Day 2 of storage field day was absolutely massive. We brought out the big names today as we visited the mothership of of Nimble Storage, NetApp, and Datera!
Nimble Storage
We had the privilege of dropping by the Nimble Storage headquarters in Silicone Valley to be greeted by a giant banner welcoming us to #SFD12! That was nice of Nimble.
We arrived at Nimble at an interesting time. We had just learned about HP Enterprise’s intent to acquire Nimble Storage. The topic came up over breakfast of course, with much of the information being too new to share publicly. I can’t share much of what we heard, but let’s just say HP is really excited about having Nimble in the fold and has big plans for their tech.
Nimble Arrives In the Cloud
The HP news notwithstanding, Nimble had a big tech announcement to make: Nimble Cloud Volumes!
At the 10,000 foot level the new Nimble cloud service is Nimble storage technology in a shared environment with a direct 1ms latency connection into AWS and Azure, with a brand new web based provisioning interface painted on top of it all.
Nimble believes standard hyperscaler storage is not redundant and resilient enough. In steps NCV to provided 6 9’s or data protection and rich data services you’ve come to know and love with Nimble. And they may be on to something as AWS just had a major outage.
Nimble Storage Cloud Volumes Overview with Gavin Cohen
(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RcS-CDaurZY)
Nimble Storage Cloud Volumes Demo with Sandeep Karmarkar
(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DnZ4w7ceegs)
InfoSight is Still King.
Rod Bagg, Vice President, Analytics & Customer Support at Nimble goes deep on the biggest driver of Nimble sales – InfoSight. If you’re not aware of Nimble’s InfoSight analytics platform you should be.
Nimble Storage InfoSight Predictive Analytics Overview with Rod Bagg
Nimble Storage InfoSight Demo with David Adamson
Nimble Storage Achieving Six-Nines Availability with Rod Bagg
Nimble Storage Docker Volume Plugin with Sakthi Chandra and Michael Mattsson
NetApp
As a member of the NetApp A-Team I always love to get to Sunnyvale to meet with the NetApp team to hear straight from the horse’s mouth what the big “N” has been cooking up. This visit didn’t disappoint as NetApp pulled out a few things that I didn’t even know they were working on.
After this visit one thing became abundantly clear, NetApp is “all-in: on their data fabric vision for the hybrid cloud.
Arthur Lent, VP, Chief Architect, reviews updates to NetApp’s Data Fabric. He puts the updates into the context of the problems of the modern enterprise, primarily the issue of data silos. Arthur reviews how over the last two years, the capabilities and versatility of Data Fabric has exploded.
What’s New with NetApp Data Fabric with Arthur Lent
Duncan Moore, Director, StorageGRID software, reviews the recent trend in object storage. He then uses this to pivot into a discussion of the ongoing gaps within object storage, particularly with unstructured data. He then reviews how StorageGRID can serve to extend NetApp’s Data Fabric through S3. Finally, Duncan reviews how StorageGRID scales to Webscale storage needs.
NetApp Object Storage and StorageGRID with Duncan Moore
And the highlight of the visit to NetApp, Dave Hitz, Executive VP and Founder of NetApp, further discusses the history of Data Fabric, and their overall cloud vision. He further reviews how the state of the company changed over the last two years, including the massive growth in their all-flash storage array.
Top of Mind Discussion with NetApp Founder Dave Hitz
Datera
Last but not least on day 2 we visited startup Datera, who’s promising High Performance elastic block storage, cloud-like agility on-prem to deliver operational simplicity.
First up we got meeting with Marc Fleischmann, CEO and Founder of Datera. He overviews their Elastic Data Storage, which is targeted toward on-premises clouds. Their overall mission is to bring data simplicity, agility and performance to on-prem clouds, and to allow for better data management across a hybrid cloud.
Datera Update with CEO and Founder, Marc Fleischmann
Ashok Rajagopalan, Head of Products, introduces their Elastic Data Fabric, which is designed to defragment the data center and improve utilization. This solution is flexible enough for any application, allows for mixed nodes within a on-premises cloud, provides for true scale-out, and allows for any orchestration stack.
Datera Elastic Data Fabric with Ashok Rajagopalan
Nic Bellinger, CTO and Co-Founder, goes to the whiteboard to review their distributed placement implementation within Datera’s solution. He reviews how Datera designed their solution around application requirements at a very high level. This makes the entire system built around constant change, allowing you to easily verify your placement map without disrupting IO.
How We Built Datera with Nic Bellinger, CTO and Co-Founder
Bill Borsari, Head of Systems Engineering, gives a preliminary demonstration of the Datera user interface. The system obscures the carefully constructed architecture behind an easy to consumer UI. He walks through the various views available to administrators, including active nodes, and overall system performance. Finally, he digs into how the system handle application performance on a policy level.
Datera Elastic Data Fabric Demo with Bill Borsari
Bill Borsari, Head of Systems Engineering, demonstrates using Datera with OpenStack. He shows created volumes in OpenStack being reflected in their GUI. This also allows for viewing tenancy, as well as volumes.
Datera Ecosystem Demo: OpenStack with Bill Borsari
Bill Borsari, Head of Systems Engineering, demonstrates Datera working with Kubernetes. With it, you can set a block storage volume for the container instances to use, which can be added to if additional workloads are created by Kubernetes.
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