• Red Hat Stretches Gluster Clustered Storage Under Containers

    October 5, 2017

    Red Hat has been aggressive in building out its capabilities around containers. The company last month unveiled its OpenShift Container Platform 3.6, its enterprise-grade Kubernetes container platform for cloud native applications that added enhanced security features and greater consistency across hybrid and multi-cloud deployments.

    A couple of weeks later, Red Hat and Microsoft expanded their alliance to make it easier for organizations to adopt containers. Red Hat last year debuted OpenShift 3.0, which was based on the open source Kubernetes orchestration system and Docker containers, and the company has since continued to roll out enhancements to the platform.

    The …

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  • The Ascendancy Of Ethernet Storage Fabrics

    September 26, 2017

    It is hard to remember that for decades, whether a system was large or small, its storage was intricately and inescapably linked to its compute.

    Network attached storage, as pioneered by NetApp, helped break those links between compute and storage in the enterprise at the file level. But it was the advent of storage area networks that allowed for storage to still be reasonably tightly coupled to servers and work at the lower block level, below file systems, while at the same time allowing that storage to scale independently from the number of disks you might jam into a single …

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  • The Prospects For A Leaner And Meaner HPE

    September 6, 2017

    The era of Hewlett Packard Enterprise’s envious – and expensive – desire to become IT software and services behemoth like the IBM of the 1990s and 2000s is coming to a close.

    The company has finalized its spinout-merger of substantially all of its software assets to Micro Focus. HPE has already spun out the lion’s share of its outsourcing and consulting businesses to Computer Sciences and even earlier had split from its troublesome PC and very profitable printer businesses. These were spun out together to give the combined HP Inc a chance to live on Wall Street and because PCs …

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  • Future Interconnects: Gen-Z Stitches A Memory Fabric

    September 5, 2017

    It is difficult not to be impatient for the technologies of the future, which is one reason that this publication is called The Next Platform. But those who are waiting for the Gen-Z consortium to deliver a memory fabric that will break the hegemony of the CPU in controlling access to memory and to deepen the memory hierarchy while at the same time flattening memory addressability are going to have to wait a little longer.

    About a year longer, in fact, which is a bit further away than the founders of the Gen-Z consortium were hoping when they launched …

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  • Kafka Wakes Up And Is Metamorphosed Into A Database

    August 30, 2017

    Sometimes a database is like a collection of wax tablets that you can stack and sort through to update, and these days, sometimes it is more like a river that has a shape defined by its geography but it is constantly changing and flowing and that flow, more than anything else, defines the information that drives the business. There is no time to persist it, organize it, and then query it.

    In this case, embedding a database right in that stream makes good sense, and that is precisely what Confluent, the company that has commercialized Apache Kafka, which is a …

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  • How To Do Stateless Compute, Clustered Storage Like A Hyperscaler

    August 17, 2017

    There are so many companies that claim that their storage systems are inspired by those that have been created by the hyperscalers – particularly Google and Facebook – that it is hard to keep track of them all.

    But if we had to guess, and we do because the search engine giant has never revealed the nitty gritty on the hardware architecture and software stack underpinning its storage, we would venture that the foundation of the current Google File System and its Colossus successor looks a lot like what storage upstart Datrium has finally, after many years of development, brought …

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  • An Exascale Timeline for Storage and I/O Systems

    August 16, 2017

    The more things change, the more they stay the same.

    While exascale supercomputers mark a next step in performance capability, at the broader architectural level, the innovations that go into such machines will be the result of incremental improvements to the same components that have existed on HPC systems for several years.

    In large-scale supercomputing, many performance trends have jacked up capability and capacity—but the bottlenecks have not changed since the dawn of computing as we know it. Memory latency and memory bandwidth remain the gating factors to how fast, efficiently, and reliably big sites can run—and there is still …

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  • How Hardware Drives The Shape Of Databases To Come

    August 15, 2017

    One of the reasons that the University of California at Berkeley was been a hotbed of software technology back in the 1970s and 1980s is Michael Stonebraker, who was one of the pioneers in relational database technology and one of the industry’s biggest – and most vocal – shakers and movers and one of its most prolific serial entrepreneurs.

    Like other database pioneers, Stonebraker read the early relational data model papers by IBMer Edgar Codd, and in 1973 started work on the Ingres database along IBM’s own System R database, which eventually became DB2, and Oracle’s eponymous database, which entered …

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  • The Ironic – And Fleeting – Volatility In NVM Storage

    August 14, 2017

    There is no question any longer that flash memory has found its place – in fact, many places – in the datacenter, even though the debate is still raging about when or if solid state memory will eventually replace disk drives in all datacenters of the world.

    Sometime between tomorrow and never is a good guess.

    Flash is still a hot commodity, so much so that the slower-than-expected transition to 3D NAND has caused a shortage in supply that is driving up the price of enterprise-grade flash – unfortunately at the same time that memory makers are having trouble cranking …

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  • Fresh Thinking on Programmable Storage

    August 1, 2017

    The difficult part about storage these days is far less about capability than about adapting to change. Accordingly, the concept of programmable storage is getting more traction.

    With such an approach, the internal services and abstractions of the storage stack can be considered as building blocks for higher level services and while this may not be simple to implement, it can work to eliminate duplication of complex, unreliable software that is commonly used as a workaround for storage system deficiencies.

    A team from the University of California Santa Cruz has developed a programmable storage platform to counter these issues called …

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