Netapp FlashRay! 100% SSD Storage Appliances.

This morning, Netapp took a u-turn in their product offering by announcing two 100% SSD storage appliances for both SAN and NAS.   

After spending years on integrating several levels of cache into their current operating system, Netapp appears to have had a change in direction and decided to go all in with SSD... 

Finally.

The EF540 SAN solution builds on it's SANtricity® operating system that was purchased from Engenio/LSI in 2011.  "The EF540 is said to achieve 300,000 IOPS and the transactional performance of 1000 15K drives"

The more interesting announcement almost appeared as "by the way" statement in today's Flash product announcement.    You have to play the the announcement several times to actually hear the word "FlashRay".

The FlashRay™ product architecture is being designed from the ground up and will combine consistent, low-latency performance, high availability, and integrated data protection with enterprise storage efficiency features such as inline deduplication and compression.

Beta systems available this year, and available in early 2014

Sources

FlashRay shines out from Sunnyvale
How NetApp FlashRay Will Disrupt Enterprise Storage
NetApp EF540 Flash Array and FlashRay Preview
NetApp Expands Flash Portfolio, Extending Leadership in Enterprise Flash Storage

End of the Corporate Datacenter

Networking, Storage, Servers, Power, Cooling, Datacenter buildings and people which are a significant cost to businesses will been eliminated in the very near future.  Services such as the Windows Azure Platform will used to build, host and scalE applications in cloud datacenters.     This service real and available today and while it might take a few years for adoption, the Corporate Datacenter will soon collapse into the cloud.  It's time now to re-focus the resume on providing cloud solutions, because the days of providing datacenter solutions have ended.

Nasuni Cloud File Server

Finally something interesting and real in Storage...

Cloud is HOT this year and Nasuni is my first look into cloud storage.   Nasuni is a virtual NAS appliance that has some amount of local storage.  The Nasuni appliance sits on your local network and serves CIFS and NFS to your users on the front end, and then snapshots the data to one or more Cloud Storage providers of your choice.  Cloud providers currently include Amazon Web Services, AT&T Synaptic Storage as a Service℠, Nirvanix, Peer 1 Hosting, Rackspace, and Windows Azure

Literally within 10 minutes, I download the ESX VM, started it and had my first cloud share up and running. Started copying images, videos, etc and sharing them to other to test... Fast and flawless.

Nasuni setup was by far they easiest appliance I have ever setup, and when you turn on, it's just on.  No boot up, just on!

Nasuni really isn't Cloud Storage, it more of a Cloud Storage Gateway.  It's a generic way to setup Cloud Storage to any number of current (an future) Cloud Storage providers.  Yes it does CIFS and NFS and stores data on local disk just like all NAS filers, however the main feature is the snapshots to the "Cloud".

How is works is simple;  Data is written locally to the appliance, and at set increments,  snapsnots of the data are taken and the delta (change blocks) are sent to the cloud.    Recovery from any point in time snapshot is also possible... Delete a file, no problem...  Go recover it from the snapshot!

I've only had a few hours with this product, and I see lot's of potential here and still lots of questions. 

Netapp better incorporate this technology into Ontap fast, or it's going to see some market share loss to this new idea on providing NAS.

Look for updates to the blog as soon as I have a better feel for it...





NetApp ONTAP-v Virtual Storage Array - Cloud Computing in a BOX?

Netapp has my attention with it's announcement of a NetApp ONTAP-v Virtual Storage Array (VSA).  

Basically ONTAP-v will be a virtual machine and will use virtual disk to serve (via iscsi/NFS?) other VMs in local and remote VSAs.    Add some additional SAS shelves and you could in theory handle 1000's of VMs all replicated and backed up via snapshots/mirrors on remote VSAs...  

A truely converged datacenter in a box or at least a small puff of a cloud starting for form.

This is one to keep a close eye on...


On November 24th Fujitsu announced the global availability of the Primergy BX400 blade server. The Primergy BX400 is a green ‘datacenter in a box’ that delivers the first NetApp virtual storage appliance (or VSA) running Data ONTAP-v.

EMC Corporation In Talks To Buy Isilon Systems, Inc.-Reuters $2 billion?

Pasture play?   Not sure where EMC is going with Isilon System...  

October 18 12:22pm EDT


Reuters reported that EMC Corporation is in talks to buy computer storage company Isilon Systems Inc for more than $2 billion, the New York Post reported on Monday. The report quoted an unnamed source as saying the deal would be done this year.

HP ReRAM Flash and Disk Replacement?

Today, HP announced a joint development agreement with Hynix Semiconductor Inc., to develop a new kind of computer memory – one that will employ memristor technology pioneered by researchers at HP Labs.
This memory, called ReRAM, holds the potential to surpass Flash in terms of affordability, total capacity, speed, energy efficiency, and endurance.
Previous to the prediction of the memristor by Prof. Leon Chua of UC Berkeley in 1971, there were three recognized passive circuit elements: the resistor, capacitor, and inductor. These three passive elements have provided the fundamental building blocks on which all electronic circuits today are based.

Symantec Puredisk

Shadowed by their competitors, Symantec Puredisk solution is starting to turn heads. Well at least mine... Puredisk is now completely integrated into Netbackup 7, which means that a 3rd party solution or separate install is not required for backup deduplication. Out of the box, Puredisk is available to use at the switch of a license key.

Puredisk deduplication can be accomplished at the client, or at the media server and can be switched via netback policy. As a bonus, the puredisk pool can be replicated to a second pool incrementally and the netbackup catalog kept sync automagically.

Some amount duplication occurs on the initial backup depending on your data, but Puredisk shines on the next backup deduplicating all unchanged blocks. Nothing like seeing a 99% deduplication rate!