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

  August 17, 2017 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  

  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 Nicole Hemsoth

  

  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 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  

  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 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  

  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 Nicole Hemsoth

  

  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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• Fix Your NAS With Metadata

  June 30, 2017 David Flynn

  

  Enterprises are purchasing storage by the truckload to support an explosion of data in the datacenter. IDC reports that in the first quarter of 2017, total capacity shipments were up 41.4 percent year-over-year and reached 50.1 exabytes of storage capacity shipped. As IT departments continue to increase their spending on capacity, few realize that their existing storage is a pile of gold that can be fully utilized once enterprises overcome the inefficiencies created by storage silos.

  A metadata engine can virtualize the view of data for an application by separating the data (physical) path from the metadata (logical) path. This …

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• Stretching the Business of Tape Storage to Extreme Scale

  June 14, 2017 Nicole Hemsoth

  

  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 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  

  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 Jeffrey Burt

  

  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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