OpenSDS Project Issues First Release for Software-Defined Storage

The @LinuxFoundation is hosting a little-known open source project that’s doing #softwaredefinedstorage. The #OpenSDS project officially launched with the #Linux Foundation in November 2016. And it recently issued its first code release — #Aruba. The impetus of the project was to bring together different companies to collaborate on an open storage platform, said Steven Tan, chairman of the OpenSDS technical steering committee and CTO of cloud storage solutions at Huawei. There are so many open source projects for compute and networking. The founders of OpenSDS wanted something for storage.

Some of the vendors behind the start of OpenSDS were @Hitachi, @Huawei, and @Fujitsu. @Dell EMC joined a bit later. The group also includes end users of #softwaredefinedstorage such as @Vodafone, @YahooJapan, and @NTTCommunications.

“A lot of end users have a traditional IT set-up, and if they have cloud-native apps they still need to connect to the existing IT infrastructure,” said Tan. “A lot of projects are just addressing one environment. We’re trying to connect the dots and make sure to provide a framework that connects traditional with cloud-native.”

Similar to SDN, software-defined storage separates the control plane from the data plane. OpenSDS is creating the control plane for storage. Tan said it doesn’t matter whether the underlying storage is handled by hardware or software. The OpenSDS code provides a management and control interface.

“It’s definitely a very challenging endeavor,” said Tan. “In terms of more traditional storage like block or file, each vendor does stuff differently. OpenSDS is a consistent way to manage different storage.”

https://www.sdxcentral.com/articles/news/opensds-project-issues-first-release-for-software-defined-storage/2018/07/

6 Software-Defined Storage Companies to Watch

While the traditional storage industry has been largely experiencing anemic growth, at a 2.7 percent compound annual growth rate (CAGR) through 2021, there are pockets of the market that are seeing high growth and revenue. One such pocket is software-defined storage ( #SDS ). This segment is growing at a 13.5 percent CAGR through 2021, according to IDC. SDS is penetrating IT infrastructures to meet the needs of the next-generation datacenter. As companies transform their businesses and move operations to the cloud, they are adopting SDS for greater agility, reduced costs, and greater operational efficiency.

IDC defines SDS using the following criteria, “storage software that runs on commodity hardware, does not require any proprietary hardware components like custom ASICs [application-specific integrated circuit chips], and is a standalone storage system.”

Companies are abandoning traditional hardware-defined storage designs for software-defined storage models. “The legacy systems have improved their software to make them easier to use, borrowing some of the ideas of SDS,” said Eric Burgener, IDC research vice president of enterprise storage. “But they will generally always be more complex to manage, and certainly more expensive to buy and maintain.”

SDS is a subset of the larger storage market, and it can be split into four segments: block, file, object, and hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI), according to IDC. It’s worth noting that Gartner segments this differently into two categories: infrastructure (which would include block, file, object, and hyperconverged) and management (which coordinates the delivery of storage services).

VMware was one of the first companies to support this newer storage model with its software-defined data center and vSAN technology. But as the SDS market continues to grow, there are more companies coming forward with SDS innovations. We’ve identified six SDS companies that we believe are worth watching as this market continues to experience growth.

Cloudian

Cloudian set out to bring object storage to the enterprise. The company launched in 2011 with its flagship product, HyperStorage, a hybrid cloud storage platform.

It has recently updated the platform to include on-premises data centers and multiple public clouds, and it acquired SDS file storage company Infinity Storage. The founder of Infinity invented the write-once-read-many (WORM) file system that most SDS platforms use, including Cloudian. Prior to the acquisition, the two companies launched HyperFile, which used Infinity’s file storage software built into Cloudian’s storage platform.

The platform is widely seen as a way to consolidate data storage into a managed environment, while maintaining cloud-like object storage without obstructing the data.

Founders: Hiroshi Ohta and Michael Tso
Total Funding: $104.1 million (Digital Alpha Advisors, Lenovo, Epsilon Venture Partners, Intel Capital, DVP Investment, Innovation Network Corporation of Japan, City National Bank, Eight Roads Ventures, Goldman Sachs)

Cohesity

Cohesity was started in 2013 by Mohit Aron who previously co-founded Nutanix. The hyperconverged secondary storage company has been growing rapidly, and it saw a 600 percent increase in sales revenue over the previous year in 2017.

The company’s data storage platform, Orion, seeks to eliminate secondary storage silos by consolidating an enterprises on-premises and cloud-based secondary storage silos onto a centralized, hyperconverged platform.

Last year, Cohesity updated the platform to combine data protection and scalable file and object storage. The update enabled enterprises to also use Orion as a backup system and a searchable archive for large amounts of structured and unstructured data.

Founder: Mohit Aron
Total Funding: $160 million (Battery Ventures, Foundation Capital, Hewlett Packard Ventures, Accel Partners, Artis Ventures, GV, Cisco Investments, Qualcomm Ventures, Sequoia Capital, Wing Venture Capital, DHVC, Trinity Ventures, InstantScale Capital)

Datrium

Datrium was founded in 2012 by Data Domain and VMware veterans to create a slightly different model for storage than HCI infrastructure players. It provides open converged infrastructure for hybrid clouds in a way that doesn’t require the overhead of HCI. It does, however, integrate some features of HCI such as scale-out backup, cloud-based disaster recovery, and the ability to scale automatically to overcome bottleneck problems.

When Datrium launched, up until last year, it only had support for VMware servers and virtual machines (VMs), but it added storage support for open source platforms and Linux containers and Docker persistent volumes. This update enables enterprises to manage multiple environments from a single source. The company also enhanced its private cloud infrastructure platform with new scaling functions.

Founders: Boris Weissman, Brian Biles, Ganesh Venkitachalam, Hugo Patterson, and Sazzala Reddy
Total Funding: $110 million (New Enterprise Associates, Lightspeed Ventures)

Portworx

Portworx is a growing container storage company, which is packaged as a container itself. The company, founded in 2014, seeks to provide container-native storage and enable container use for DevOps and production environments.

Its cloud native data management platform provides automated data services, including data persistence and security, and it saves and stores container data. It can run on any infrastructure using a container, including Kubernetes, Mesosphere DC/OS, and Docker Swarm.

Portworx recently launched an open source stateful storage project, STORK, a storage orchestrator runtime for Kubernetes. The project allows DevOps teams to run stateful applications on Kubernetes and offer storage health monitoring.

Mesosphere recently became a reseller of Portworx’s products, combining Mesosphere’s automated compute service with Portworx’ automated storage platform.

Founders: Goutham Rao, Murli Thirumale, and Vinod Jayaraman
Total Funding: $28.5 million (Mayfield Fund, Sapphire Ventures, GE Ventures, Michael Dell)

Rubrik

Rubrik provides automated data backup, recovery, search, cloud, and development services across cloud and on-premises environments. The company launchedthe ninth release of its data management platform, Alta, in June 2017 with additional support for a number of physical and virtual environments.

In February, Rubrik acquired NoSQL data backup company, Datos IO. This acquisition is meant to help its enterprise customers undertake digital transformations and AI initiatives. In April, the company released a software-as-a-service platform, Polaris, for data management applications.

While Rubrik and Cohesity are competitors in this market, Rubrik disagrees on the use of the term “hyperconverged secondary storage,” deeming it a marketing term and preferring “cloud data management.”

Like Cohesity, it has seen enormous growth in the past few years as the market explodes. Rubrik was named as an alternative acquisition target for VMware by a VMware investor.

