rack-scale flash

Rack-scale flash is flash-only storage that uses a high-speed interface to connect the storage more directly to the CPU than with a traditional storage array. The most common connection is nonvolatile memory express (NVMe) connected via a network fabric. This interface is called NVMe over Fabrics (NVMe-oF).

Rack-scale flash is also known as shared flash storage because it creates a pool of storage that is shared by servers over the high-speed interconnect inside one or more racks. Others call the concept of sharing compute, storage and networking as resource pools composable infrastructure.

By using the NVMe protocol, rack-scale flash vendors can deliver much lower latency while keeping the same throughput levels available from network transports such as 32 gigabit Fibre Channel (FC) or 40/50/100 Gigabit Ethernet (GbE). The lower latency improves the IOPS of the overall system, making rack-scale flash best suited for high-performance computing needs. Examples include artificial intelligence, real-time analytics of big data and in-memory database systems.

Rack-scale flash vendors

There are two main types of rack-scale flash suppliers: those that use off-the-shelf solid-state drives (SSDs) and those that use custom flash modules. The former are generally startups such as Apeiron Data Systems, E8 Storage, Excelero and Mangstor. The latter are rack-scale flash vendors such as tech giants IBM and Hitachi Vantara.

Two early startups are Pure Storage, founded in 2009, and DSSD Inc., founded in 2010. Pure began life as a flash-only storage provider and entered the rack-scale flash market in 2016 with its FlashBlade product.

#DSSD, in comparison, was acquired by EMC Corp. in 2014 for its rack-scale technology. In 2016, the newly merged @Dell EMC launched DSSD D5, a #rackscale #flash appliance based on the acquired technology. The company cancelled the line in March 2017, stating it made more sense to embed the technology into existing storage arrays.

Benefits/drawbacks of rack-scale flash

#Rackscale #flash boosts the performance of any system, even more than #allflash arrays that don't connect via #lowlatency #NVMe protocols. All-flash array vendors claim IOPS ranging from 200,000 to the low millions. @Dell EMC, for example, claimed 10 million IOPS for its now cancelled #DSSD D5 product. While any application can benefit from that speed, it is a necessary feature for financial applications, big data technology such as #Hadoop, and #inmemory #database systems such as #SAP #HANA.

http://searchstorage.techtarget.com/definition/rack-scale-flash

Dell EMC World 2017: Flash, HCI and cloud take center stage

If you think #DellEMC will condense any of its overlapping storage products at Dell EMC World 2017, think again. There has been a great amount of speculation about which storage arrays might be dropped since Dell said it would pay more than $60 billion to acquire EMC in late 2015. The merger created overlap throughout Dell EMC's combined traditional storage products, especially in midrange arrays.

Michael Dell spent a lot of time in the run-up to closing the deal assuring Dell's #Compellent customers their platform would survive the merger. That will remain true through next week, when the vendor makes a crush of product releases at Dell EMC World 2017, which begins May 8.

Dell EMC is looking to pivot toward newer technologies such as flash, #hyperconverged and cloud as sales of traditional disk-based arrays slip. Even with all this change, Dell EMC will hold on to its major array platforms. The traditional array families such as EMC #VMAX, #Unity and Dell SC (formerly Compellent) will survive but are considerably flashier. In many cases, they are flash-only, as is Dell EMC #XtremIO, which has never been a hard disk drive system.

During an analyst day last month, Dell EMC president David Goulden said the vendor will eventually merge midrange arrays but will proceed at a slow pace. For now, the Unity platform from EMC and Compellent SC platform from Dell will continue.

There will be a combined midrange family, but we don't have to rush into that because we have two very important families," Goulden said of the Unity and SC platforms. "We have been making moves to pull the storage portfolio together."

The vendor will instead focus on integrating flash throughout its storage lines at Dell EMC World 2017 and beyond. Its recent decision to discontinue its #DSSD high-end NVM Express-based shared storage box was a step in that direction. Instead of selling a DSSD product that appealed to a limited customer base, Dell EMC will incorporate that technology into other products.

