Need for Speed? NetApp Launches the EF570

September 22, 2017 By Adam Bergh 1 Comment

Two questions for you…

1. Do you like speed? 2. Do you want to pay a lot for it?

If your answers are 1. Hell Yes! and 2. Hell No! – today is your day.

Here comes NetApp’s newest All-Flash dragster – The EF570

Before we get into the specs on this new kit, let’s review a little bit of a history.

NetApp’s E and EF Series storage systems run an OS called ‘SANtricity’. SANtricity has shipped with over a million systems for over 20 Years, and is the #1 ‘SAN only’ OS deployed in the world. In short, this is no new comer to the industry and is a rock-solid enterprise class hardware platform.

SANtricity differs from NetApp’s flagship OS ‘ONTAP’ in that it’s streamlined architecture optimized for:

low-latency workloads
big data analytics
bare metal applications
price/performance considerations
highest bandwidth in very dense form factor.

With that being said, let’s get into the newest in the line up:

The EF570

The EF570 is the successor to the immensely popular EF560.

This newest system is rated for 1 Million 4k IOPS at .3ms of latency. That’s 300 MICRO seconds of latency – at ONE MILLION IOPS.

Oh, and how does 21 GBps of read throughput and and a total max capacity of 1.8PB work for you?

These numbers are up from about 850,000 IOPs at 800 micro seconds of latency and 12GBps of read throughput on the previous gen EF560. Not a bad bump.

I know what you’re thinking though, these are just marketing numbers, how about you show me an independent benchmark.

Take a look at NetApp’s SPC benchmarks below:

SPC-1 Benchmark Results

SPC-2 Benchmark Results

Guess who now holds the #1 spot all time in Price/Performance ratio in both SPC-1 and SPC-2 benchmarks?

Spoiler alert: It’s the EF570!

SPC-1 Results:

These show an incredible 500k SPC-1 IOPs with an overall response time of .26ms!

SPC-2 Results:

The SPC-2 test is focused on throughput. Here you can see an incredible 21GBps throughput on a database query test!

More On Performance

The pace at which NetApp keeps ramping up the performance on the EF platform is pretty staggering. Check out this comparison graph on the history of the EF lineup on OLTP workloads:

What else is new?

An all new HTML5 management interface that’s now easier than ever with SANtricity 11.4.

New host interfaces: 100Gb NVMe over InfiniBand, 32Gb FC, 25Gb iSCSI, 12Gb SAS, 100Gb IB

Yes that’s right, NetApp now has NVMe front-end interfaces. More on this to come in a future blog post!

When Can I Get It?!?!

The new EF570 starts to ship this October and is available for order today.

Storage Field Day 12 – Day 3 Recap

March 21, 2017 By Adam Bergh 2 Comments

Day 3 is a wrap and I’m sad that’s SFD12 has finally come to an end. Quite the experience and day 3 didn’t disappoint. We arrived at Intel’s campus to meet with SNIA and Intel for our last day.

SNIA

If you don’t know who SNIA is or you’ve never heard of them, you’re probably not that deep in the industry. But for the uninitiated SNIA stands for “The Storage Networking Industry Association” and is a “non-profit organization made up of member companies spanning information technology. A globally recognized and trusted authority, SNIA’s mission is to lead the storage industry in developing and promoting vendor-neutral architectures, standards and educational services that facilitate the efficient management, movement and security of information.”

Michael Oros, Executive Director at SNIA, gives an overview of the entire organization, including their technical focus for the foreseeable future. They are the leading body advancing industry storage standards, best practices, and testing.

Introduction to SNIA with Michael Oros

SNIA Hyperscaler Storage Development with Mark Carlson

Mark Carlson, Principal Engineer at SNIA, reviews the state of hyperscaler storage, and how the organization can better address this disruptive trend. These hyperscale organization are building their own storage arrays, rather than going to traditional storage vendors. By some measure, 50%of all bits shipped go to hyperscalers.

Intel

Last but not least, Intel was on hand to drop some serious technical details on the SFD12 delegates.

Jonathan Stern, Applications Engineer, Network Platforms Group, gives an overview of Intel’s Storage Performance Development Kit. He reviews the performance benefits of SPDK over using the standard Linux kernel. This is especially evident when it comes to VM optimization and hyperscale operations.