Founders: Arvind Jain, Arvind Nithrakashyap, Bipul Sinha, and Soham Mazumdar
Total Funding: $292 million (Kevin Durant, Greylock Partners, IVP, Lightspeed Ventures, Khosla Ventures)

SoftNas

SoftNas launched its first product, Cloud NAS, in 2013. Its goal was to fill a gap in terms of cloud native services by giving a native storage experience in a cloud environment, according to Arun Chandrasekaran, VP and distinguished analyst for Data Center and Cloud Infrastructure at Gartner.

Last year, the company released a new version of Cloud NAS and three additional products as it rebranded itself as a hybrid cloud platform provider.

CloudNAS works as an alternative to hardware-based storage, on-premises network attached storage (NAS), storage area networks (SAN), and file servers. It replaces these with cloud object storage, which can be more easily scaled to accommodate enterprise needs.

The three products it launched as part of its makeover are set to make it faster and easier to migrate applications to the cloud while providing backup and recovery.

Founders: Rick Braddy and William Hood
Total Funding: $6.4 million (angel investors)

https://www.sdxcentral.com/articles/news/6-software-defined-storage-companies-to-watch/2018/04/

What Windows Server 2019 Will Have to Offer for Data Centers

With Windows Server 2008 R2 reaching the end of extended support in January 2020, it’s time to start planning your upgrades. #WindowsServer2019 will be available in the second half of this year, along with #SystemCenter2019, and @Microsoft is just starting to talk about the new features it will bring. Some of these features are already in the faster moving “Semi Annual Channel” version of Windows Server 2016. Those include the Windows Subsystem for Linux that lets you run the same Linux scripts and utilities from a Windows server, much smaller images for Server Core, improved support for Kubernetes container orchestration, and Hyper-V isolation for Linux containers. Others are logical progressions from key Server 2016 features, such as support for Shielded VMs with limited admin access for Linux VMs. Related: Planning for the New Windows Server Cadence But Windows Server 2019 also adds new options for hyper-converged infrastructure and cluster management that fit well with current data center trends. “HCI will have continual enhancements on scale (a feature called Cluster Sets that allows you to build a cluster of clusters, resulting in large hyper-converged clusters), increased resiliency to hardware failure, diagnosability, health monitoring, performance (within and across hyper-converged nodes), management, persistent memory support, and more,” a Microsoft spokesperson told us. Related: Spectre, Meltdown Hit On-Prem Windows Servers Hardest Cluster sets group together multiple failover clusters, whether they’re compute, storage, or hyper-converged clusters. With cluster sets, resources like VMs are not part of their individual cluster but belong to a cluster of clusters. That means you can scale up to a much larger number of nodes and still have the benefits of a single cluster (like live VM migration and a single storage namespace) without the fragility of a single, giant cluster. This makes the fabric more reliable and more scalable.  Being able to encrypt network segments to protect the network layer between servers will also appeal to operators of larger data centers, a Microsoft spokesperson suggested. “SDN Encryption allows you to encrypt subnet traffic, which is very useful in multi-tenant environments with multiple virtual networks,” they explained, noting that it doesn’t require special network hardware. While cluster sets will appeal to the largest enterprise data centers, Windows Server 2019’s new remote server management application, codenamed Project Honolulu, will bring the benefits of HCI to much smaller setups. As Siddhartha Roy from the Windows Server team explained to Data Center Knowledge last year when first announcing the new management tool, software-defined data centers have needed significant investments in hardware and software before. “We are very cognizant that for these smaller footprints, for the two-to-four-node segment, we need a separate lightweight do-it-yourself software-defined data center user experience,” Roy said. “We see the need for more of a self-managed solution aimed at someone who is more of an IT generalist.” Hybrid Cloud Project Honolulu has a web-based interface but doesn’t require a connection to Azure the way the web-based management tools for the GUI-less Server Core and Nano Server have done if you wanted to use anything but PowerShell. It’s designed for managing a single cluster, manages Windows and Windows Server instances running on physical or virtual machines on any hypervisor or cloud, and covers everything from certificates to Windows Update. But it’s especially helpful for provisioning and managing hyperconverged clusters, down to the real-time CPU, memory, new usage, and storage IOPS across the cluster and on individual VMs and volumes.  Being able to authenticate directly against Azure Active directory from Windows Server 2019 (the way Windows 10 already can) unlocks hybrid cloud scenarios, like using Azure Site Recovery, Backup, and File Sync directly with individual servers using Project Honolulu. (So far, this appears to be Azure services only rather than supporting multiple clouds, but Microsoft tells us you’ll be able to integrate with Update Management for Operations Management Suite, which can also monitor systems running on different clouds.) Windows Server 2019 also includes the client for the Windows Defender Advanced Threat Protection cloud service, so you can monitor servers for the kind of behavior that indicates a hacker has broken in, as well as Exploit Guard controls for locking down devices against lateral movement, ransomware, data exfiltration, and vulnerability exploits. Combine this Azure integration with the HCI support, and it’s clear that Azure Stack isn’t the only option Microsoft is pitching for hybrid cloud and edge computing. Windows Server and its Storage Spaces Direct software-defined storage (especially on pre-certified Windows Server Software Defined hardware configurations that save you months of integration testing) and their potential for hybrid cloud is a big part of why Gartner is now including software options in its hyper-converged infrastructure Magic Quadrant. Infrastructure Planning WSL and shielded Linux VMs may allow some organizations to consolidate infrastructure because you’ll no longer need duplicate systems for managing Windows Server and Linux workloads (“The hardware requirements for Shielded VMs in Windows Server 2019 remain unchanged” from supporting Windows shielded VMs in Windows Server 2016, the Microsoft spokesperson told us). There’s been speculation about possible changes to Remote Desktop Services; the Remote Desktop Session Host isn’t in the first preview build and appears to be moving to the Windows client. That could simplify VDI infrastructure, assuming the session host doesn’t reappear in later builds.  If you’ve been waiting for an R2 version of Windows Server 2016, remember that server releases don’t work like that anymore. Instead, there’s a new Long Term Servicing Channel release every two to three years (which gets five years of mainstream support, five years of extended support and – if you pay for it – six years of Premium Assurance). During those two to three years, Microsoft will be testing and debugging key new features in the Semi-Annual Channel releases that come out every six months. Those get 18 months of production support, require Software Assurance, are aimed at faster-moving workloads like software-defined networking and containers, and don’t have a desktop GUI interface at all. If you want to get advanced experience with new Windows Server features in your data center and you have suitable workloads, SAC is a good option. If you have more traditional workloads and do your Windows Server upgrades on longer timescales, Windows Server 2019 is the next release to start evaluating.

http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/microsoft/what-windows-server-2019-will-have-offer-data-centers

