Disclaimer: I recently attended Storage Field Day 6.  My flights, accommodation and other expenses were paid for by Tech Field Day and their sponsors. 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.

For each of the presentations I attended at SFD6, there are a few things I want to include in the post. Firstly, you can see video footage of the Coho Data presentation here. You can also download my raw notes from the presentation here. Finally, here’s a link to the Coho Data website as well as their blog that covers some of what they presented.

Firstly, while there were no “winners” at SFD6, I’d like to give Coho Data a special shout-out for thinking of giving the delegates customised LEGO minifigs. Here’s a picture of mine. If you’ve ever met me in real life you’ll know that that’s pretty much what I look like, except I don’t cruise around holding a fish.

Secondly, the Coho Data session, delivered by Coho Data’s CTO Andrew Warfield, was an exceptionally technical deep dive and is probably best summarised thusly: go and watch the video again. And probably again after that. In the meantime, here’s a few of my notes on what they do.

Coho Data offers a software stack that qualifies and ships on commodity hardware. It is ostensibly a NFS V3 server for VMware. If you look at the architecture diagram below, the bottom half effectively virtualises flash.

Coho Data is about to ship v2.0, which adds remote asynchronous site to site replication (read about that here) and some API additions. Andrew also covered off some analytics and looked at Coho Data’s implementation thereof. You can check out a video that covers roughly the same topic here.

Andrew is a super-smart dude and I simply cannot do justice to his presentation by blabbering on here. Go check out the videos, they’re well worth it.