SPDK and the Future of Storage with Jonathan Stern

Tony Luck, Principal Engineer, SSG Enabling Group, reviews Intel’s Resource Director Technology, which can help with processor core resource management for software defined networking. He goes into a technical deep dive of what’s actually happening on the silicon to reach this core optimization, down to the L3 cache.

Intel Resource Director Technology (RDT) for Storage with Tony Luck

THAT’S A WRAP!

Thanks so much to Stephen Foskett, Kat Kitzmiller, Rich Stroffolino, and Megan Robinette for making SFD12 possible! I hope to be invited back again!

Storage Field Day 12 – Day 2 Recap

March 21, 2017 By Adam Bergh 2 Comments

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!

all flash arrays

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.

Datera Ecosystem Demo: Kubernetes with Bill Borsari

Storage Field Day 12 Day 1 Recap and Day 2 Preview

March 9, 2017 By Adam Bergh 3 Comments

Storage Field Day 12 Day 1 is in the books, and what an incredible day it was. Let’s quick recap what was covered:

We kicked off the day with Ryussi who gave us the goods on their proprietary SMB stack they call “MoSMB” – SMB with Mojo!

In a nutshell MoSMB is an ultra lightweight SMB 2.x and 3.x stack designed for with the future in mind – a future where NVMe, high CPU core counts, and high bandwidth/low latency connections rule the day. MoSMB was designed for highly scalable environments with an unique modular and pluggable architecture.

Ryussi MoSMB: An Advanced SMB 3 Stack with Sandeep Bhambani

Ryussi MoSMB Architecture with Sunu Engineer

Product Features

File & Print

SMB3 File Server
SMB3 Printing
Named Pipes

High Performance

Receive Side Scaling
ODX Support
Multichannel
SMB Direct
Directory Leasing and Caching

Security & Authentication

Encryption Signing
SAD Integration (LDAP/Kerberos)

Reliability

Cluster Support
RPC
Witness Protocol
Persistent/Durable Handles

Client Support

Hyper V – Live Migration
SQL Server

Management

SMI-S
Remote VSS
Powershell

StarWind

Our second presentation was with StarWind. Many of you know StarWind as the company who makes iSCSI target software, but think again, they have quite a robust HCI and stand-alone storage play as well.

Check out their timeline:

What was really interesting to me was their “Cloud Gateway” hard drive. Check this out:

StarWind Simple, Flexible, Scalable Storage with Max Kolomyeytsev and Anton Kolomyeytsev

StarWind Fault-Tolerant Storage Demo with Max Kolomyeytsev

StarWind Scale Out and Log Structured File System with Anton Kolomyeytsev

StarWind and AcloudA: Stairway to Cloud with Anton Kolomyeytsev

StarWind and Veeam VTL and Cloud Replication Demo with Max Kolomyeytsev

ElastiFile

Next we met with ElastiFile – A company building a software defined file system that can work on local hardware or in the cloud. Very interesting tech and these guys really knew their stuff.

Elastifile Company, Product, and Design Overview with Shahar Frank

Elastifile Hyperconverged Scaling in the Cloud Demo with Shahar Frank

Elastifile Architecture – Overview, Data Path with Ezra Hoch

Elastifile Architecture – Metadata with Ezra Hoch

Elastifile Architecture: Clustering with Ezra Hoch

Elastifile Node Failure Handling Demo and Discussion with Shahar Frank

Excelero

Lastly and probably the highlight of the day was meeting with Excelero – Who used our session to announce coming out of stealth.

Excelero is making some really fascinating NMVe Mesh software technologies. The goal of their software is to create software that can connect commodity servers with NVMe devices into one large pool of storage with no loss of disk spec IOPs and throughput whether the data is accessed locally or remotely – and from the demo was saw they have succeeded spectacularly.

With this demo hardware, Excelero showed us 4 MILLION+ IOPs at 0.2ms latency. Whoa!

I guess this is why DSSD got dumped.

