Disclaimer: I recently attended Storage Field Day 10.  My flights, accommodation and other expenses were paid for by Tech Field Day. There is no requirement for me to blog about any of the content presented and I am not compensated in any way for my time at the event.  Some materials presented were discussed under NDA and don’t form part of my blog posts, but could influence future discussions.

Before I get started, you can find a link to my raw notes on Hedvig‘s presentation here. You can also see videos of the presentation here.

It’s Hedvig, not Hedwig

I’m not trying to be a smart arse. But when you have a daughter who’s crazy about Harry Potter, it’s hard not to think about Hedwig when seeing the Hedvig brand name. I’m sure in time I’ll learn not to do this.

If you’re unfamiliar with Hedvig, it’s software-defined storage. The Hedvig Distributed Storage Platform is made up of standard servers and the Hedvig software.

Some of the key elements of the Hedvig solution are as follows:

• Software is completely decoupled from commodity hardware;
• Application-specific storage policies; and
• Automated and API-driven.

Capabilities

Hedvig took us through their 7 core capabilities, which were described as follows:

• Seamless scaling with x86 or ARM (haven’t seen an ARM-64 deployment yet);
• Hyperconverged and hyperscale architectures (can mix and match in the same cluster);
• Support for any hypervisor, container or OS (Xen, KVM, HyperV, ESX, containers, OpenStack, bare-metal Windows or Linux);
• Block (iSCSI), file (NFS) and object (S3, SWIFT) protocols in one platform;
• Enterprise features: dedupe, compression, tiering, caching, snaps/clones;
• Granular feature provisioning per virtual disk; and
• Multi-DC and cloud replication.

Components

The Hedvig solution is comprised of the following key components:

• Hedvig Storage Proxy – presents the block and file storage; runs as VM, container, or bare metal;
• Hedvig Storage Service – forms an elastic cluster using commodity servers and/or cloud infrastructure; and
• RESTful APIs – provides object access via S3 or Swift, instruments control and data plane

How Does It Work?

This is oversimplifying things, but here’s roughly how it works:

• Create and present virtual disks to the application tier;
• Hedvig Storage Proxy captures and directs I/O to storage cluster;
• Hedvig Storage Service distributes and replicates data across nodes;
• The cluster caches and balances across nodes and racks; and
• The cluster replicates for DR across DCs and/or clouds.

Use Cases?

So where would you use Hedvig? According to Hedvig, they’re seeing uptake in a number of both “traditional” and “new” areas:

Traditional

• Server virtualisation
• Backup and BC/DR
• VDI

New workloads

• Production clouds
• Test/Dev
• Big data/IoT

Further Reading and Final Thoughts

Before I wrap up, a quick shout-out to Chris Kranz for his use of Hedvig flavoured magnetic props during his whiteboard session – it was great. Here’s a shonky photo of Chris.

Avinash Lakshman is a super smart dude with a tonne of experience in doing cloud and storage things at great scale. He doesn’t believe that traditional storage has a future. When you watch the video of the Hedvig presentation at SFD10 you get a real feel for where the company’s coming from. The hyper-functional API access versus the GUI that looks a little rough around the edges certainly gives away the heritage of this product. That said, I think Avinash and Hedvig are onto a good thing here. The “traditional” storage architectures are indeed dying, as much as we might enjoy the relative simplicity of selling someone a dual-controller, midrange, block array with limited scalability.

As with many of these solutions I feel like we’re on the cusp of seeing something really cool being developed right in front of us. For some us, the use cases won’t strike a chord, and the need for this level of scalability may not be there. But if you’re all in on SDS, Hedvig certainly has some compelling pieces of the puzzle that I think are worthy of further investigation.

The Hedvig website contains a wealth of information. You should also check out Chris M. Evans‘s SFD10 preview post on Hedvig here, while Rick Schlander did a great overview post that I recommend reading. Max did a really good deep dive post, along with a higher level view that you can see here.