Supermicro RSD 2.1 Pools All-Flash NVMe Composable Storage

Today #Supermicro announced their new Rack Scale Design (RSD) 2.1 with pooled all-flash #NVMe composable storage support for applications like high throughput ingest, #HPC, #dataanalytics, video streaming, CDN, and software-defined storage ( #SDS) environments. “Occupying just 1U of rack space, our all-flash NVMe storage systems support 32 hot-swap 2.5″ NVMe SSDs for a half petabyte of high-performance storage with Supermicro RSD 2.1 that can be shared by 12 hosts simultaneously,” said Charles Liang, president and CEO of Supermicro. “With dynamically composable server nodes, efficient storage utilization, and independently upgradeable compute resources, our RSD 2.1 solutions with advanced NVMe pooled storage are perfect for efficient and flexible hyperscale datacenters. In fact, we have already deployed these 32-drive systems running Hadoop workloads for a major automobile company.”  Supermicro RSD empowers cloud service providers, telecoms and Fortune 500 companies to build their own agile, efficient software-defined datacenters or expand existing ones. Supermicro RSD is based on Intel Rack Scale Design (Intel RSD), which is an industry-aligned datacenter architecture built on open standards. Intel RSD helps large datacenters support new data-centric applications that require large amounts of very fast storage to be shared while enabling increased speed, agility and automation. In an environment of explosive datacenter growth, Intel RSD provides an infrastructure blueprint with more flexibility and scalability, higher security and better control, while delivering substantial savings in capex and opex. Supermicro RSD manages racks of disaggregated servers, storage, and networking with industry standard Redfish Restful APIs that remain consistent across different vendors and multiple server generations. Supermicro RSD 2.1, supports high performance, high density, and disaggregated NVMe storage for dramatically improved datacenter efficiency, increased utilization and lower costs. Based on Intel RSD version 2.1 spec, the arrival of this technology marks the beginning of a paradigm shift to deploy truly disaggregated resource pools in large-scale data centers that dramatically improve datacenter efficiency, increase utilization and reduce costs. For optimal compatibility, Supermicro RSD 2.1 runs on all X11-generation server and storage systems supporting Intel Xeon Scalable processors as well as Supermicro X10-generation server and storage systems supporting the Intel Xeon processor E5-2600 v4 family. This cross-generational hardware compatibility offers Supermicro customers investment protection and the flexibility to either build new or expand their existing datacenters. In addition, Supermicro RSD 2.1 is tightly integrated with other datacenter management software layers such as OpenStack using the Restful Pod Manager APIs that enable end-to-end cloud infrastructure deployment. The traditional way of scaling up datacenter resources often involves adding server nodes with fixed computing, networking, and storage ratios. Due to the different life cycles of these resources, a wholesale upgrade of the entire set of server nodes will often lead to premature retirement of valuable investments and resource underutilization. That is why Supermicro’s resource-saving, disaggregated NVMe storage solutions like NVMe-oF (NVMe over Fabric) are so important to customers who want to build more efficient and flexible hyper-scale datacenters.

https://insidehpc.com/2018/04/supermicro-rsd-2-1-pools-flash-nvme-composable-storage/

Open Source Software-Defined Storage Backs New Hybrid Cloud OfferingBy David Ramel

#Opensource, #softwaredefined storage ( #SDS ) and a #hybrid on-premises/cloud model have all converged in a new commercial offering announced by @Nexenta. The company specializes in enterprise-centric software-only storage management services for any scale-up or scale-out workload, using any protocol, on any software or hardware infrastructure -- what it calls Nexenta #AnyCloud. Nexenta has chosen the @Amazon Web Services Inc. ( #AWS) cloud for extending its software-defined storage offering to a hybrid model. The company is targeting users of its "open-source driven" Software-Defined Storage ( #OpenSDS) solution who want to go hybrid, wherein they can take advantage of AWS' cloud-native file and block storage services for their business apps, integrating with on-premises implementations. To do that, the company launched NexentaCloud in AWS on the AWS Marketplace. Several services, coming with different storage capacities, are offered, all with free trials available.

https://virtualizationreview.com/articles/2018/04/09/software-defined-storage.aspx?m=1

7 Tips for the Enterprise Data Storage Manager

Enterprise data storage management is easier said than done. The problem is, storage managers have a lot going on. Managing systems, dealing with IT and end-users, and everyday firefighting take up days and weeks, leaving little time to do proactive tasks like optimizing the storage environment. However, if you take consistent time to plan and optimize your storage management, you’ll improve your storage environment and get back the time you’re losing. Start with the 7 major storage domains that you are responsible for: 1. Performance 2. Availability and Reliability 3. Governance and Compliance 4. Control Cost 5. Security 6. Software-Defined Storage 7. Data Protection

http://mobile.enterprisestorageforum.com/storage-management/7-tips-for-the-enterprise-data-storage-manager.html

VMware ponders baking backup into VSAN

@VMware has pondered baking backup and disaster recovery into its #VSAN #softwaredefined ( #SDS ) storage tool. Speaking at the Sydney VMware User Group conference in Sydney today, Cormac Hogan, director and chief technologist of VMware’s Storage and Availability Business Unit, said “We are very focussed on building an ecosystem for VSAN.” Advertisement He added that such an ecosystem will have “features like data protection embedded in it, so you don’t need third party tooling to protect the workload.” “VSAN in AWS gives us an opportunity to do DR,” he added. “Maybe failover to AWS. We are thinking about it. A sort of backup solution and a DR solution.” In conversation with The Register Hogan later described the backup feature as snapshots. Backup would also offer AWS as a target, the idea being that VSAN on-prem and in the cloud makes for a backup arrangement that should offer fast restores . Adding such features will, Hogan added, help VMware to change perceptions of VSAN as best-suited to non-critical workloads. “We were extremely cautious when we launched VSAN,” and therefore recommended it for simple workloads or test and development environments. Users therefore didn’t think VSAN was ready for prime time. Hogan said the product has reached "feature parity” with rival hyper-converged and added “the mindset is changing” among customers. Adding backup and DR will change things further, but Hogan said VMware will also continue to support data management software vendors and the APIs they rely on. Hogan also popped up the following slide with more hints of VSAN's possible future.

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/03/20/vmware_ponders_baking_backup_into_vsan/

Google's 72-Qubit Bristlecone Puts 'Quantum Supremacy' Within Reach

Today’s topics include @Google previewing the largest quantum computing processor to date; the #DDoS record broken again as a memcached attack hits 1.7 Tbps; @Microsoft revamping the setup experience for Windows 10; and hyperconverged infrastructure systems as one of the hottest IT markets of 2018. Google this week previewed Bristlecone, a 72-qubit quantum processor that surpasses the previous record 50-qubit system @IBM announced last November. Google's announcement, at the American Physical Society meeting March 5 in Los Angeles, takes the company one step closer to its goal of demonstrating "quantum supremacy," where a quantum computer can perform a task that a classical computer cannot. Google thinks quantum supremacy can be easily demonstrated with a 49-qubit processor so long as certain other technical conditions are also achieved.

Julian Kelly, research scientist at Google's Quantum AI Lab, said, "We believe the experimental demonstration of a quantum processor outperforming a supercomputer would be a watershed moment for our field. [It] remains one of our key objectives.”

Related ReadingGoogle Previews 72-Qubit Quantum ProcessorMemcached DDoS Attack Hits 1.7 TbpsMicrosoft Adds More Privacy Controls to Windows 10HCI Storage: One Hot Market in 2018

Netscout Arbor on March 5 reported the largest ever distributed denial-of-service attack to date at 1.7 terabits per second, just four days after the previous largest DDoS attack at 1.35 Tbps against GitHub was reported. Both attacks involved improperly configured memcached servers that reflected attack traffic, amplifying the total volume.

At this point in time, it's not clear who is behind the memcached DDoS attacks, though indicators show where the traffic is coming from.

Carlos Morales, vice president of Arbor's Security Engineering and Response Team, noted, "The top source country was the United States at nearly 50 percent of the traffic at peak. The other sources in the top 5 included France, Netherlands, UK and Australia."