Excelero NVMesh Server SAN Vision with Yaniv Romem

Excelero Use Cases with Josh Goldenhar

Excelero NVMesh Architecture and Software Components with Yaniv Romem

Excelero Demo with Josh Goldenhar

Day 2 is even more impressive. We start the day at Nimble Storage, then head to NetApp, and finish with Datera. Check out all the live streams at http://techfieldday.com

Storage Field Day 12!

March 6, 2017 By Adam Bergh 2 Comments

In case you haven’t heard Storage Field Day 12 is this week and I’m excited to announce that I’ll be attending this year’s event as an esteemed delegate. If you’re new to Stephen Foskett’s (@SFoskett) “Tech Field Day” events, they are described as “events that bring together innovative IT product vendors and independent thought leaders to share information and opinions in a presentation and discussion format. Independent bloggers, speakers, freelance writers, and podcasters have a public presence that has immense influence on the ways that products and companies are perceived and by IT practitioners. Our Field Day is an opportunity for tech companies and independent writers to meet, update and discuss products and form new communications.”

Basically Stephen and his talented team bring together a group of rotating tech startups and established industry big boys for several days of product and vision presentations that are live streamed in beautiful HD to the whole world, all the while being challenged, grilled, and questioned by a group of independent community experts called the TFD Delegates. These presentations are not to be missed and are truly a unique way for tech companies to spread their message and be challenged by the community in real time.

Storage Field Day 12 has an amazing line up up presenters, check out this list:

The schedule of presentations is as follows (All times US PST)

Wednesday, March 8	10:00 – 12:00	StarWind Presents at Storage Field Day 12
Wednesday, March 8	13:00 – 15:00	Elastifile Presents at Storage Field Day 12
Wednesday, March 8	16:00 – 18:00	Excelero Presents at Storage Field Day 12
Thursday, March 9	08:00 – 10:00	Nimble Storage Presents at Storage Field Day 12
Thursday, March 9	11:00 – 13:00	NetApp Presents at Storage Field Day 12
Thursday, March 9	14:00 – 16:00	Datera Presents at Storage Field Day 12
Friday, March 10	09:00 – 10:00	SNIA Presents at Storage Field Day 12
Friday, March 10	10:30 – 12:30	Intel Presents at Storage Field Day 12

In addition to our amazing presenter, we have some major brain power on the delegate panel who have some serious storage chops to their resumes. The delegates are:

	Arjan Timmerman	@ArjanTim
	Software is the new Hardware, or wait, Hardware loves the new Software, or whatever…
	Chan Ekanayake	@S_Chan_Ek
	Chan Ekanayake is the Lead Architect & Practice manager of the Hybrid Cloud practice at Insight UK, specialized in Public & Private Cloud, Datacentre Virtualization and Enterprise Storage (SAN) with over 14 years of hands on IT consultancy experience in the field.
	Chin-Fah Heoh	@StorageGaga
	Passionate storage technology enthusiast who enjoys the learning as much as the sharing.
	Dan Frith	@PenguinPunk
	I like punk rock and storage arrays.
	Dave Henry	@DaveMHenry
	IT Jack-of-all-trades, gadget geek, currently engaged in a job search
	Glenn Dekhayser	@GDekhayser
	20+ year IT/Storage/Network/Security Veteran.
	Howard Marks	@DeepStorageNet
	Storage Analyst Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary
	Jon Klaus	@JonKlaus
	Storage, back-up and server virtualization consultant based in the southern part of the Netherlands.
	Mark May	@CincyStorage
	Storage expert, unix curmudgeon, IT nerd, and sporadic blogger
	Matthew Leib	@MBLeib
	Long time engineer, and presales architect specializing in Storage, VIrtualization and Orchestrations in the cloud.
	Ray Lucchesi	@RayLucchesi
	Ray Lucchesi is president of Silverton Consulting, blogs at RayOnStorage.com, co-hosts GreyBeardsOnStorage.com podcast and has worked in data storage for over 30 years mostly in marketing and engineering new disk and tape automation products

Once again, thank you to Stephen Foskett and his team for putting together such a wonderful event and inviting me to participate in my first full #TFD #SFD event. I’m looking forward to a great week, making many new friends, and getting my mind blown by some seriously smart people. Be on the lookout for many new blog posts and twitter battles this week!