Here are a few links to some random news items and other content that I found interesting. You might find them interesting too. Let’s dive in to lucky number 13.
Pure Storage recently acquired software-defined filer company Compuverde. You can read the press release here. Speaking of Pure Storage, Cody has a great rundown on Pure Storage’s FlashArray NVMe-oF support that you can read here.
Liking the sound of file in your NVMe-oF? You’ll be happy to know that E8 Storage and ThinkParQ announced a technology partnership to enable the integration of BeeGFS with E8 Storage’s NVMe-oF solution. You can find the press release here.
HCI Bench 2.0 is out now. You can read more about that on Charles’s blog here.
This post from Jess discussing contempt culture is right on the money and recommended reading.
Anthony will be presenting with Veeam at Cloud Field Day 5 this week. I’m looking forward to checking it out. If you can’t catch it live, the videos are usually posted in a timely fashion.
Something went pear-shaped with my mail provider, so I decided to use Gmail for my NAS email notifications. QNAP has some built-in smarts and works out of the box. For my OpenMediaVault environment, though, notifications with Gmail take a little extra effort. In short, you’ll need to turn on 2FA and create an app password.
I’ve been participating in the tech version of “Blogtober” because I was going to be writing and it’s October. You can find out a bit more about it here.
Welcome to the sixth edition of the Random Short Take. Here are a few links to a few things that I think might be useful, to someone.
I’m a big fan of Plex, and recently moved it from my iMac onto a Debian-based NAS. There’s a comprehensive Linux Permissions Guide that you can get here. It came in handy because I have a number of NAS devices serving up media. And you don’t want to see what I did to get multiple volumes mounted via SMB. (It gets ugly when I want the DVR component to be able to record to any share)
A lady named Wendy asked me to link to her article because I’d mentioned some of the environmental work Dell EMC had done previously, so here you go Wendy – Plastic Is Killing our Oceans
I recently had the opportunity to have a call with Julie Herd about what E8 Storage have been up to and thought I’d share my thoughts here. I’ll admit it was a very quick chat because the announcement needed little explanation, but it’s sometimes the simple things that are worth noting.
Announcement
E8 Storage recently announced availability of InfiniBand support for its high performance, NVMe storage solutions. They already do NVMe/F using 4 or 8 100GbE ports, and there’s now an equivalent offering using IB.
Thoughts and Further Reading
E8 are positioning this primarily as a response to requirements from HPC customers. While some people think IB is dead, there has been a big investment in the technology in HPC environments, and this allows E8 to get into that market without upsetting the apple cart too much. They’re certainly delivering the kind of storage performance that HPC folks would be interested in, so this seems like a sensible solution. They tell me there’s no difference in terms of latency or performance between the IB and RoCE offerings, and it’s really just about a common transport for those users that need it. The cool thing about E8, of course, is that there’s also a software-only version of their offering available, in case you have a particular tin vendor that you’d like to build your super fast NVMe/F storage platform on. You can read the full announcement here.
E8 Storage came out of stealth in 2016, and have been dazzling the market with some very impressive performance numbers. I recently had the opportunity to chat about their announcements with Julie Herd, and thought I’d share my thoughts here.
Announcement
E8 recently announced the launch of its new E8 Storage Software only product offering for a selected range of pre-qualified servers from leading vendors such as Dell, HP and Lenovo. Built with “standard” components, such as RoCE and standard 2.5″ NVMe SSDs, the E8 Storage Software connects up to 96 host servers to each E8 Storage controller, each linked concurrently to shared storage to deliver unprecedented petabyte scalability.
Thoughts and Further Reading
It’s been interesting to see a number of high-performance storage offerings released as software-only plays. While this announcement isn’t exactly the same as Kaminario’s recent exit from the hardware market, it does mark a significant shift in the underlying technology driving modern software solutions. In the past, storage consumers were beholden to their vendor’s choice of silicon (and associated supply chain). Nowadays, however, we’re seeing a lot more focus on the value that can be delivered beyond the hardware. It no longer matters as much to your storage vendor what the bezel looks like. What is important is that their code is driving your storage solution.
The benefit of this is that you can now, potentially, enjoy an improved consumer experience by leveraging your existing server purchasing arrangements (assuming you’re still in the business of buying tin) to extend your storage footprint as well. The downside is that you’re still possibly going to be a bit limited by the range of hardware supported by software vendors. This is going to be heavily influenced by what hardware the software vendors can get into their integration lab to test, and sometimes you’ll find (much like the early days of VMware ESX) that the latest revision of your favourite bit of kit may not always be supported by your preferred storage provider.
In any case, E8, according to Herd, don’t expect to flip their business model on its head. Instead, they foresee their hardware business continuing along as before, with this software-only offering merely augmenting their capability for customers who are into that kind of thing. You can’t run software without hardware, but it’s nice to be able to choose which hardware you want to deploy. I’m all for it, and I’m looking forward to seeing what else E8 have up their sleeve in the next little while.
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