Category Archives: Seagate

Random Short Take #52

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Welcome to Random Short Take #52. A few players have worn 52 in the NBA including Victor Alexander (I thought he was getting dunked on by Shawn Kemp but it was Chris Gatling). My pick is Greg Oden though. If only his legs were the same length. Let’s get random.

  • Penguin Computing and Seagate have been doing some cool stuff with the Exos E 5U84 platform. You can read more about that here. I think it’s slightly different to the AP version that StorONE uses, but I’ve been wrong before.
  • I still love Fibre Channel (FC), as unhealthy as that seems. I never really felt the same way about FCoE though, and it does seem to be deader than tape.
  • VMware vSAN 7.0 U2 is out now, and Cormac dives into what’s new here. If you’re in the ANZ timezone, don’t forget that Cormac, Duncan and Frank will be presenting (virtually) at the Sydney VMUG *soon*.
  • This article on data mobility from my preferred Chris Evans was great. We talk a lot about data mobility in this industry, but I don’t know that we’ve all taken the time to understand what it really means.
  • I’m a big fan of Tech Field Day, and it’s nice to see presenting companies take on feedback from delegates and putting out interesting articles. Kit’s a smart fellow, and this article on using VMware Cloud for application modernisation is well worth reading.
  • Preston wrote about some experiences he had recently with almost failing drives in his home environment, and raised some excellent points about resilience, failure, and caution.
  • Speaking of people I worked with briefly, I’ve enjoyed Siobhán’s series of articles on home automation. I would never have the patience to do this, but I’m awfully glad that someone did.
  • Datadobi appears to be enjoying some success, and have appointed Paul Repice to VP of Sales for the Americas. As the clock runs down on the quarter, I’m going two for one, and also letting you know that Zerto has done some work to enhance its channel program.

StorONE and Seagate Team Up

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This news came out a little while ago, but I thought I’d cover it here nonetheless. Seagate and StorONE recently announced that the Seagate Exos AP 5U84 Application Platform would support StorONE’s S1:Enterprise Storage Platform.

 

It’s A Box!

[image courtesy of StorONE]

The Exos 5U84 Dual Node supports:

  • 2x 1.8 GHz CPU (E5-2648L v4)
  • 2x 256GB RAM
  • Storage capacities between 250TB and 1.3PB

 

It’s Software!

Hardware is fun, but it’s the software that really helps here, with support for:

  • Full High Availability
  • Automated Tiering
  • No Write Cache
  • Rapid RAID Rebuilds
  • Unlimited Snapshots
  • Cascading Replication
  • Self Encrypting Drives

It offers support for multiple access protocols, including iSCSI, NFS, SMB, and S3. Note that there is no FC support with this unit.

 

Thoughts and Further Reading

I’ve had positive things to say about StorONE in the past, particularly when it comes to transparent pricing and the ability to run this storage solution on commodity hardware. I’ve been on the fence about whether hybrid storage solutions are really on the way out. It felt like they were, for a while, and then folks kept coming up with tweaks to software that meant you could get even more bang for your buck (per GB). Much like tape, I think it would be premature to say that hybrid storage using spinning disk is dead just yet.

Obviously, the folks at StorONE have skin in this particular game, so they’re going to talk about how hybrid isn’t going anywhere. It’s much the same as Michael Dell telling me that the on-premises server market is hotting up. When a vendor is selling something, it’s in their interest to convince you that a market exists for that thing and it is hot. That said, some of the numbers Crump and the team at StorONE have shown me are indeed compelling. When you couple those numbers with the cost of the solution (you can work out for yourself here) it becomes difficult to dismiss out of hand.

When I look at storage solutions I like to look at the numbers, and the hardware, and how it’s supported. But what’s really important is whether the solution is up to the task of the workload I need to throw at it. I also want to know that someone can fix my problem when the magic smoke escapes said storage solution. After a while in the industry, you start to realise that, regardless of what the brochures look like, there are a few different ways that these kind of things get put together. Invariably, unless the solution is known for being reckless with data integrity, or super slow, there’s going to be a point at which the technical advantages become less of a point of differentiation. It’s at that point where the economics really come into play.

The world is software-defined in a lot of ways, but this doesn’t mean you can run your favourite storage code on any old box and expect a great outcome. It does, however, mean that you no longer have to pay a premium to get good performance, good capacity, and a reliable outcome for your workload. You also get the opportunity to enjoy performance improvements as the code improves, without necessarily needing to update your hardware. Which is kind of neat, particularly if you’ve ever paid a pretty penny for golden screwdriver upgrades from big brand disk slingers in the past. This solution might not be for everyone, particularly if you already have a big arrangement with some of the bigger vendors. But if you’re looking to do something, and can’t stretch the economics to an All-Flash solution, this is worth a look.

Random Short Take #35

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Welcome to Random Short Take #35. Some really good players have worn 35 in the NBA, including The Big Dog Antoine Carr, and Reggie Lewis. This one, though, goes out to one of my favourite players from the modern era, Kevin Durant. If it feels like it’s only been a week since the last post, that’s because it has. I bet you wish that I was producing some content that’s more useful than a bunch of links. So do I.

  • I don’t often get excited about funding rounds, but I have a friend who works there, so here’s an article covering the latest round (C) of funding for VAST Data.
  • Datadobi continue to share good news in these challenging times, and has published a success story based on some work it’s done with Payspan.
  • Speaking of challenging times, the nice folks a Retrospect are offering a free 90-day license subscription for Retrospect Backup. You don’t need a credit card to sign up, and “[a]ll backups can be restored, even if the subscription is cancelled”.
  • I loved this post from Russ discussing a recent article on Facebook and learning from network failures at scale. I’m in love with the idea that you can’t automate your way out of misconfiguration. We’ve been talking a lot about this in my day job lately. Automation can be a really exciting concept, but it’s not magic. And as scale increase, so too does the time it takes to troubleshoot issues. It all seems like a straightforward concept, but you’d be surprised how many people are surprised by these ideas.
  • Software continues to dominate the headlines, but hardware still has a role to play in the world. Alastair talks more about that idea here.
  • Paul Stringfellow recently jumped on the Storage Unpacked podcast to talk storage myths versus reality. Worth listening to.
  • It’s not all good news though. Sometimes people make mistakes, and pull out the wrong cables. This is a story I’ll be sharing with my team about resiliency.
  • SMR drives and consumer NAS devices aren’t necessarily the best combo. So this isn’t the best news either. I’m patiently waiting for consumer Flash drive prices to come down. It’s going to take a while though.