"We're making that a feature of storage products rather than its own thing," Goulden said at analyst day. "We're focusing high-end storage products according to where their respective strengths are, as opposed to a broad overlap.

"You'll see us announce a lot of new storage capabilities at Dell EMC World," Goulden continued. "We recognize the storage market is in consolidation mode and the market is basically flat, but there are some great pockets of growth. There are a lot of things happening in the storage business. We're seeing hypergrowth in all-flash, we're seeing hypergrowth in converged infrastructure and we're seeing declines in traditional markets."

Dell EMC has the technology pieces for this changing world. It has more all-flash array platforms than any of its competitors. Its #Vblock #convergedinfrastructure (CI) partnership with #Cisco still is the market leader in CI revenue, although the emphasis may shift to using Dell servers instead of Cisco in converged packages. Dell sells #VMware #vSAN software that powers #hyperconvergence and Dell EMC #VxRail vSAN-based hyper-converged appliances. It also has a raft of cloud technologies.

http://searchstorage.techtarget.com/news/450418266/Dell-EMC-World-2017-Flash-HCI-and-cloud-take-center-stage

7 Questions to Ask at Dell-EMC World

Next week is the first #EMCWorld since #EMC was assimilated into #Dell, and if you are one of the storage faithful making the annual trek out to Vegas, you are probably already coming with questions. This first #DellEMC World is a great opportunity to really get a sense for whether the new Dell-EMC is the storage company that deserves your business for the next decade. #DellEMC, #Compellent, #Isilon, #VCE, #VMware, #VSAN, #Vmax, #VNXe, #Nutanix, #DSSD, #XtremIO, #VxRail

While you likely already have your own questions, if we were going to Vegas, here are the ones we’d ask:

1. #XtremIO vs. #VMAX – which is the real Tier1 bet?  
EMC’s strategy for Tier1 block has been inconsistent and confusing, at best.  If you were at EMC World in 2014, you probably got the distinct impression that VMAX was over and XtremIO was the future (anyone remember the $1M guarantee?), but just two years later there was nary a mention of XtremIO with all the attention on the new All-Flash VMAX. And sales reflected this shift. According to IDC, XtremIO sales were down -27.7% year-over-year in 2016, as EMC pivoted focus back to VMAX, realizing perhaps that selling retrofit flash was easier than maturing their purpose-built all-flash platform.  What will 2017 bring, and where should your investment go?

 

2. #DSSD – what happened?

For the past two years at EMC World, DSSD was touted as the next big thing, promising an “order of magnitude improvement” and “insane low latency.”  Michael Dell even called DSSD “a game changer” a few months ago at Dell World. Unfortunately, it was storage for the 0.01% – expensive, exotic, low on scale, and non-existent on software data services. Abruptly, last month, DSSD appears to be gone (at least as a stand-alone product). The go-forward plan is to apparently integrate DSSD NVMe technology into other EMC products, which one has to imagine means another retrofit coming for VMAX. Meanwhile, if you want affordable NVMe today, that’s non-disruptively backward compatible with the products you previously purchased from Pure, we have youcovered.

 

3. #XtremIO #X2 – Can you get there from here?
Industry rumors seem to indicate that a new “X2” version of XtremIO is coming.  It’s time. XtremIO is really, really due for a hardware refresh as the core hardware hasn’t substantially evolved since GA in 2013. Even XtremIO’s spec sheet is pushing 2 years old. The X2 story has been an interesting one, as the marquee feature seemed to be native file integration, as publicized at Dell World, and regularly tweetedabout by the XtremIO team. Then a few weeks ago, news surfaced that project was halted. As we contemplate new XtremIO hardware, questions about upgradability come to mind, as such issues have plagued XtremIO customers in the past. In a world where customers still can’t mix 10, 20, and 40TB X1 bricks in a cluster (is that really scale-out?), will existing X1 customers even be able to adopt new X2 bricks? Will X2 support NVMe flash capacity? Will the move to X2 be non-disruptive and will customers be able to trade-in X1 bricks for X2 bricks? Since XtremIO’s GA, Pure has shipped three generations of FlashArray hardware, 12 software releases, and introduced NVMe flash capacity, all non-disruptively and fully-upgradable. This is the new standard.

