab area was a bit to big. But everything else seemed to work out fine.

On Wednesday, the CIO from Dish talked about what it took to completely transform their IT environment from a management and leadership perspective.  Seemed like an awful big risk but they were able to pull it off.

All in all, SNW is still a great show to learn about storage technology at least from an end-user perspective.  I just wish some more large vendors would return once again, but alas that seems to be a dream for now.