Microsoft on March 6 released Windows 10 test build 17115 for PC members of the Windows Insider early-access program. The new build features a revamped set of controls that greet users when they first run the operating system. Included is a new setup experience offering users control over how their data is shared with the company.

Marisa Rogers, Windows and Devices Group Privacy Officer at Microsoft, said, "This new design conveys focused information to help our customers make focused choices about their privacy and offers two new settings for Inking & Typing and Find my device.”

Those new settings may show up in a single-screen layout or as separate screens for some users so that the company's developers can gauge which approach is most effective. On separate screens, Microsoft will highlight its privacy recommendation by framing it with a dotted line. Some users may be presented with up to seven individual screens.

Hyperconverged infrastructure systems are all the rage, with @HP, @DellEMC, @Cisco Systems, @Lenovo, @Nutanix, @Pivot3, @Cohesity, @HyperGrid, @Maxta and others all crowding the space. " #Hyperconverged " refers to platform offerings that share computing and storage resources, based on #softwaredefined storage, software-defined computing, commodity hardware and a unified management interface.

Hyperconverged systems deliver their main value through software tools, commoditizing the underlying hardware. The market surpassed $2.2 billion in global revenue in 2016, up 110 percent compared to 2015, and was at $2.9 billion after three quarters in 2017.

Pivot3 CEO Ron Nash said, "Hyperconverged is in a 'crossing-the-chasm' situation right now. ... Once [everybody] bought the hyperconverged system for one purpose, they started to run other things on it. They saw that it stayed up, did not lose data, was easy to operate and was less expensive than buying traditional legacy gear.”

http://www.eweek.com/servers/google-s-72-qubit-bristlecone-puts-quantum-supremacy-within-reach

Global Markets for Software-defined Storage to Double to $18.2 Billion

WELLESLEY, Mass., Feb. 26, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Growing demand for flexible, application-specific scalability is driving growth in the market for #softwaredefinedstorage products and services. In a new report, Software-defined Storage: Global Markets to 2022, BCC Research estimates the global market to grow from $8.5 billion in 2017 to almost $18.2 billion by 2022, indicating a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 16.4%. The storage industry is one of the most crucial and fastest growing segments in the high technology industry. Storage market leaders such as @IBM and @DellEMC forecast that storage data will exponentially increase in size, volume and complexity. For example, @EMC projects that data will grow to 40 zettabytes by 2020; a 50-fold increase from the amount of data stored in the beginning of 2010. Storage volume is increasing in IT environments due to digital transformation, mobile computing and more complex cloud architectures. The volume is increasing by more than 40% annually. Organizations are increasingly turning to software-defined storage as the primary economic alternative to simply adding more storage racks to keep pace with the burgeoning volume of data. Software-defined architectures are becoming viable across major IT platforms, paving the way for a software-defined data center that leverages the combination of improved operational control and cost efficiency. Thus, software-defined storage is has become a key element of hyper-converged infrastructure that is at the core of the software-defined architecture. It presents great value on its own and enables greater transformation of the IT infrastructure. Research Highlights Fully 80% of the world’s data has been created in the past two years. Much of that data is unstructured, meaning it does not reside in traditional row column databases and is typically more storage intensive. Companies in the North American market are learning how to adapt to regulatory requirements to maximize the value of software-defined storage deployments. Software-defined storage is expected to surpass traditional storage in terms of market size beginning in 2020. “On average, 40% of corporations are increasing their storage capacity by 11% to 30% annually while another 20% of firms are upping capacity by 41% to over 100% year over year,” said Michael Sullivan, Senior Editor and report author, BCC Research. “Significantly, the storage increases are occurring irrespective of whether or not business revenues or employee headcount remains the same or rises. Legacy solutions become cost prohibitive at these high growth rates, and the combination of data analytics, regulatory requirements and other business critical mandates make it impossible for IT organizations to reduce the inevitable exponential expansion of storage infrastructure.”

https://globenewswire.com/news-release/2018/02/26/1387578/0/en/Global-Markets-for-Software-defined-Storage-to-Double-to-18-2-Billion.html

