SFD4

Tomorrow Joep Piscaer and myself will fly to San Francisco for Storage Field Day 4. From Wednesday to Friday we’ll be visiting multiple companies in Silicon Valley, together with a great line-up of independent influencers in the Storage industry. First I want to thank the GestaltIT team for this awesome opportunity. Stephen Foskett, Tom Hollingsworth and Claire Chaplais you guys rock! Bringing together the delegates and the vendors  in this setup provides  great knowledge to the whole community is something that’s unique for the whole industry, and you guys (and girl) pull it off.

During these days the following companies will do a presentation:

  • Avere Systems:  The FXT product from Avere are located in front of filers. They use tiers of storage, including DRAM, NV-RAM, flash and SAS disk drives. The idea is to cache filer I/O in the appropriate storage tier so accessing servers get a much faster I/O completion than if the I/Os were being handled by the actual filers. Really looking forward to hear more of Avere as a lot of our customers are looking for these kind of solutions.
  • Cleversafe: With their dsNet object storage system that protects both data and metadata it is more reliable and more efficient than traditional RAIDs. Using the information dispersal technology to slice and disperse data, single points of failure and centralized synchronization points are eliminated. The data is distributed across all storage nodes, and metadata can scale linearly and infinitely as new nodes are added. Cleversafe reduces scalability bottlenecks and increases performance and reliability.  Cleversafe presented during Storage Field Day 3 and I’m very curious what they’ll present this time.
  • Cloudbyte: Elastistore promises guarantee Quality Of Service (QOS) to every application from a shared storage platform. Cloudbyte’s technology offers virtualization and software-defined storage . Offering Software Defined Storage customers can use the software to better manage storage for applications in a virtualized data center. Using ZFS but providing QOS this product is one of a kind (as far as I know).
  • CohoData: Coho Data’s DataStream product is a converged next-generation scale-out storage system. The CohoData Datastream products consists of PCIe Flash, SATA HDD’s and 10GB nics in a OEM dual server chassis and on top of that, it comes with an Arista 10GbE switch (OpenFlow-enabled) for ease of management and scalability. Lat weeks webinar was really interesting and I think it’s great they’ll present during SFD4.
  • GridStore: This technology is a bit outside my scope to be honest as I don’t work with MS HyperV that much 😉 but what I understand about Gridstore is that it allows servers to run Hyper-V virtual machines much more efficiently by tuning networked storage access to the individual needs of each VM. I’ll be listening to their story with great interest.
  • Nimble Storage:  The Nimble Storage CS series offers a cost-effective technology by integrating premium priced SSDs with low cost, high capacity SATA drives. The key technolgy is Nimble’s patented cache accelerated sequential layout (CASL) technology. Along with inline compression, CASL employs an intelligent indexing system which keeps track of hot data and copies these blocks to the SSDs for faster access. Nimble Storage is a Tech Field Day veteran presenting at TFD3 and SFD2. Looking forward to meeting the Nimble Storage crew again, and hear their presentation.
  • Oxygen Cloud: Another sponsor I don’t know that well. What I’ve read till now is that they offer a cloud (hence the cloud after oxygen ;-)) storage solution that does things a bit different. It gives their customers the opportunity to use their own (local) storage through a virtual file system technology. I’m very interested in how Oxygen Cloud thinks to securely provide customers their solution especially outside the US.
  • Proximal Data: With Autocache Proximal Data offers intelligent server side caching embedded in the (VMware only) hypervisor. They are competing with  VMware’s (vFRC) and Pernix Data’s (FVP), the product which was announced at (Pernix Data on SFD3). I’d like to know why Proximal Data chose to use write through caching in stead of write back and I’m looking forward on meeting their SFD team.
  • Virident: The creator’s of FlashMAX (a PCIe Storage Class Memory (SCM) solution) and the vFAS (Flash-management with Adaptive Scheduling) software stack. Last month Western Digital acquired Virident, and will be integrated into HGST, where it will join HGST’s other purchases STEC and Velobit to expand HGST’s presence in the rapidly growing enterprise Flash space. Will be interesting to hear more about the way the company sees the near future.

A total of 9 sponsors in two and a half days. Man, will I be exhausted when I’ll be back in the Netherlands. But this is my 4th Storage Field Day, and I love being there. I’ll put up a live feed so you can watch the event live (who needs sleep ;-P) on my own blog http://www.vdicloud.nl. In the weeks following the event I’ll do an after event post on the ITQ blog, so stay tuned.

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