 

4. #VNX vs. Dell #Compellent (vs. #Nutanix vs. #vSAN) – which is the mid-range bet?

Things get even murkier at the mid-range.  First, assuming Dell will eventually consolidate into one mid-range platform, choosing between EMC Unity and Dell Compellent is a non-obvious choice. Both Compellent and VNX/ #Unity are large, multi- $100M businesses. Compellent has a solid user base in Dell, but hasn’t been ultra-aggressive about retrofitting for flash. Unity, on the other hand, is a new reincarnation of VNX/CLARiiON with a flash focus and (allegedly) a new codebase. We’re not sure you should bet the farm (er, cattle ranch) on it yet. Meanwhile – there’s a bigger skeleton in the strategy closet – hyper-converged. It would seem that Dell needs to consolidate product lines to re-pay debt, and as a server company, maybe hyper-converged looks like a good bet for these Tier 2 / Tier 3 and smaller customer workloads? If you read Chad Sakac’s blog – that certainly seems to be Dell’s strategic direction. Leading analysts have encouraged Dell EMC customers to seek written guarantees that their selected product isn’t facing a near-term end of life. If your Compellent or VNX array is up for refresh, there’s never been a better time to push to understand Dell’s go-forward strategy before you make another 3-5 year investment.

 

5. Nutanix? #VCE #Vblocks?  How long will Dell resell multiple competing products?

Dell has always been nothing if not pragmatic – focused on whatever product drives sales vs. squabbling over who invented it. In fact, this pragmatism led to years of relatively peaceful resale of EMC VNX by Dell in the 2000s. But, Dell also knows that long-term customer relationships matter, and OEM products are not the path to long-term customer loyalty. So it’s instructive to look at what happened to that VNX resale deal. Eventually it was dissolved, Dell tried to acquire 3PAR and eventually did acquire Compellent to replace it (and amusingly, Dell is once again facing the Compellent vs. VNX choice). Fast forward to today, and there are two very obvious “inconvenient partnerships” in the Dell product lineup – reselling Nutanix (in competition w/ VMware vSAN) and selling VCE Vblock solutions with Cisco servers and networking, in competition with Dell servers.  How long will these  last?  If I were a customer who wanted Nutanix, I’d buy it directly from Nutanix.  If I wanted hyper-converged from Dell, I’d buy #VxRAIL.  And if I was a customer running a lot of VCE, I’d be really questioning the long-term roadmap of that stack.

 

6. #IsilonNitro – Ready for Prime Time?

Last year at our //Accelerate conference, Pure introduced FlashBlade – putting NetApp and EMC’s Isilon on notice that the world of high-performance storage for unstructured data was about to undergo some major disruption. Just a few weeks later at EMC World, EMC announced a competing product – Isilon Nitro. Nitro was so new, in fact, that it didn’t even make an appearance at EMC World on stage “in the hardware” – with EMC just showing some bezel renderings. Well, we can confirm that Nitro does in fact exist (we’ve competed with and beaten Nitro head-to-head in a few accounts already), but these first few Nitro encounters lead us to believe that the product is still early. It’s a year later, plenty of time to go from announcement to GA. We’ll be looking forward to hearing about Nitro customer adoption, roadmap and how much work was done to rewrite Isilon’s OneFS for flash vs. just another retrofit.

