Welcome to Random Short Take #34. Some really good players have worn 34 in the NBA, including Ray Allen and Sir Charles. This one, though, goes out to my favourite enforcer, Charles Oakley. If it feels like it’s only been a week since the last post, that’s because it has.
April Fool’s is always a bit of a trying time, what with a lot of the world being a few timezones removed from where I live. Invariably I stop checking news sites for a few days to be sure. Backblaze recognised that these are strange times, and decided to have some fun with their releases, rather than trying to fool people outright. I found the post on Catblaze Cloud Backup inspiring.
VMware vSphere 7 recently went GA. Here’s a handy article covering what it means for VMware cloud providers.
Speaking of VMware things, John Nicholson wrote a great article on SMB and vSAN (I can’t bring myself to write CIFS, even when I know why it’s being referred to that way).
Scale is infinite, until it isn’t. Azure had some minor issues recently, and Keith Townsend shared some thoughts on the situation.
StorMagic recently announced that it has acquired KeyNexus. It also announced the availability of SvKMS, a key management system for edge, DC, and cloud solutions.
Joey D’Antoni, in collaboration with DH2i, is delivering a webinar titled “Overcoming the HA/DR and Networking Challenges of SQL Server on Linux”. It’s being held on Wednesday 15th April at 11am Pacific Time. If that timezone works for you, you can find out more and register here.
It seems like only a few months ago that I was introduced to StorMagic via Storage Field Day 6. You can read my thoughts on that here. I was pretty impressed with StorMagic’s focus on their strengths and the solution’s capacity to solve some difficult problems when it came to virtualised storage at the edge of the network.
In any case, StorMagic announced recently that they’ve officially partnered with VMware as the ROBO storage solution of choice when it comes deploying a VSA at the edge. What that translates to is one SKU from VMware to order the software and licences and one SKU from StorMagic to get your hands on a very solid edge storage VSA solution. Here’s a link to StorMagic’s solution brief on their website. And here’s a picture.
The solution runs on anything that’s in the VMware HCL, can scale down to 2 servers (as opposed to VSAN’s 3-node requirement) and provides edge HA for the large enterprise.
You can also read a great write-up from Amit Panchal here, as well as a typically astute analysis from Jon Klaus here. I think it’s great that StorMagic have been able to make this announcement and look forward to hearing about future developments.
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.
This is a quick post to say thanks once again to the organisers and sponsors of Storage Field Day 6. I had a great time, learnt a lot, and didn’t get much sleep. For easy reference, here’s a list of the posts I did covering the event (not necessarily in chronological order).
Also, here’s a number of links to posts by my fellow delegates. They’re all really smart folks, and you’d do well to check out what they’re writing about. I’ll update this list as more posts are published.
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.
My full disclosure post will be nowhere near as epic as Justin’s, although he is my role model for this type of thing. Here are my notes on gifts, etc, that I received as a delegate at Storage Field Day 6. I’m going to do this in chronological order, as that was the easiest way for me to take notes during the week.
Tuesday
My wife paid for parking at BNE airport when she dropped me off. I also bought McDonalds for lunch at SYD, paid for by myself (in more ways than one). A period of time passed and I consumed plane “food”. This was included in the price of the ticket. Alcoholic beverages were not, but I stuck with water. Bless you United for keeping the economy class sober on long-haul flights.
On Tuesday night we had the Delegate dinner at Genji Steak House – a Teppanyaki restaurant in San Jose. I had the gyoza, followed by chicken and prawns with water. This was paid for by Tech Field Day. I also received 2 Manchester (City and United) beanies and 3 large blocks of Cadbury chocolate as part of the gift swap. Tom also gave me a care pack of various American snacks, including some Starbucks Iced Coffee and Nutella. I gave most of it to an American friend prior to my departure. I also had 2 Dos Equis beers in the hotel bar with everyone. This was also paid for by Tech Field Day.
Wednesday
At Avere‘s presentation on Wednesday morning I was given an Avere t-shirt. We had lunch at Bhava Communications in Emeryville (the location of the first two presentations). I had some sandwiches, a cookie, and a can of coke. At StorMagic‘s presentation I was given a 4GB USB stick with StorMagic info on it, as well as a personalised, leather-bound notebook. At Tegile‘s presentation I received a 2200ma portable USB charger thing. I also had a bottle of water.
On Wednesday night we had a delegate dinner (paid for by Tech Field Day) at an “Asian fusion” restaurant called Mosaic. I had the Triple Crown (Calamari, scallops, tiger prawns, asparagus, ginger, white wine garlic sauce). We then went to “Tech Field Day at the Movies” with delegates and friends at the Camera 12 Downtown. We watched Twelve Monkeys. I had a bottle of water from the concession stand. Tech Field Day covered entry for delegates and friends.
Thursday
Thursday morning we had breakfast at Coho Data. I had a sausage and egg roll, some greek yoghurt and an orange juice. I also received a personalised LEGO minifig, a LEGO Creator kit (31018), a foam fish hat (!) and a Coho Data sticker. At Nexenta‘s session I received a Nexenta notepad, orange Converse sneakers with Nexenta embroidered on them and a Nexenta-branded orange squishy ball. Lunch was pizza and some cheesy bread and boneless chicken and a bottle of water. At the Pure Storage session I received a Pure Storage-branded pilsener glass and a 8GB USB stick in a nice little wooden box.
For dinner on Thursday we had canapés and drinks at Cucina Venti Italian restaurant. This was paid for by Tech Field Day, as was my entry to the Computer History Museum that night (a personal highlight).
Friday
Breakfast was had at Nimble Storage‘s office. I had bacon, eggs and juice. I also received a Nimble-branded jacket and a Raspberry Pi kit. At NEC, I received a set of NEC-branded Headphones. We had lunch at NEC’s office which consisted of Thai food.
I then made my own way to SFO with a friend.
Conclusion
I’d like to extend my thanks to the Storage Field Day organisers and the sponsors of the event. I had a great time. Since I can’t think of a good way to wrap up this post I’ll leave you with a photo.
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.
StorMagic know their limitations, and are really looking to address storage problems at the edge. The “Distributed enterprise” is:
Virtualising remote infrastructure;
Introducing new remote services;
Systems in harsh environments;
Operating without local IT;
Seeking to reduce support costs; and
Experiencing downtime of critical, remote applications.
They ‘ve found that the average remote site has:
2TB average data capacity;
7 or 8 key applications;
separation of servers on site;
no computer room; and a
set and forget mentality.
What these businesses need is
High Availability;
Centralised Management;
A Small IT footprint; and
Simple, automated deployment.
Traditional storage does not fit at the remote site. Adding a traditional SAN in these environments leads to:
A single point of failure;
Complexity;
Specialist staff;
Depreciating value;
High capex and opex; and
Tied in to hardware vendor.
StorMagic have basically taken this on board in the design of their SvSAN product, and also claim to get around a number of the current limitations of VMware Virtual SAN. In a nutshell, SvSAN is a VSA that:
Uses shared storage (internal or DAS);
Provides synchronous mirroring between nodes;
Runs as VSA independent of storage hardware;
Provides HA – withstands server or storage failure; and is
Scalable – 2 nodes to many nodes.
The StorMagic guys were asked whether their focus on beating VMware Virtual SAN at the smaller end of the market was a mistake. They seemed to think that, moving forward, VMware would be a lot more interested in the mid- to high-end of the market, leaving them to play in the two-node, edge storage scenarios. It seems like a solid strategy, and it seems like a solid bit of technology. I recommend looking at them if you have this kind of use case come up.
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