Software-Defined Storage Design Considerations: 5 Key Tips

#Softwaredefinedstorage ( #SDS) decouples storage intelligence from the underlying storage devices. The environment orchestrates multiple storage devices into a software storage management layer that operates above the physical storage layer. By moving intelligence up the stack, customers can buy commodity hardware that supports SDS policy-driven workload processing, load balancing, dedupe, replication, snapshots, and backup. Instead of purchasing expensive proprietary NAS or SAN, SDS runs on commodity hardware and standard operating systems. This is true as far as it goes. However, some SDS vendors – especially the software-only sellers – claim that the hardware doesn’t matter. But when it comes to software-defined storage design, hardware choices are critical. It’s true that software-defined storage users can use commodity hardware and avoid expensive SAN or NAS with built-in storage intelligence. But software-defined storage users still need to integrate SDS with hardware, and design the physical infrastructure, so it optimizes the software-defined storage layer. Optimize Software-Defined Architecture Storage IO paths are complex and pass through multiple stages, and pathing issues easily compromise quality of service (QoS) and performance. When admins add software-defined storage on top of this already-complicated architecture, complexity increases and performance and QoS may suffer even more.  SDS users can avoid pathing issues by carefully integrating their software-defined storage with the virtual data center and its physical infrastructure. For example, coordinate the SDS design with the SDN manager to optimize virtual paths for packet routing and quality of service. However, many SDS admins spend the majority of their resources on integrating the software-defined data center, and don’t pay enough attention to integrating SDS with the physical layer. This inattention can seriously affect your SDS project. Benefits of Integrating Software-Defined Storage with Hardware The benefits of SDS design that properly integrates your hardware can be substantial. · Optimize application workloads with policy-driven performance and RTO/RPO settings. · SDS pools storage capacity from storage systems and provides them to applications running in the software-defined layer. Provisioning is simplified, and the policy-driven software manages SLAs and QoS for different applications. · Admins centrally manage the logical storage pools instead of logging in and out of device-level data services. Centralized management enables IT to create security and policies across a single logical infrastructure instead of different interfaces at the device level. · SDS simplifies scaling with dynamic provisioning. Admins can easily add servers without manual data distribution and load balancing. · SDS is capable of strong security. Not all SDS offerings are developed equally, but these environments should at a minimum enable encryption, multi-tenant logical layers, and strong logging and monitoring with understandable reports at the management interface. These are strong benefits. But none of this will work well for you if your software-defined storage design does not integrate smoothly with the underlying physical devices. Let’s talk about how you can ensure that it does. Software-Defined Storage Considerations: Key Tips These are the critical points to observe when you design and implement your software defined storage: 1. Know your storage performance and capacity requirements. 2. Understand vendor and hardware compatibilities. 3. Design for current and future resilience. 4. Finalize the design. 5. Manage your software defined storage. SDS Design Tip 1: Know Your Storage Requirements The first thing to do is to identify workloads and their respective applications, servers, and clients. Typical characteristics to look at include baseline IOPs and peak IOPs, throughput, depth of queue waiting to be processed, latency, the portion of data that is actively changing (working IO), variation patterns, and how much throughput performance you need to maintain backup windows. You might also want to look at additional characteristics like the presence of encryption and the ratio of sequential to random data. Now determine their performance and storage capacity requirements, and how data protection will work. Identify application workloads by performance, capacity, and data protection needs, including RTO and RPO. Assign priority applications to fast SSD and disk. Do the same for secondary workloads. Identify characteristics such as where the backup stream is stored, where it is replicated, and the amount of storage capacity to preserve for backup workloads. Plan the storage capacity you need for backup and archive. Although long-term data retention is likely on tape or in the cloud, you might want to continuously backup some high priority applications to the storage hardware underlying the SDS. Typical capacity factors include the existing size of data and its monthly, bi-yearly, or yearly growth rate, and its scheduled retention period. SDS Design Tip 2: Understand vendor and hardware compatibilities Once you have identified workloads, performance characteristics, and capacity needs then you can look for your SDS vendor and optimize the physical storage and networking. As you deploy new software and hardware, be careful to deploy recommended firmware and drivers. Keep in mind that as recently as 2015, most new storage hardware did not automatically work with SDS software. Consequences included SDS not recognizing new devices or media, disk sector and whole disk failures, and difficulty troubleshooting integration problems using separate software and hardware management interfaces. Since then SDS vendors who also build hardware have been developing for SDS stacks, and software-only developers are improving reference architecture. This begs the question about going with commodity hardware and avoiding vendor lock-in, but there has been improvement. Still, assume nothing when you research the storage hardware for your SDS system. Look deeply into compatibilities and best practices. SDS Design Tip 3: Design for current and future resilience Once you have chosen your SDS and physical storage vendors, you will need to design your SDS environment. Design for resilience so your environment will cost-effectively scale to match your developing storage requirements. When you design for resilience, understand your current and future thresholds before you start. Know your uptime requirements and resilience objectives for your storage configurations including cluster nodes, redundant network connections for uninterrupted traffic, and performance. Pay attention to scalability and growth characteristics on your SDS, storage media, processors, and RAM. And be sure to know how simple (or not) it will be to update firmware and drivers. The last thing you want is put your whole admin team on alert and down your SDS system for hours every time you need to upgrade firmware. SDS Design Tip 4: Finalize the design Remember that your SDS runs on top of physical storage. Carefully design performance and capacity so the physical layer will properly support your software-defined storage environment. Decide how many storage pool clusters to deploy and understand provisioning and the process of adding new pools. There is no right or wrong way to do this: large storage pools allow for centralized management and fault troubleshooting but failing storage media can ripple through the entire SDS. In that case, you may prefer to maintain smaller storage pools if the admin management time is not overwhelming. Build in redundancies by mirroring high performance applications to different storage devices in the pool or across multiple pools or use parity for low-write applications like archival. Both parity and mirroring let you copy data sets and consider reserving pool capacity for redistributed data should an SSD or HDD fail. Decide what storage media sizes you will need as well as RAM and CPU requirements. Enclosures enter the picture here: you want sufficient size to house your current drives, and easy scalability so you can simply add more enclosures and redistribute disk drives as needed. Performance and capacity are critical. Remember that calculating SSD performance has two dimensions: the number of SSDs that data can access simultaneously, and the capacity of the SSDs to know how much data it can process at the same time. Also think about the types and sizes of your SSDs and HDDs. Storage tiering comes into play here, with many admins opting for SSDs for Tier 0 and SSDs plus fast disk for Tier 1. Processors and RAM are not necessarily as critical as media performance and capacity but may be very important depending on the processing point for data traffic. If it’s processed at the physical networking layer, such as RDMA network cards, then your storage processors don’t have to do all the heavy lifting. If the storage processors do process the traffic, then you’ll need high performance processors for high priority traffic. RAM makes a difference if you are doing operations such as deduping on clustered nodes. Now that you have planned the underlying storage foundation, plan the virtual one just as carefully. Know how many virtual disks you plan on starting with and understand how to scale them over time. Remember that the more virtual disks you create in cluster nodes, the more time it will take to manage and load balance. The more intelligence your SDS offers for virtual disk management, the easier your job becomes. Also remember that the more virtual disks you are using, the more capacity you reserve for write-back caches. The total size of virtual disks will of course depend on the actual size of your storage tiers. Factor in reserved capacity for dynamic data distribution and write-back caches. Virtual disks can be terabytes in size, but peak workloads should not spike over threshold performance or capacity settings. Smaller disk sizes may be more reliable when running large workloads. Understand before you buy what your disk sector sizes are. For example, if your virtual OSs and applications support native 4KB sector disks, then you will get better write performance and some benefits to reliability and capacity. You can of course use 4K disks with 512-byte emulation for backwards compatibility, but this will not get you the same level of benefits as a native 4KB. SDS Design Tip 5: Manage the Software and Physical Layers Monitoring the software and hardware aspects of the SDS architecture are two different interfaces – more if you are separately managing multiple storage devices. SDS management abstracts the storage from its physical infrastructure and manages it at a logical layer. It administers policies for the hardware storage devices but does not manage the hardware. Common events like failed interconnects and disks can down entire software-defined storage environment. The disadvantage is that admins must separately troubleshoot and manage the physical layer instead of centrally managing the storage stack. This does not have to be a deal breaker for deploying SDS. SAN and NAS hardware are already highly complex and attempting to change application pathways and configurations is time and resource intensive. SDS can certainly simplify these changes, which cuts down on the resources required for managing disk devices and SDS. Simplify hardware troubleshooting by using robust hardware architecture with redundant clusters, dynamic scaling, and self-healing mechanisms. Also look for reference architectures and storage devices that are purpose-built to run SDS stacks. Invest in additional software like drive monitoring utilities. Software Defined Storage: Powerful but Not Simple SDS architectures can save money and time. When admins successfully integrate storage software and hardware and customize them to their storage needs, the business may realize significant improvements and cost savings. No one is saying this is easy. One of the beauties of virtualized environments is that they run on a variety of storage, server, and networking components. Yet when admins want to combine these platforms into a single virtual SDS, they cannot simply expect them to automatically work seamlessly. This is why storage admins need to spend time and attention to make sure their hardware is reliable and fault-tolerant and integrates well with their software-defined storage design. Only this level of integration allows SDS to properly manage stored data with flexible and dynamic policies. You can do it by creating a clear knowledge and implementation plan for SDS and hardware integration and giving your team enough time to optimize the infrastructure right from the start. Expending the right resources at the start of the project will help ensure that your SDS deployment will be everything you need, now and into the future.

http://mobile.enterprisestorageforum.com/storage-technology/software-defined-storage-design-considerations.html