 

7. Does the storage fire still burn strong?

Finally, a softball question, but perhaps the most important one. Storage is all about trust. Trust that your vendor will have your back, trust that the support team rocks, trust that your relationship is valued, trust that the product you are betting on will have another decade of investment. So as you head to EMC World, it’s a great opportunity to feel out EMC leadership, both business and technical. How excited are they? How dedicated are they? Are they pumped-up for the next decade of innovation under the Dell family?

http://blog.purestorage.com/7-questions-to-ask-at-dell-emc-world/

Dell kills off standalone DSSD D5, scatters remains into other gear

A year after first shipping the #DSSD D5 array, #DellTechnologies is axing the standalone product. It will sprinkle the technology into its storage and platforms groups; that will, it is hoped, speed up applications on these systems by exploiting high-speed access to NVMe drives. #EMC bought DSSD in May 2014 for a suggested $1bn. Now Dell owns EMC. Now the DSSD D5 product line is being dismantled and scattered into other gear. Sam Grocott, Dell’s senior veep of marketing for storage and data protection, confirmed the DSSD D5's fate to El Reg today. He added that 10 million IOPS D5, with 100 microsecond latency and 100GB/sec bandwidth from its NVMe drives and fabric, started shipping in February 2016 and went, broadly speaking, to two kinds of customers: enterprises needing high IOPS access to next-generation databases and HPC customers. These enterprise customers apparently told Dell that they loved the performance but wanted (needed) mainstream all-flash array data services, such as those we assume on #VMAX and #XtremIO products. The HPC customers said that mainstream all-flash arrays and bulk capacity storage met their requirements, so there was no general need for a separate D5-type product. So Dell has decided to make a strategic pivot with its DSSD technology, because it’s convinced fast network access to NVMe storage will be vital in the future. Consequently it is going to bring the DSSD technology to its storage and its platforms, with people in the present DSSD team moving either to Jeff Boudreau’s Storage business unit or to SVP for platform and systems engineering Bill DePatie’s organization. We understand long-time EMC staffer DePatie’s organization looks after platform hardware engineering, systems & software engineering, drive & storage media engineering, and platform and system strategy. Any DSSD people leaving EMC will be treated respectfully, according to Grocott. He was not able to say what proportion of the DSSD team might be leaving Dell. It is also too early to say which of Jeff Boudreau’s storage products will embrace DSSD technology first. Grocott did say a storage array product using NVMe would be launched by the end of the year. El Reg suggests you take your pick from XtremIO, #VMAX and Unity. For DSSD people it must be a blow, to put it mildly, to see their standalone and much cared-for product baby meeting an abrupt end-of-life. EMC has not been reluctant to kill off under-performing products in the past and its ability to act decisively and quickly in this regard deserves respect.

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/03/02/dell_cans_standalone_dssd/

