Tech Field Day Archives - Page 2 of 4

Open Source and Open Standards open the Future

By cfheoh | February 3, 2020 - 7:19 am |February 3, 2020 API, Big Data, Cloud, Composable Infrastructure, Data Fabric, Data Security, Disks, Filesystems, Intel, Linux, Memory Cloud, nVidia, PCIe, RDMA, Solid State Devices, Storage Field Day, Tech Field Day

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[Disclosure: I was invited by GestaltIT as a delegate to their Storage Field Day 19 event from Jan 22-24, 2020 in the Silicon Valley USA. My expenses, travel, accommodation and conference fees were covered by GestaltIT, the organizer and I was not obligated to blog or promote the vendors’ technologies to be presented at this event. The content of this blog is of my own opinions and views]

Western Digital dived into Storage Field Day 19 in full force as they did in Storage Field Day 18. A series of high impact presentations, each curated for the diverse requirements of the audience. Several open source initiatives were shared, all open standards to address present inefficiencies and designed and developed for a greater future.

Zoned Storage

One of the initiatives is to increase the efficiencies around SMR and SSD zoning capabilities and removing the complexities and overlaps of both mediums. This is the Zoned Storage initiatives a technical working proposal to the existing NVMe standards. The resulting outcome will give applications in the user space more control on the placement of data blocks on zone aware devices and zoned SSDs, collectively as Zoned Block Device (ZBD). The implementation in the Linux user and kernel space is shown below:

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Tiger Bridge extending NTFS to the cloud

By cfheoh | January 28, 2020 - 8:03 am |January 29, 2020 Appliance, Avere, Backup, Business Continuity, BYOD, CIFS, Cloud, Clusters, Data Archiving, Data Availability, Data Management, Data Protection, Datacore, Digital Transformation, Disaster Recovery, Fibre Channel, Filesystems, iSCSI, Microsoft, NAS, Nasuni, NetApp, Object Storage, Openstack, Storage Field Day, Storage Tiering, Stornext, Tape, Tape storage, Tech Field Day, Tiger Technology, Virtualization

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The NTFS File System has been around for more than 3 decades. It has been the most important piece of the Microsoft Windows universe, although Microsoft is already replacing it with ReFS (Resilient File System) since Windows Server 2012. Despite best efforts from Microsoft, issues with ReFS remain and thus, NTFS is still the most reliable and go-to file system in Windows.

First reaction to Tiger Technology

When Tiger Technology was first announced as a sponsor to Storage Field Day 19, I was excited of the company with such a cool name. Soon after, I realized that I have encountered the name before in the media and entertainment space.

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Hadoop is truly dead – LOTR version

By cfheoh | January 24, 2020 - 1:06 pm |January 24, 2020 Acquisition, Analytics, API, Artificial Intelligence, Big Data, Cloud, Cloudera, Containers, Data Management, Data Security, Deep Learning, Digital Transformation, Hadoop, Hadoop Clusters, Kubernetes, MapReduce, NAS, NetApp, Object Storage, Pure Storage, Storage Field Day, Tech Field Day

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This blog was not intended because it was not in my plans to write it. But a string of events happened in the Storage Field Day 19 week and I have the fodder to share my thoughts. Hadoop is indeed dead.

Warning: There are Lord of the Rings references in this blog. You might want to do some research. 😉

Storage metrics never happened

The fellowship of Arjan Timmerman, Keiran Shelden, Brian Gold (Pure Storage) and myself started at the office of Pure Storage in downtown Mountain View, much like Frodo Baggins, Samwise Gamgee, Peregrine Took and Meriadoc Brandybuck forging their journey vows at Rivendell. The podcast was supposed to be on the topic of storage metrics but was unanimously swung to talk about Hadoop under the stewardship of Mr. Stephen Foskett, our host of Tech Field Day. I saw Stephen as Elrond Half-elven, the Lord of Rivendell, moderating the podcast as he would have in the plans of decimating the One Ring in Mount Doom.

So there we were talking about Hadoop, or maybe Sauron, or both.

The photo of the Oliphaunt below seemed apt to describe the industry attacks on Hadoop.