Software-Defined Storage Design Considerations: 5 Key Tips

#Softwaredefinedstorage ( #SDS) decouples storage intelligence from the underlying storage devices. The environment orchestrates multiple storage devices into a software storage management layer that operates above the physical storage layer. By moving intelligence up the stack, customers can buy commodity hardware that supports SDS policy-driven workload processing, load balancing, dedupe, replication, snapshots, and backup. Instead of purchasing expensive proprietary NAS or SAN, SDS runs on commodity hardware and standard operating systems. This is true as far as it goes. However, some SDS vendors – especially the software-only sellers – claim that the hardware doesn’t matter. But when it comes to software-defined storage design, hardware choices are critical. It’s true that software-defined storage users can use commodity hardware and avoid expensive SAN or NAS with built-in storage intelligence. But software-defined storage users still need to integrate SDS with hardware, and design the physical infrastructure, so it optimizes the software-defined storage layer. Optimize Software-Defined Architecture Storage IO paths are complex and pass through multiple stages, and pathing issues easily compromise quality of service (QoS) and performance. When admins add software-defined storage on top of this already-complicated architecture, complexity increases and performance and QoS may suffer even more.  SDS users can avoid pathing issues by carefully integrating their software-defined storage with the virtual data center and its physical infrastructure. For example, coordinate the SDS design with the SDN manager to optimize virtual paths for packet routing and quality of service. However, many SDS admins spend the majority of their resources on integrating the software-defined data center, and don’t pay enough attention to integrating SDS with the physical layer. This inattention can seriously affect your SDS project. Benefits of Integrating Software-Defined Storage with Hardware The benefits of SDS design that properly integrates your hardware can be substantial. · Optimize application workloads with policy-driven performance and RTO/RPO settings. · SDS pools storage capacity from storage systems and provides them to applications running in the software-defined layer. Provisioning is simplified, and the policy-driven software manages SLAs and QoS for different applications. · Admins centrally manage the logical storage pools instead of logging in and out of device-level data services. Centralized management enables IT to create security and policies across a single logical infrastructure instead of different interfaces at the device level. · SDS simplifies scaling with dynamic provisioning. Admins can easily add servers without manual data distribution and load balancing. · SDS is capable of strong security. Not all SDS offerings are developed equally, but these environments should at a minimum enable encryption, multi-tenant logical layers, and strong logging and monitoring with understandable reports at the management interface. These are strong benefits. But none of this will work well for you if your software-defined storage design does not integrate smoothly with the underlying physical devices. Let’s talk about how you can ensure that it does. Software-Defined Storage Considerations: Key Tips These are the critical points to observe when you design and implement your software defined storage: 1. Know your storage performance and capacity requirements. 2. Understand vendor and hardware compatibilities. 3. Design for current and future resilience. 4. Finalize the design. 5. Manage your software defined storage. SDS Design Tip 1: Know Your Storage Requirements The first thing to do is to identify workloads and their respective applications, servers, and clients. Typical characteristics to look at include baseline IOPs and peak IOPs, throughput, depth of queue waiting to be processed, latency, the portion of data that is actively changing (working IO), variation patterns, and how much throughput performance you need to maintain backup windows. You might also want to look at additional characteristics like the presence of encryption and the ratio of sequential to random data. Now determine their performance and storage capacity requirements, and how data protection will work. Identify application workloads by performance, capacity, and data protection needs, including RTO and RPO. Assign priority applications to fast SSD and disk. Do the same for secondary workloads. Identify characteristics such as where the backup stream is stored, where it is replicated, and the amount of storage capacity to preserve for backup workloads. Plan the storage capacity you need for backup and archive. Although long-term data retention is likely on tape or in the cloud, you might want to continuously backup some high priority applications to the storage hardware underlying the SDS. Typical capacity factors include the existing size of data and its monthly, bi-yearly, or yearly growth rate, and its scheduled retention period. SDS Design Tip 2: Understand vendor and hardware compatibilities Once you have identified workloads, performance characteristics, and capacity needs then you can look for your SDS vendor and optimize the physical storage and networking. As you deploy new software and hardware, be careful to deploy recommended firmware and drivers. Keep in mind that as recently as 2015, most new storage hardware did not automatically work with SDS software. Consequences included SDS not recognizing new devices or media, disk sector and whole disk failures, and difficulty troubleshooting integration problems using separate software and hardware management interfaces. Since then SDS vendors who also build hardware have been developing for SDS stacks, and software-only developers are improving reference architecture. This begs the question about going with commodity hardware and avoiding vendor lock-in, but there has been improvement. Still, assume nothing when you research the storage hardware for your SDS system. Look deeply into compatibilities and best practices. SDS Design Tip 3: Design for current and future resilience Once you have chosen your SDS and physical storage vendors, you will need to design your SDS environment. Design for resilience so your environment will cost-effectively scale to match your developing storage requirements. When you design for resilience, understand your current and future thresholds before you start. Know your uptime requirements and resilience objectives for your storage configurations including cluster nodes, redundant network connections for uninterrupted traffic, and performance. Pay attention to scalability and growth characteristics on your SDS, storage media, processors, and RAM. And be sure to know how simple (or not) it will be to update firmware and drivers. The last thing you want is put your whole admin team on alert and down your SDS system for hours every time you need to upgrade firmware. SDS Design Tip 4: Finalize the design Remember that your SDS runs on top of physical storage. Carefully design performance and capacity so the physical layer will properly support your software-defined storage environment. Decide how many storage pool clusters to deploy and understand provisioning and the process of adding new pools. There is no right or wrong way to do this: large storage pools allow for centralized management and fault troubleshooting but failing storage media can ripple through the entire SDS. In that case, you may prefer to maintain smaller storage pools if the admin management time is not overwhelming. Build in redundancies by mirroring high performance applications to different storage devices in the pool or across multiple pools or use parity for low-write applications like archival. Both parity and mirroring let you copy data sets and consider reserving pool capacity for redistributed data should an SSD or HDD fail. Decide what storage media sizes you will need as well as RAM and CPU requirements. Enclosures enter the picture here: you want sufficient size to house your current drives, and easy scalability so you can simply add more enclosures and redistribute disk drives as needed. Performance and capacity are critical. Remember that calculating SSD performance has two dimensions: the number of SSDs that data can access simultaneously, and the capacity of the SSDs to know how much data it can process at the same time. Also think about the types and sizes of your SSDs and HDDs. Storage tiering comes into play here, with many admins opting for SSDs for Tier 0 and SSDs plus fast disk for Tier 1. Processors and RAM are not necessarily as critical as media performance and capacity but may be very important depending on the processing point for data traffic. If it’s processed at the physical networking layer, such as RDMA network cards, then your storage processors don’t have to do all the heavy lifting. If the storage processors do process the traffic, then you’ll need high performance processors for high priority traffic. RAM makes a difference if you are doing operations such as deduping on clustered nodes. Now that you have planned the underlying storage foundation, plan the virtual one just as carefully. Know how many virtual disks you plan on starting with and understand how to scale them over time. Remember that the more virtual disks you create in cluster nodes, the more time it will take to manage and load balance. The more intelligence your SDS offers for virtual disk management, the easier your job becomes. Also remember that the more virtual disks you are using, the more capacity you reserve for write-back caches. The total size of virtual disks will of course depend on the actual size of your storage tiers. Factor in reserved capacity for dynamic data distribution and write-back caches. Virtual disks can be terabytes in size, but peak workloads should not spike over threshold performance or capacity settings. Smaller disk sizes may be more reliable when running large workloads. Understand before you buy what your disk sector sizes are. For example, if your virtual OSs and applications support native 4KB sector disks, then you will get better write performance and some benefits to reliability and capacity. You can of course use 4K disks with 512-byte emulation for backwards compatibility, but this will not get you the same level of benefits as a native 4KB. SDS Design Tip 5: Manage the Software and Physical Layers Monitoring the software and hardware aspects of the SDS architecture are two different interfaces – more if you are separately managing multiple storage devices. SDS management abstracts the storage from its physical infrastructure and manages it at a logical layer. It administers policies for the hardware storage devices but does not manage the hardware. Common events like failed interconnects and disks can down entire software-defined storage environment. The disadvantage is that admins must separately troubleshoot and manage the physical layer instead of centrally managing the storage stack. This does not have to be a deal breaker for deploying SDS. SAN and NAS hardware are already highly complex and attempting to change application pathways and configurations is time and resource intensive. SDS can certainly simplify these changes, which cuts down on the resources required for managing disk devices and SDS. Simplify hardware troubleshooting by using robust hardware architecture with redundant clusters, dynamic scaling, and self-healing mechanisms. Also look for reference architectures and storage devices that are purpose-built to run SDS stacks. Invest in additional software like drive monitoring utilities. Software Defined Storage: Powerful but Not Simple SDS architectures can save money and time. When admins successfully integrate storage software and hardware and customize them to their storage needs, the business may realize significant improvements and cost savings. No one is saying this is easy. One of the beauties of virtualized environments is that they run on a variety of storage, server, and networking components. Yet when admins want to combine these platforms into a single virtual SDS, they cannot simply expect them to automatically work seamlessly. This is why storage admins need to spend time and attention to make sure their hardware is reliable and fault-tolerant and integrates well with their software-defined storage design. Only this level of integration allows SDS to properly manage stored data with flexible and dynamic policies. You can do it by creating a clear knowledge and implementation plan for SDS and hardware integration and giving your team enough time to optimize the infrastructure right from the start. Expending the right resources at the start of the project will help ensure that your SDS deployment will be everything you need, now and into the future.