Let's talk about NVMe, let's talk to Dell EMC: Let's talk about $1bn baby DSSD

Interview The most high profile #NVMe -using array is #Dell #EMC 's #allflash, 10 million IOPS #D5, the much anticipated product of its billion-dollar acquisition of #DSSD . We asked Mike Shapiro, VP Software for DSSD, questions about how DSSD views NVMe as part of our NVMe interview series. His answers are below. During the process, news hit that the President of the #DellEMC Division responsible for DSSD, C J Desai, had quit, and then that Bill Moore, President of DSSD, had also quit. Is there an issue over DSSD's future? That prompted another question-and-answer session with EMC, and that clarified EMC's commitment to DSSD: On Bill Moore: "Bill joined EMC's Office of the CTO more than a year ago from DSSD. He wrapped up his employment at Dell EMC last month." On the amount of EMC investment in DSSD: "Sorry ... we can't verify any of these numbers. Does Dell EMC view DSSD as a large-scale growth opportunity or is it more of a niche market product? "DSSD is a rack-scale flash array designed for use cases that require the highest levels of performance. It will continue to play a strategic role in Dell EMC's all-flash portfolio and all-flash strategy going forward." DSSD is strategic to EMC and, that said, here are its SW President's views on NVMe. El Reg: Will simply moving from SAS/SATA SSDs to NVMe drives bottleneck existing array controllers? Must we wait for next-generation controllers with much faster processing? Mike Shapiro: As a general statement, NVMe drives offer higher IOPS and bandwidth capability, but they also consume fewer CPU cycles per IOP on a host or storage controller (by running a far simpler software stack than does SCSI/SAS/SATA). So depending on how such drives are used in each product line, and in what quantity, and other system design properties, they may or may not require new controllers. For example, if you look at the DSSD system which is designed for delivering the absolute highest performance in the industry from NVMe drives, this required a completely new controller and I/O fabric design to fully realise these new levels of performance. Whereas other types of systems that use a small amount of flash storage for caching, such as Dell EMC’s mid-range solutions, might benefit from NVMe drives as an enhancement to their current production architecture. Secondly, systems that use a modular architecture of controllers and drives, such as VMAX, can incorporate NVMe without needing new controllers. VMAX currently uses NVMe within its controllers and due to its modular architecture the VMAX architecture will be able to take advantage of NVMe drives without waiting for next generation controllers. El Reg: Will we need affordable dual-port NVMe drives so array controllers can provide HA? What does affordable mean? Mike Shapiro: For dual-controller HA systems, of which we have many in the Dell EMC portfolio, we certainly will provide dual-port NVMe drives at affordable cost. The hardware cost for the drives is essentially no different for such drives: the flash media is the same as for any SSD, and PCIe NVMe controller ASICs all provide PCIe lanes and endpoints sufficient for dual-porting. So as the NVMe ecosystem of servers and drive enclosures rolls out, we expect dual-port NVMe drives to be available everywhere we see dual-port SAS drives today and at essentially the same cost structure as SAS dual-port SSDs. We believe that in the 2017-18 timeframe dual-port NVMe drives will be comparable in price to their SAS counterparts. VMAX is uniquely positioned to add next-generation (3D XPoint) memory tiering due to the built-in performance-based tiering feature of the VMAX architecture. El Reg: Are customers ready to adapt NVMeF array-accessing servers with new HBAs and, for ROCE, DCB switches and dealing with end-to-end congestion management? Do they need routability with ROCE? Mike Shapiro: There are multiple pieces to the NVMeF readiness: one is the switch ecosystem, where we do already see widespread deployment of DCB-capable switches. Two is client-side RDMA NICs, where we are seeing a set of new chips available in 2016-2017 that will provide low-cost RDMA NICs for Ethernet (including both RoCE and iWarp options), Omnipath, and Infiniband. For Ethernet in particular, new NICs providing RDMA at the same time as conversion from 1 to 10, 25, or 40GbitE will accelerate NVMeF readiness. Three is host software being available in all operating systems: since the NVMeF spec was only recently finished, this is something we expect to mature rapidly over the first half of 2017. So all the necessary pieces for readiness are happening with significant industry momentum behind NVMeF. We do expect for Ethernet that most customers will use RoCEv2 which is routable, although not all solutions require routability. As an example, many high-performance storage clusters might consist of only dozens of servers and shared storage in a handful of racks, and therefore not require routing. Single-rack solutions can be built today from our DSSD product line, using NVMe over shared PCIe as a fabric, which is the fastest possible solution for single-rack and similarly does not require external switches or routers. Solutions that require wide-area routing will push the industry to continue to work on end-to-end congestion management for RDMA, and Dell EMC is participating in multiple hardware and software efforts related to this area. Dell EMC is in a great position to enable industry adoption through its end-to-end offerings across servers, networking, storage and management software. El Reg: Could we cache inside the existing array controllers to augment existing RAM buffers and so drive up array performance? With flash DIMMs say? Or XPoint DIMMs in the future? Mike Shapiro: First, essentially all enterprise storage controllers provide caching in some form, whether it be for metadata or data. Workloads that have higher locality greatly benefit from this cache to improve application response time. The new NVDIMM technology provides the ability to increase the amount of cache by providing higher density memory at lower cost. So in places where DRAM caching is used today and it would benefit to significantly expand the cache, these technologies may find a home in future products. We are always looking at new ways to expand caches with these types of DIMM alternatives where the resulting price/performance of the system is benefited. Second, 3D XPoint technology will also offer opportunities for performance improvements as a high-speed tier for user data. VMAX is uniquely positioned to add next-generation memory tiering due to the built-in performance-based tiering feature of the VMAX architecture. And performance-focused products such as DSSD will incorporate next-generation memory in the form of new storage modules. It might well make sense to provide NVMeF connectivity not just to high-speed data with NVMe drives, but other kinds of services like a data lake. El Reg: Does having an NVMe over fabrics connection to an array which is not using NVMe drives make sense? Mike Shapiro: Yes, one can imagine scenarios where that would be of benefit, just as in previous product generations it has been useful to speak FC to an array that no longer contains FC connected drives. Fundamentally once customers choose an overall server/storage deployment model, it will be convenient to make other types of products that augment that deployment plug into the environment using the same protocol. For customers who move to NVMeF in the future to gain advantages of high-speed networks with RDMA and converged storage and network traffic, it might well make sense to provide NVMeF connectivity not just to high-speed data with NVMe drives, but other kinds of services like a data lake, backed by non-NVMe drives on non-Flash media, or by a hybrid pool. El Reg: When will NVMeF arrays filled with NVMe drives and offering enterprise data services be ready? What is necessary for them to be ready? Mike Shapiro: At the start of 2016, Dell EMC launched the industry's first NVMe enterprise shared storage system, the DSSD D5, filled with the industry's densest NVMe drives and supporting enterprise applications like Oracle. Dell is also already shipping the industry's leading portfolio of servers supporting NVMe 2.5-inch SSDs. NVMe drives and NVMeF protocols will continue to be added to other products in the overall Dell and Dell EMC portfolio as we enhance more of our overall software and hardware platforms to support this new technology. These new storage offerings will include the full complement of enterprise data services that customers expect and rely on when they purchase a Dell EMC storage system. Comment No question but Dell EMC sees NVMe drive and fabric adoption necessary in the shared storage array market. How about in the hyper-converged area? An emerging possibility is the notion of having hyper-converged nodes' storage connected by an NVMe type fabric, one using RDMA, to speed inter-node linking and virtual SAN operations. An Excelero NASA Ames case study illustrates the idea. NVMe's array access latency-killing future is shining bright and strong, and DSSD seems to be charging ahead to take advantage of that. ®