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Zoned Technologies with Western Digital

By cfheoh | January 14, 2020 - 10:29 am |January 14, 2020 API, Composable Infrastructure, Disks, Drivescale, Dropbox, Filesystems, Flash, IoT, Linux, Liqid, Open Compute Project, Reliability, SATA, SCSI, Seagate, Solid State Devices, Storage Field Day, Tech Field Day, Western Digital

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[Disclosure: I am invited by GestaltIT as a delegate to their Storage Field Day 19 event from Jan 22-24, 2020 in the Silicon Valley USA. My expenses, travel, accommodation and conference fees will be covered by GestaltIT, the organizer and I am not obligated to blog or promote the vendors’ technologies to be presented at this event. The content of this blog is of my own opinions and views]

Storage Field Day 19 is a week away. And one of the vendors presenting is Western Digital, who also presented at Storage Field Day 18 almost a year ago. Here is my blog where I received the full force of Western Digital. In that 10 months or so, Western Digital has sold off their IntelliFlash assets to Data Direct Networks and leaving their ActiveScale object storage platform in limbo.

What is in store from Western D?

I am eager to find out what coming from Western Digital. They have tons of storage technologies that I have yet to encounter, and this anticipation is keeping me excited for the Western D session at Storage Field Day 19.

For a few years I have been keen on a few Western D’s technologies which were moving up the value chain. They are:

Symbotics Design™ (although I think they changed their marketing messaging)
OpenFlex architecture, Fabric devices and enclosures
KingFish™ API for composable infrastructure

In my patch, the signals of the 3 Western D’s technologies have gone weak in the past year. However, there is a lot of momentum right now for Zoned Storage and Zoned Name Space and I believe this could be what is in store for the storage propeller heads like us at Storage Field Day 19.

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Is General Purpose Object Storage disenfranchised?

By cfheoh | December 23, 2019 - 5:40 pm |January 14, 2020 100Gigabit Ethernet, Amazon Web Services, Analytics, API, Artificial Intelligence, Big Data, BYOD, Ceph, Cloud, Cloudian, Clusters, Deep Learning, DellEMC, Docker, Dropbox, Edge Computing, Filesystems, Flash, Gartner, Hadoop, HDS, High Performance Computing, Hitachi Vantara, IDC, Industry 4.0, IoT, Lustre, Machine Learning, Mellanox Technologies, Minio, NetApp, Object Storage, OpenIO, Openstack, Performance Benchmark, Reliability, Scale-out architecture, Software Defined Storage, Storage Field Day, Storage Market Share, swiftstack, Tape storage, Tech Field Day

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This is NOT an advertisement for coloured balls.

This is the license to brag for the vendors in the next 2 weeks or so, as we approach the 2020 new year. This, of course, is the latest 2019 IDC Marketscape for Object-based Storage, released last week.

My object storage mentions

I have written extensively about Object Storage since 2011. With different angles and perspectives, here are some of them:

The Future is Intelligent Objects (2011)
What should be Cloud Storage? (2011)
APIs that stick in Storage (2012)
Has Object Storage become the Everything Store? (2013)
Of Object Storage, Filesystems and Multicloud (2017)
My Dilemma of Stateful Storage Marriage (2018)
The Malaysian Openstack Storage Conundrum (2018)
Sleepless in Malaysia with Object Storage (2019)
The Waning Light of Openstack Swift (2019)

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Brainy Commvault

By cfheoh | October 17, 2019 - 3:40 am |October 17, 2019 Acquisition, Analytics, API, Artificial Intelligence, Big Data, Business Continuity, Cloud, Commvault, Containers, Data Archiving, Data Availability, Data Corruption, Data Fabric, Data Management, Data Privacy, Data Protection, Data Security, Deep Learning, Digital Transformation, Disaster Recovery, Filesystems, Hedvig, Hyperconvergence, IoT, Kubernetes, Machine Learning, Object Storage, Scale-out architecture, Software Defined Storage, Software-defined Datacenter, Storage Field Day, Storage Optimization, Storage Tiering, Tech Field Day, Unified Storage, Virtualization

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[Disclosure: I was invited by Commvault as a Media person and Social Ambassador to their Commvault GO 2019 Conference and also a Tech Field Day eXtra delegate from Oct 13-17, 2019 in the Denver CO, USA. My expenses, travel, accommodation and conference fees were covered by Commvault, the organizer and I was not obligated to blog or promote their technologies presented at this event. The content of this blog is of my own opinions and views]

The waltz across the Commvault-Hedvig mine field will not be easy. Commvault will have a lot of open discussions about their acquisition of Hedvig and how Hedvig “primary storage platform” will fit into a “secondary storage framework” of Commvault. The outcome of this consummation is yet to appear as a structured form. The storyline will eventually form as Commvault’s diligence to define their strategy moving forward.

