Next-Generation Storage Symposium Recap

I got the chance to attend the Next-Generation Storage Symposium in San Jose yesterday that is organized by Tech Field Day and hosted by Steven Foskett. There were a number of vendors that spoke at the event and if I could put a theme on this event it would be centric around flash based storage. I am going to summarize on what each vendor brought to the table at this event in order to give you an overview of what was talked about.

Nexsan - Hybrid storage platform through SAN, NAS and Unified Storage Systems including their NS model that they referenced in their presentation.

Nimbusdata - The presentation revolved around their memory-based protocol storage systems and they discussed how simplistic the platform is and they emphasized a 10yr warranty on their platform.

Permabit - This company focuses on Enterprise Flash Array’s and cache solutions through their Albireo dedupication methods for SSD’s.

Purestorage -This is a pure flash-based storage platform that reads and writes to flash disks fundamentally different to take advantage of performance and sustain longevity.

Solidfire - They are focused on cloud-scale computing and the performance requirements behind it. Their point is that traditional storage platforms are not designed for this level of storage. Solidfire’s presentation focused on taking advantage of unique properties of these solid state drives.

Starboard - This company fell in line with the other presenters in that they have a hybrid storage platform that is focused on delivery at a certain price point. They also make note of cost savings from consolidating and mixing workloads with dynamic storage pooling.

Tegile - This presentation focused on their Hybrid storage system that utilizes spinning disk as well as flash based. They touched on their management capabilities with this technology around VDI as well.

Towards the end of the day, some of the Tech Field Day delegates hosted a number of sessions that had various panelists talk about a number of topics that pertained to the architecture of these next generation storage platforms.

Flash Storage overview – Comments from the moderator and panelists centered on the delivery mechanisms for each company that is focused on solid state as the primary tier for all levels. A strong argument was made from one of the attendees that some of these problems have been addressed at a higher layer and if these technologies have these same issues in mind when products are delivered.

Scaling storage for the future – Comments from the panelists revolved around how large scale environments can effectively be moved to the next level and maintain the service levels that the original deployment was designed to deliver.

Storage for the Virtual Infrastructure – Questions and statements in this panel talked about how these new storage platforms are going to affect how data is accessed and stored. One of the main highlights in this discussion were centered around how the storage layer is aware of the type of I/O that is being passed to it. VMware’s VAAI was called out specifically as well as other API’s that are coming to market.

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Posted in Product Reviews Storage by vmrick No Comments Yet