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/12/12/emc_sees_nvme_adoption_taking_off_next_year/

DSSD President quits Dell EMC

The Register's storage desk has learned that #DSSD President Bill Moore has left #DellEMC. EMC acquired DDSD in 2014, when the prey company had revealed its intentions to build rack-scale flash storage rugs, but was still in stealth mode. Moore co-founded the company, along with Jeff Bonwick who remains a VP and CTO at Dell EMC. News of Moore's departure emerged after Emerging Technologies President CJ Desai resigned ealier this week. That leaves Jeff Bonwick in place along with John McCool as SVP and General Manager of DSSD in Dell EMC's Emerging Technologies Division. We have been told that there have been around a dozen DSSD sales totalling less than US$6 million. Dell EMC has spent about $1.3 billion on DSSD, with $1 billion in the acquisition in May 2014, and there are more than 200 DSSD employees. We understand that Dell EMC may need to decide in the next six months whether to keep investing for growth in DSSD or to decide to view it as a niche product and resize the DSSD team to fit that niche dimensions. According to confidential background from a source aware of what's going in at DSSD but not authorised to speak for the company, Bill Moore has not been involved in DSSD for more than a year. John McCool is still running DSSD. Does DDSD have a future? It's best, for now, to view the system as a new thing growing slowly as Dell EMC finds the right swim lanes. On the plus side, the product is a performance monster that delivered better-than-expected maturity for a 1.0 system. The handful of current customers are very satisfied and have brands that will make for great reference stories. On the downside, as currently defined, a super-high-end box like this is not going to be a volume product any time soon. So what can DDSD be? We see three roles: Current positioning positions DDSD as a high-end, next-generation, all-flash array for the new wave of memory-hungry applications. A next generation intelligent "shelf" of drives sitting behind existing assets like #Xtremio or #VMAX or #Isilon. Those conversations and investigations are well in progress but nothing is decided yet. An embedded part of Dell server architecture which has also now begun to be discussed as part of the new company. It's far too early in DSSD's life to declare success or failure. What we can say for now is that Dell EMC has a unique storage tool that doesn't yet solve widely-experienced problems. The world has changed: the storage industry is not about selling a faster-than-last-year high-end boxes anymore. It remains to be seen if the new Dell EMC management team can execute a transition to the new world.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/12/09/dssd_president_quits_dell_emc/