Day 1

Day 1 was my open day at Commvault GO. I was absorbing the first impressions of Commvault again even though this was my third Commvault GO, after Washington DC and Nashville in 2017 and 2018 respectively. There was certainly a “startup” feeling again in Commvault since the appointment of Sanjay Mirchandani as CEO 9 months ago.

A lot of excitement and buzz were generated around the metallic, the Commvault venture into Software-as-a-Service (SaaS). The SaaS solution is targeted at the mid-market for organizations with 500-2500 staff count. Its simplicity and pricing were the 2 things which gave me a good feeling all over. There is even a 45-day trial for metallic.

Getting Brainy

My Day 2 itinerary was more specific because my agenda for this trip was to seek answers to the realization of Commvault-Hedvig.

Commvault took the distinction of using the vision of a DataBrain (#databrain) to define their strategy. From the picture below, the left and right hemisphere of the DataBrain forms the Storage Management piece on the left and Data Management on the right.

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Commvault coming all together

By cfheoh | October 15, 2019 - 2:58 pm |October 15, 2019 Acquisition, Analytics, Appliance, Artificial Intelligence, Backup, Big Data, Business Continuity, Cloud, Clusters, Commvault, Data Archiving, Data Availability, Data Corruption, Data Fabric, Data Management, Data Privacy, Data Protection, Data Security, Deduplication, Digital Transformation, Disaster Recovery, Edge Computing, eDiscovery, Filesystems, Forrester, Gartner, Hyperconvergence, Industry 4.0, Machine Learning, NAS, Object Storage, SAP, Scale-out architecture, Software Defined Storage, Software-defined Datacenter, Storage Optimization, Storage Tiering, Tech Field Day, Unified Storage, Virtualization

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This trip to the Commvault GO conference was pretty much a mission to find answers to their Hedvig acquisition just a month ago. It was an unprecedented move for Commvault and I, as an industry observer and pundit, took the news positively. I wrote in my blog about Commvault’s big bet and I liked their boldness in their approach.

But the news did not bode well back here in Malaysia. The local technology news portal, Data Storage Asean picked up the news in a rather unconvinced way. 2 long time Commvault partners I spoke to were obviously unhappy because the acquisition made little sense to them on the back of closing of the Commvault Malaysia office just weeks before this with more unsettling rumours of the Commvault team in Asia Pacific. The broken trust and the fear of what the future held for the Commvault customers in Malaysia and in the region were riding along with me on this trip.

But I have seen the beginning of the Commvault transformation from the Commvault GO conferences I have attended since 2017. This is my 3rd Commvault GO and I ended Day 1 with good vibes.

Here were some of my highlights in the first day. Continue reading →

Commvault big bet

By cfheoh | September 12, 2019 - 9:03 pm |September 12, 2019 Acquisition, Analytics, API, Appliance, Big Data, Business Continuity, Cisco, Cloud, Cohesity, Commvault, Data Archiving, Data Availability, Data Corruption, Data Fabric, Data Management, Data Privacy, Data Protection, Data Security, Deep Learning, Digital Transformation, Filesystems, Hadoop, Hadoop Clusters, Hedvig, Hitachi Vantara, Hyperconvergence, ILM, Infrascale, Machine Learning, MapReduce, Minio, NAS, NetApp, Object Storage, Scale-out architecture, Software Defined Storage, Software-defined Datacenter, Storage Field Day, Storage Tiering, Tape storage, Tech Field Day, Unified Storage, Veeam, Veritas, Zerto

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I woke up at 2.59am in the morning of Sept 5th morning, a bit discombobulated and quickly jumped into the Commvault call. The damn alarm rang and I slept through it, but I got up just in time for the 3am call.

