• Stretching the Business of Tape Storage to Extreme Scale

    June 14, 2017

    IPOs and major investments in storage startups are one thing, but when it comes to a safe tech company investment, all bets are still on tape.

    The rumors of tape’s death are greatly exaggerated, but there have been some changes to the market. While the number of installed sites might be shrinking for long-time tape storage maker, SpectraLogic, the installation sizes of its remaining customers keeps growing, which produces a nice uptick in revenue for the company, according to its CTO, Matt Starr.

    This makes sense since the relatively smaller backups and archives make better performance sense on disk—and many …

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  • Clever RDMA Technique Delivers Distributed Memory Pooling

    June 12, 2017 Agam Shah

    More databases and data stores and the applications that run atop them are moving to in-memory processing, and sometimes the memory capacity in a single big iron NUMA server isn’t enough and the latencies across a cluster of smaller nodes are too high for decent performance.

    For example, server memory capacity tops out at 48 TB in the Superdome X server and at 64 TB in the UV 300 server from Hewlett Packard Enterprise using NUMA architectures. HPE’s latest iteration of the The Machine packs 160 TB of shared memory capacity across its nodes, and has an early version of …

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  • Memory-Like Storage Means File Systems Must Change

    May 24, 2017

    The term software defined storage is in the new job title that Eric Barton has at DataDirect Networks, and he is a bit amused by this. As one of the creators of early parallel file systems for supercomputers and one of the people who took the Lustre file systems from a handful of supercomputing centers to one of the two main data management platforms for high performance computing, to a certain way of looking at it, Barton has always been doing software-defined storage.

    The world has just caught up with the idea.

    Now Barton, who is leaving Intel in the …

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  • Dell EMC Upgrades Flash in High-End Storage While Eyeing NVMe

    May 9, 2017

    When Dell acquired EMC in its massive $60 billon-plus deal last year, it boasted that Dell was inheriting a boatload of new technologies that would help propel forward its capabilities and ambitions with larger enterprises.

    That included offerings ranging from VMware’s NSX software-defined networking (SDN) platform to VirtuStream and its cloud technologies for running mission critical applications from the likes of Oracle, SAP and Microsoft off-premises. In particular, Dell was acquiring EMC’s broad and highly popular storage portfolio, in particular the high-end VMAX, XtremeIO, and newer ScaleIO lineups as well as its Isilon storage arrays for high performance workloads.

    Dell …

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  • Impatient For Fabrics, Micron Forges Its Own NVM-Express Arrays

    May 8, 2017

    There may be a shortage in the supply of DRAM main memory and NAND flash memory that is having an adverse effect on the server and storage markets, but there is no shortage of vendors who are trying to push the envelope on clustered storage using a mix of these memories and others such as the impending 3D XPoint.

    Micron Technology, which makes and sells all three of these types of memories, is so impatient with the rate of technological advancement in clustered flash arrays based on the NVM-Express protocol that it decided to engineer and launch its own product …

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  • Rambus, Microsoft Put DRAM Into Deep Freeze To Boost Performance

    May 6, 2017

    Energy efficiency and operating costs for systems are as important as raw performance in today’s datacenters. Everyone from the largest hyperscalers and high performance computing centers to large enterprises that are sometimes like them are trying squeeze as much performance as they can from their infrastructure while reining in power consumption and the costs associated with keeping it all from overheating.

    Throw in the slowing down of Moore’s Law and new emerging workloads like data analytics and machine learning, and the challenge to these organizations becomes apparent.

    In response, organizations on the cutting edge have embraced accelerators like GPUs and …

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  • Swiss Army Knife File System Cuts Through Petabytes

    May 1, 2017

    Petabytes are in the future of every company, and luckily, the future is always being invented by the IT ecosystem to handle it.

    Those wrestling with tens to hundreds of petabytes of data today are constantly challenged to find the best ways to store, search and manage it all. Qumulo was founded in 2012 and came out of the chute two years ago with the idea that a software-based file system that includes built-in analytics that enables the system to increase capacity as the amount of data grows. QSFS, now called Qumulo Core, also does it all: fast with big …

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  • Riding The Virtual SAN Gravy Train

    April 24, 2017

    Being the first mover in establishing a new technology in the enterprise is important, but it is not more important than having a vast installed base and sales force peddling an existing and adjacent product set in which to sell a competing and usually lagging technology.

    VMware can’t be said to have initially been particularly enthusiastic about server-SAN hybrids like those created by upstart Nutanix, with its Acropolis platform, or pioneer Hewlett Packard Enterprise, which bought into the virtual SAN market with its LeftHand Networks acquisition in October 2008 for $360 million and went back to the hyperconverged well …

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  • Intel Shuts Down Lustre File System Business

    April 20, 2017

    Chip maker Intel is getting out of the business of trying to make money with a commercially supported release of the high-end Lustre parallel file system. Lustre is commonly used at HPC centers and is increasingly deployed by enterprises to take on their biggest file system jobs.

    But don’t jump too far to any other conclusions. The core development and support team, minus a few key people who have already left, remains at Intel and will be working on Lustre for the foreseeable future.

    Intel quietly announced its plans to shutter its Lustre commercialization efforts in a posting earlier this …

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  • FPGAs To Shake Up Stodgy Relational Databases

    April 18, 2017

    So you are a system architect, and you want to make the databases behind your applications run a lot faster. There are a lot of different ways to accomplish this, and now, there is yet another — and perhaps more disruptive — one.

    You can move the database storage from disk drives to flash memory, You can move from a row-based database to a columnar data store that segments data and speeds up accesses to it. And for even more of a performance boost, you can pull that columnar data into main memory to be read and manipulated at memory …

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