Dell EMC kills off VxRack Neutrino

#EMC is end-of-lifing its #hyperconverged, rack-scale, scale-out, turnkey #VxRack #Neutrino product. #VxRackNeutrino was announced in February this year as a product on which to run cloud-native apps and Big Data analytics workloads in large data centres. The component storage pieces in the #VxRack 1000-based product were #ScaleIO virtual SAN storage software and the ECS #objectstorage software, and a #DSSD all-flash array. In May the system was named the VxRack System with Neutrino Nodes - there could be up to 108 of them, and described as a pre-packaged #OpenStack system. It was composed from P Brick processing nodes and #IBrick storage/compute nodes with #hybridflash and #diskstorage. The minimum VxRack system had four racks, 45 bricks and 108 nodes made from P and I bricks. There was then a separate VxRack System with DSSD. Seven months later, EMC has decided to kill off the Neutrino systems. Customers, it said, wanted more flexibility than they got with a fixed, turnkey design. They also wanted to get support and training outside Dell EMC, with Red Hat mentioned as an alternative. The blog (by engineering veep Doug Bowers from Dell EMC’s Infrastructure Solutions Group), states: Dell EMC has made the strategic decision to meet this customer demand for OpenStack private clouds with our Reference Architecture and Validated System portfolio and end of life VxRack Neutrino. The alternatives for the VxRack Neutrino target customers are “The Red Hat OpenStack Solution – A validated solution using Dell servers and switches delivered via our strategic partnership with Red Hat and jointly engineered by Dell EMC and Red Hat,” or ScaleIO OpenStack Reference Architectures, which support Mirantis and Canonical OpenStack environments. The VxRack system with DSSD is not specifically called out in EMC’s blog, although a search for "VxRack system with DSSD" on theregister.co.ukEMC's website reveals no results.

A Chad Sakac* blog on the build-vs-buy system continuum provides a view on how to position reference architectures, bundles, validated systems, engineered systems and, at the end of this continuum, hybrid cloud platforms. Going on this post, VxRack Neutrino was too far to the right on the continuum for OpenStack customers. ®

* Chad Sakac is president of the VCE - Converged Platform division of EMC.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/12/02/dell_emc_kills_off_vxrack_neutrino/

EMC mulled a Pure Storage buyout amid patent sueball tennisInternal emails reveal more of Chad Sakac and Vaughn Stewart's rivalry

Three months before #EMC bought #DSSD in May 2014, the storage goliath was thinking about buying #Pure Storage. EMC even admitted in emails that its rival would always win out in head-to-head proof-of-concept de-dupe battles.

This is according to internal emails disclosed during EMC's patent infringement lawsuitagainst Pure Storage and obtained by The Register. That lawsuit rumbled to a halt this month with a small judgment against the upstart. Pure plans to appeal against the verdict.

Let's wind back the clock and build a timeline of events.

In 2012, for its entry into the all-flash array market, EMC bought startup XtremIO and its all-flash array technology for $430m. TheXtremIO array launched in March 2013 while EMC was fighting Pure to be king of the solid-state array market.

Pure upgraded its product set to the FA-400line in May 2013.

The rivalry with Pure Storage became bitter, with EMC accusing Pure of poaching its staffin October 2013. The next month, EMCaccused Pure of ripping off its deduplication and RAID patents.

This action may have been triggered by Pure winning bids against EMC's XtremIO product due to Pure’s data-reduction technology.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/03/22/emc_pondered_purchasing_pure_storage/

5 things you need to know about EMC's DSSD storage announcement

#EMC recently announces its new #DSSD D5 rack-scale flash appliance. Keith Townsend provides the five critical data points that IT professionals need to know.

http://www.techrepublic.com/article/5-things-you-need-to-know-about-emcs-dssd-storage-announcement/