http://mobile.enterprisestorageforum.com/storage-technology/software-defined-storage-design-considerations.html

6 Things You Should Know About Acropolis Ultimate Edition

This blog post is authored by @Shubhika Taneja, Senior Product Marketing Manager @Nutanix offers three editions of #Acropolis software so that you can select the right capabilities that fit the needs of your #EnterpriseCloud. You can see the list of capabilities offered by the three editions of Acropolis: Basic, Pro and Ultimate here. In this blog post we discuss how you can quickly check which edition of Acropolis you have and how to get the most out of Acropolis Ultimate edition. First, Which Edition Of Acropolis Software Do You Have? Once you log into Prism Element for your cluster, and click on the far right admin drop down, you will see an option: "About Nutanix". Clicking on "About Nutanix" will show you the software and the license you have. Next, Are You Getting the Most Out of Acropolis Ultimate's Capabilities? The advanced capabilities that come included with the Ultimate edition enable you to leverage the full potential of Nutanix to build and operate your Enterprise Cloud. You can: 1. Consolidate VMs and Unstructured Data: Acropolis File Services (AFS), included in Acropolis Ultimate Edition, consolidates VMs and unstructured data on Nutanix, thus giving you a simpler infrastructure stack. AFS can be deployed on any Nutanix cluster in a few clicks from Prism. AFS supports SMB protocol and support for NFS is coming soon, has a rich partner ecosystem for capabilities such as Inline Antivirus Scans, Backups, File Auditing and Global Namespace. You can learn more about AFS here. 2. Ensure All-Flash Performance: VM Flash mode which is a part of the Acropolis Ultimate Edition ensures all-flash performance for latency-sensitive applications in a hybrid system. The data for these applications does not migrate from the SSD-backed hot data tier to the cold data tier that uses HDD. 3. Choose among several options for MultiSite DR: Nutanix multi-site disaster recovery option supports a wide variety of enterprise topologies to meet all customers' replication requirements such as one-to-many, many-to-one, many-to-many. One-to-many scenario covers the use case where you have a central site and multiple remote locations for central site backup where in case of disaster workloads can be started on either remote locations. Many-to-one scenario or a hub-and-spoke architecture are deployments where workloads are running on multiple different sites and are being replicated to the central site. At last you have the many-to-many scenario where workloads can be replicated to many sites and recovered from many sites. 4. Support NearSync Replication for Mission Critical Applications: NearSync (Near Synchronous) Replication allows for one minute RPO for mission-critical applications. There are no restrictions on latency or distance. By leveraging Nutanix Light Weight Snapshots (LWS), it supports more granular restore capabilities. NearSync is supported with vSphere and AHV. It enables an RTO of minutes and an RPO as low as one minute. 5. Guarantee zero data loss with Metro Availability and Synchronous Replication: Metro Availability synchronously replicates data to another site, ensuring that a full, real-time copy of the data exists at a different location. During a disaster, VMs can failover from a primary site to a secondary site, guaranteeing nearly 100 percent uptime for applications and zero data loss. For planned failovers, live-migration of the VMs between sites is supported. Metro Availability requires a max RTT latency of 5ms. This technology enables RTO of near zero and RPO of zero minutes. Metro is available for vSphere. For Hyper-V, Nutanix supports synchronous replication (Sync Rep) between two clusters, but does not provide any HA or live migration capabilities. 6. Protect Data with Software Based Data-at-Rest Encryption: Nutanix data-at-rest encryption meets FIPS 140-2 compliance for both software and hardware (SEDs) encryption solutions. The software based encryption does not rely on any specialized hardware. Nutanix data-at-rest encryption satisfies regulatory requirements for government agencies, banking, financial, and healthcare.

https://next.nutanix.com/blog-40/6-things-you-should-know-about-acropolis-ultimate-edition-27496

IBM Rains Down Spectrum SD-Storage Updates, New NAS Software

@IBM announced a slew of updates to @Spectrum, its software-defined storage ( #SDS ) line. The new capabilities will make it easier for companies to derive value from the massive amounts of data they are storing — for example, from analytics and artificial intelligence ( #AI )-driven workloads across multi-cloud environments, according to IBM. “Data is essentially today’s oil,” said @EricHerzog, chief marketing officer for IBM’s storage division and VP of its global channel sales. “And the infrastructure people are using to run that data is multi-cloud.”

https://www.sdxcentral.com/articles/news/ibm-rains-spectrum-sd-storage-updates-new-nas-software/2018/02/

Seagate & RackTop Systems Partner On SDP2

Today @Seagate Technology and the #softwaredefined #storage company, @RackTop Systems, announced a new partnership on a joint product, the Secure #DataProtection Platform ( #SDP2 ). Targeted at governments, the SDP2 is designed to solve key cyber security and compliance issues. The SDP2 is a drop-in data storage solution that specifically addresses NIST 800-171 and GDPR security and compliance requirements.  Security and the standards around it always need to be evolving in order to address the risks that change every day. The two companies are working together to help address the changing issues. RackTop will be combining its high-performance Software-Defined Storage platform with Seagate’s BAA-/TAA-compliant FIPS 140-2 disk drives and enclosures, as well as FIPS-compliant, automated encryption key management to create the SDP2. According to the two companies, this immediately satisfies the 18 data-related controls of NIST 800-171. It also meets NIST 800-88 and FIPS 140-2 requirements for protecting non-classified information, is certified to ISO 28001 for supply chain security assurance, and meets the GDPR for security and compliance. The SDP2 uses a simplified, unified and secure data management solution with encryption, orchestration, versioning, replication, retention and disposition capabilities. SDP2 supports SMB, NFS, AFP, and iSCSI network file sharing protocols and encrypts all data with the claim of not impacting performance. The SDP2 is ideally used for file shares, storage for virtual machines, DevOps, databases and large data repositories.

http://www.storagereview.com/seagate_racktop_systems_partner_on_sdp2

Cohesity CEO and Founder Mohit Aron to Lead VLAB's "Young Immigrant Entrepreneurs: Living the American Dream" Panel Discussion

