SFD9 Preview Intel – X Marks the spot

Vendors are always looking for the next technology or innovation that is going to allow them to remain competitive. Intel XPoint announced in July last year could be that next treasure that all storage vendors are searching for.

 

Pirates

 

Today’s market

Flash has been a major breakthrough in storage, the debate on all flash data centres is all but done, it’s happening right now. Flash has brought a significant amount of innovation and additional competition to the storage market. Today’s flash systems tend to use nand SSD’s, according to Intel these are up to 1300 times faster than traditional hard drives but are 1500 times slower than DRAM. Intel want to fill this gap in the memory market with a fast, dense medium that is also non-volatile. The solution they have come up with is 3D XPoint.

benefits

The future

3D XPoint is so named due to its cross like structure which can be stacked in 3 dimensions. Any cell can be uniquely addressed by selecting one wire at the top and one at the bottom.

selection

Intel will be releasing this 3D Xpoint based meory under the brand name of Intel Optane and claim XPoint will have 1,000 times the performance of NAND flash, 1,000 times the endurance of NAND flash, and about 10 times the density of DRAM. The following graphic shows how the memory grids will be stacked one on top of another.

 

xpoint

 

Impact

It seems likely storage vendors will be queuing up at Intel’s door to get hold of this technology. Like the introduction of flash there will be winners and losers: Who will be the first to ship with the technology? Will this fit in with Vendors existing model, or prompt a re-design like the first wave of flash. Perhaps most interestingly will hybrid players have the upper hand and be able to use XPoint as a high performance tier and SSD’s for capacity. It really does appear to be game changing technology and it will be interesting to see if the other storage vendors presenting during SFD9 will start to talk about it.

There is no official release date yet for XPoint, Intel’s website displays a teaser stating that it will be coming soon. You can read more about XPoint on Intel’s website. Intel will be presenting at Storage Field Day 9 next week, remember you can follow along by watching the live stream and have your say by using #SFD9 on Twittter.

 

Intel website

 

 

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SFD9 Preview – Will VSAN be THE SAN?

VSAN 6.2

VMware Storage are one of the vendors that will be presenting at Storage Field Day 9, which I will be attending. Given the recent unveiling of VSAN 6.2 it seems very likely this will be the subject matter they will be presenting on. VSAN 6.2 introduced a whole host of much needed features, Duncan Epping summarises them nicely in this post.

 

One of the key benefits of virtualisation was reducing the number of servers and their foot print in the datacentre. Previous versions of VSAN lacked data reduction technology and RAID 5, requiring that all those servers you moved out following virtualisation would have needed to be wheeled back in again to accommodate capacity.   VSAN 6.2 brought these much needed data reduction features to the table and has arguably for the first time, made VSAN a credible candidate to challenge other hyper-converged and indeed established storage players.

Battle for supremely

What I am especially interested in is VMware’s next tactical play. The key assault from almost all vendors seems to be the battle to own the data centre.

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Rather than selling individual components the aim is to sell packages that meet all the customer’s needs. Nutanix are bidding for more control with their Acropolis OS, EMC have their ever expanding VCE range and HP have their Synergy play to name but a few.

Playing tactically

A key opportunity also exists to bring VSAN into the data centre, not just as part of purpose built hyper-converged appliances but also to the vSphere customers building their own solutions. I wonder if the key to getting VSAN into as many customers’ data centres as possible is by giving away VSAN for free. This is not to devalue VSAN, but if the latest feature set was bundled within vSphere customers would have to ask why wouldn’t we use VSAN?  It may not do everything a high end SAN does, but for most customers it just needs to be good enough.

This may seem like a crazy suggestion but it could give VMware an unassailable lead against not only the software defined solutions but be a major blow against traditional players as well. It would also help to win out in price sensitive deals where Hyper-V is being chosen. VMware would control a good chunk of the data centre and there would be a great amount of inertia to move to another vendor with this level of control.

If this was unpalatable I would still have thought heavy discounting or giving away a quota of free storage space with vSphere coupled with an option to licence further capacity would be the order of the day. Clearly once the brand was established and in data centres everywhere the cost model could be revisited.

 

Fellow SFD9 delegate Chris M Evans wrote an an interesting article arguing from a different point of view that ESXi should be open sourced. I think this would be a challenge financially, to take away a company’s cash cow and politically to open source the product a company has built its brand on.  Any how I will be interested to hear about VMware’s tactics, about the product, the tech behind it and how they plan to make VSAN be THE SAN at Storage Field Day 9. Remember you can follow along by watching the live stream and have your say by using #SFD9 on Twittter.

 

 

 

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Storage Field Day 9 – Let’s do this thang

When UFC started, it was bloody brilliant. You took the best fighter from each discipline and paired them up against each other. This meant you could get a Kung-Fu expert fighting a wrestler or a Sumo wrestler taking on a boxer. The results were unpredictable, no one knew what to expect but all in it was epic. What was great about it was bringing together so many disciplines on a neutral ground and finding out who’s method really was best.

UFC1

 

Stephen Foskett pulls together an equally diverse range of IT Vendors in his Tech Field Day events, who come to prove that their way is best and they have the champion technology. The format is simple a single ring of death, bloggers baying for blood and a group of vendors who are only armed only with their FUD and mighty PowerPoint slides. The single surviving vendor at the end of the week is declared the winner. Maybe not quite, but hey Stephen if you do down this route you owe me.

MC1

 

The actual format is as follows; to each Tech Field Day a number of Vendors are invited and get approximately a 3 hour slot, to explain the tech behind and the USP’s of their product to a panel of bloggers. The presentations often turn into a lively debate as the bloggers push deeper on areas of interest and challenge vendors on architectural and other product decisions. Tech Field Day comes in various flavours including Network, Virtulisation and best of all Storage Field day.

The panel generally consist of 12 industry guru’s. For Storage Field Day 9 taking place in Silicon Valley March 16–18, there will be 11 industry gurus and me. I can only assume I have been chosen for my Hollywood good looks, which is lucky since the whole event will be streamed live on the internet. You will be able to see which vendor is presenting when and be able to watch the live stream on the Tech Field Day website. If you miss a vendor you are particularly interested in fear not since it will all be uploaded to YouTube afterwards.

Vendors confirmed so far include Intel Storage, Plexistor, VMware Storage, Violin Memory and Cohesity . As everyone know the storage industry has just been crazy over the past few years with so many different driving forces like flash, software defined and hyper-converged changing the landscape. Recently however there has been an unfortunate trend for cuts in several storage companies, it will be interesting to hear how the Vendors plan to stay relevant and stand out from the rest in these more challenging times.

 

You can join in the fun by using #SFD9 on Twitter and adding your comments.  You can follow me on Twitter and the rest of the blogging panel as well:

Alex Galbraith, Arjan Timmerman, Chris M Evans, Dave Henry, Enrico Signoretti, Howard Marks, Justin Warren, Mark May, Matthew Leib, Arnold, Scott D. Lowe, Vipin V.K

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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