As I was going through the motion of getting onto UberConference, organized by GestaltIT, I was already sensing something big. In the call, Commvault was acquiring Hedvig and it hit me. My drowsy self centered to the big news. And I saw a few guys from Veritas and Cohesity on my social media group making gestures about the acquisition.

I spent the rest of the week thinking about the acquisition. What is good? What is bad? How is Commvault going to move forward? This is at pressing against the stark background from the rumour mill here in South Asia, just a week before this acquisition news, where I heard that the entire Commvault teams in Malaysia and Asia Pacific were released. I couldn’t confirm the news in Asia Pacific, but the source of the news coming from Malaysia was strong and a reliable one.

What is good?

It is a big win for Hedvig. Nestled among several scale-out primary storage vendors and little competitive differentiation, this Commvault acquisition is Hedvig’s pay day.

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Scaling new HPC with Composable Architecture

By cfheoh | May 10, 2019 - 4:50 pm |May 10, 2019 100Gigabit Ethernet, Analytics, API, Appliance, Artificial Intelligence, Big Data, Cloud, Clusters, Composable Infrastructure, Containers, Data Fabric, Data Management, Deep Learning, DellEMC, Drivescale, High Performance Computing, Hyperconvergence, Infiniband, Liqid, Machine Learning, nVidia, NVMe, PCIe, RDMA, Scale-out architecture, Software Defined Storage, Software-defined Datacenter, Tech Field Day, Unified Storage, Virtualization

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[Disclosure: I was invited by Dell Technologies as a delegate to their Dell Technologies World 2019 Conference from Apr 29-May 1, 2019 in the Las Vegas USA. Tech Field Day Extra was an included activity as part of the Dell Technologies World. My expenses, travel, accommodation and conference fees were covered by Dell Technologies, the organizer and I was not obligated to blog or promote their technologies presented at this event. The content of this blog is of my own opinions and views]

Deep Learning, Neural Networks, Machine Learning and subsequently Artificial Intelligence (AI) are the new generation of applications and workloads to the commercial HPC systems. Different from the traditional, more scientific and engineering HPC workloads, I have written about the new dawn of supercomputing and the attractive posture of commercial HPC.

Don’t be idle

From the business perspective, the investment of HPC systems is high most of the time, and justifying it to the executives and the investors is not easy. Therefore, it is critical to keep feeding the HPC systems and significantly minimize the idle times for compute, GPUs, network and storage.

However, almost all HPC systems today are inflexible. Once assigned to a project, the resources pretty much stay with the project, even when the workload processing of the project is idle and waiting. Of course, we have to bear in mind that not all resources are fully abstracted, virtualized and software-defined whereby you can carve out pieces of the hardware and deliver a percentage of that resource. Case in point is the CPU, where you cannot assign certain clock cycles of CPU to one project and another half to the other. The technology isn’t there yet. Certain resources like GPU is going down the path of Virtual GPU, and into the realm of resource disaggregation. Eventually, all resources of the HPC systems – CPU, memory, FPGA, GPU, PCIe channels, NVMe paths, IOPS, bandwidth, burst buffers etc – should be disaggregated and pooled for disparate applications and workloads based on demands of usage, time and performance.

Hence we are beginning to see the disaggregated HPC systems resources composed and built up the meet the diverse mix and needs of HPC applications and workloads. This is even more acute when a AI project might grow cold, but the training of AL/ML/DL workloads continues to stay hot

Liqid the early leader in Composable Architecture

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Connecting ideas and people with Dell Influencers

By cfheoh | May 10, 2019 - 8:54 am |May 10, 2019 Analytics, Artificial Intelligence, Big Data, Big Switch Networks, Cloud, Composable Infrastructure, Data Management, Data Privacy, Data Protection, Data Security, Deep Learning, DellEMC, High Performance Computing, Hyperconvergence, Kemp Technologies, Liqid, Machine Learning, Microsoft, Software-defined Datacenter, Tech Field Day, VMware

AI Tweetup

In the razzmatazz, the most memorable moments were one of the Tweetups organized by Dr. Konstanze Alex (Konnie) and her team, and Tech Field Day Extra.

Tweetup was alien to me. I didn’t know how the concept work and I did google tweetup before that. There were a few tweetups on the topics of data protection and 5G, but the one that stood out for me was the AI tweetup.

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Category Archives: Tech Field Day