I heard storage beers last nite was quite the party, sorry I couldn’t make it but I did end up at the HDS customer reception which was standing room only and provided all the food and drink I could consume.
Saw quite a lot of old friends too numerous to mention here but they know who they are.
As for technology on display there was some pretty impressive stuff.
Lots of great technology on display there.
Virident tachIOn SSD
One product that caught my eye was from Virident, their tachIOn SSD. I called it a storage subsystem on a board. I had never talked with them before but they have been around for a while using NOR storage but now are focused on NAND.
Their product is a fully RAIDed storage device using flash aware RAID 5 parity locations, their own wear leveling and other SSD control software and logic with replaceable NAND modules.
Playing with this device I felt like I was swapping drives of the future. Each NAND module stack has a separate controller and supports high parallelism. Talking with Shridar Subramanian, VP of marketing, he said the product is capable of over 200K IOPS running a fully 70% read:30% write workload at full capacity.
They have a Capacitor backed DRAM buffer which is capable of uploading the memory buffer to NAND after a power failure. It plugs into a PCIe slot and uses less than 25W of power, in capacities of 300-800GB. It requires a software driver, they currently only support Linux and VMware (a Linux varient) but Windows and other O/Ss are on the way
Other SSDs/NAND storage
Their story was a familair refrain throughout the floor, lots of SSD/NAND technology coming out, in various formfactors. I saw one system using SSDs from Viking Modular Systems that fit into a DRAM DIMM slot and supported a number of SSDs behind a SAS like controller. Also requiring a SW driver.
Of course TMS, Fusion-IO, Micron, Pliant and others were touting their latest SSD/Nand based technology showing off their latest solutions and technology. For some reason lots of SSD’s at this show.
Naturally, all the other storage vendors were there Dell, HDS, HP, EMC, NetApp and IBM. IBM was showing off Watson, their new AI engine that won at Jeopardy.
And then there was cloud, …
Cloud was a hot topic as well. Saw one guy in the corner I have talked about before StorSimple which is a cloud gateway provider. They said they are starting to see some traction in the enterprise. Apparently enterprise are starting to adopt cloud – who knew?
Throw in a few storage caching devices, …
Then of course there was the data caching products which ranged from the relaunched DataRAM XcelASAN to Marvel’s new DragonFLY card. DragonFLY provides a cache on a PCI-E card which DataRAM is a FC caching appliance, all pretty interesting.
… and what’s organic storage?
And finally, Scality came out of the shadows with what they are calling an organic object storage device. The product reminded me of Bycast (now with NetApp) and Archivas (now with HDS) in that they had a RAIN architecture, with mirrored data in an object store interface. I asked them what makes them different and Jerome Lecat, CEO said they are relentlessly focused on performance and claims they can retrieve an object in under 40msec. My kind of product. I think they deserve a deeper dive sometime later.
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Probably missed a other vendors but these are my initial impressions. For some reason I felt right at home swapping NAND drive modules,…
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