SAN JOSE, Calif., Jan. 25, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- @Cohesity, the leader of hyperconverged secondary storage, announced that its CEO and founder, @Mohit Aron, will be moderating #VLAB’s “Young Immigrant Entrepreneurs: Living the American Dream” panel on Tuesday, Jan. 30, starting at 6:00 p.m. in Menlo Park. An immigrant and successful entrepreneur himself, Mohit will leverage his experience as a co-founder of the #softwaredefinedstorage company @Nutanix, and more recently, founding and leading the revolutionary secondary storage startup Cohesity, to help guide participants to answers questions such as: What drives young entrepreneurs to immigrate? How do they overcome the many challenges that they face? Are they concerned about immigration reform affecting their companies? Established in 1990, VLAB is a non-profit organization dedicated to connecting Silicon Valley’s entrepreneurs, industry experts, venture capitalists, private investors, and technologies to enable them to effectively grow high-tech ventures amidst dynamic market risks and challenges. Past panel participants have included CEOs and senior level executives from companies such as @Tesla Inc., @Google, @Mint, @Cloudera, and @LinkedIn.

https://www.google.com/url?rct=j&sa=t&url=https://globenewswire.com/news-release/2018/01/25/1305000/0/en/Cohesity-CEO-and-Founder-Mohit-Aron-to-Lead-VLAB-s-Young-Immigrant-Entrepreneurs-Living-the-American-Dream-Panel-Discussion.html&ct=ga&cd=CAEYACoUMTEwMDQ5MjkyMjc5NTA5MzU0ODAyGjk3NzRkZWU3NTQ1Y2M4ZDY6Y29tOmVuOlVT&usg=AFQjCNE2gv4wU8WikkX5oT3yEyBRWcVdIg

Software-defined storage products: 2017 Products of the Year finalists

The #softwaredefinedstorage products selected as finalists in Storage magazine and SearchStorage's 2017 Products of the Year competition reflect the latest trends in #flash, #cloud and #container technologies. The finalists include a mix of new and updated software-defined storage products, and many support performance-boosting nonvolatile memory express ( #NVMe) #flash technology and extended cloud and container storage options. To be eligible in the Products of the Year competition, a software-defined storage product must run on standard servers with no dependencies on the underlying hardware. Finalists in the category include software that pools and centrally manages storage, file systems, object stores and software powering hyper-converged infrastructure. Software-defined storage products that made it through the finalist cut include the following: DataCore Software SANsymphony PSP6 Update The PSP6 upgrade of DataCore Software's SANsymphony storage virtualization product enhanced REST API integration with more than 200 new operation methods. It also lets customers use the Kubernetes PersistentVolume API to orchestrate deployment, operations and scaling of containerized applications. The update optimized the product's parallel I/O capabilities to improve performance. Elastifile Cloud File System The distributed Elastifile Cloud File System (ECFS) can pool server-based flash storage and present it to applications through a global namespace, enabling any server in the cluster to directly access files. ECFS uses a distributed metadata model and enables linear performance scalability. The product supports global deduplication, compression and snapshot shipping, and its CloudConnect feature lets customers tier colder data to cloud-based object storage. PRO+ Content E-Zine Storage startup trends: Vendors to watch in 2018 E-Zine Dell EMC acquisition: The deal of the century a year later 360 Guide IT industry trends: Six major vendors chart new courses Excelero NVMesh 1.1 Excelero's NVMesh software virtualizes NVMe-based storage, pools the capacity of the SSDs and uses Remote Direct Memory Access networking to connect them. Any Linux-based host server running the NVMesh block client can access the virtual block volumes to enable applications to get the latency, throughput and IOPS of local NVMe. Excelero's Remote Direct Drive Access technology disaggregates storage from applications to save server CPU for the applications. Hedvig Distributed Storage Platform 3.0 The Hedvig Distributed Storage Platform supports scale-out block, file and object storage on premises and in public clouds, and manages the storage as a single pool. New FlashFabric technology adds tiering capabilities between two different classes of SSDs, whether SAS or SATA, NVMe-based PCI Express (PCIe) or 3D XPoint. Other new features include AES 256-bit software-based encryption for data in use, in flight and at rest, and CloudScale plugins for Red Hat products, Veritas OpenStorage Technology and VMware vSphere. IBM Spectrum Scale 4.2.3 IBM enhanced its Spectrum Scale clustered file system -- based on the company's General Parallel File System -- in areas such as cloud data sharing, NVMe, audit logging and general usability. IBM also beefed up support for iSCSI, Hadoop Distributed File System and OpenStack object storage. Pivot3 Acuity HCI Platform 2.1.1 Pivot3's Acuity hyper-converged infrastructure platform added policy-based management with quality of service to enable customers to provide more resources for high-priority applications. The software update also enables the system to take greater advantage of NVMe-based PCIe flash storage to reduce latency and improve performance. Qumulo File Fabric Qumulo File Fabric (QF2) runs on premises and in the public cloud, and it claims to provide billion-file capacity. QF2 gives customers programmatic access to features and administrative settings through a programmable REST API and includes cloud-based monitoring to proactively detect disk failures. Additional capabilities include real-time analytics down to the file level, snapshots to the directory level and continuous replication. Red Hat Ceph Storage 2.3 Red Hat's commercially supported open source Ceph distribution added a lightweight NFS interface to the Ceph Object Gateway, letting users access the same object storage data via NFS or Amazon's Simple Storage Service (S3) API. Compatibility with the Hadoop S3A file system client enables big data analytics applications -- such as Apache Hadoop MapReduce, Hive, Presto and Spark -- to read and write data from the Ceph object store. Red Hat Ceph Storage 2.3 also introduced an option to deploy Ceph in containers. Scality Ring7 Scality stood out among the software-defined storage products for steps it took to unite its scale-out file system and object store, and enable users to access the same data from either protocol. Ring7 supports versioning and replication for object and file storage; data encryption; secure write once, read many (WORM) change control; and cross-region replication to Scality Ring and Amazon's S3 cloud object storage for disaster recovery. SUSE Enterprise Storage 4 SUSE's Enterprise Storage 4, the company's commercially supported Ceph distribution, added support for the Ceph file system, or CephFS, to round out its unified block, object and file capabilities. The software update enabled long-distance replication for block storage and multisite object storage replication to improve disaster recovery. SUSE also enhanced cluster orchestration through open source Salt configuration management software, improved the graphical user interface to ease management and expanded hardware choice with support for 64-bit ARM processors. WekaIO Matrix The WekaIO Matrix scale-out parallel file system is designed to pool server-based flash SSDs for high-performance workloads and tier cold data to object storage in public and private clouds. Matrix presents the local flash storage as a single global namespace to host applications, and the software extends the namespace beyond the flash pool to offload colder data to less expensive S3-compliant and OpenStack Swift-compliant object storage. 

http://searchstorage.techtarget.com/news/450432330/Software-defined-storage-products-2017-Products-of-the-Year-finalists

How Virtualization Supports Healthcare Data Storage Needs

December 29, 2017 - Entities need to consider how to best address future healthcare data storage needs as the amount of data collected by digital devices continues to grow exponentially. Organizations have several options including public and #privatecloud storage. However #softwaredefinedstorage ( #SDS ) has emerged as another way to store vast amounts of data using #virtualization. Research and Markets predicted the SDS market will reach $42 billion by 2023, up from $4 billion in 2017, and grow at a CAGR of 39 percent in that time. Dig Deeper Benefits of #SoftwareDefinedNetworking in #Healthcare How #VirtualDesktopInfrastructure Supports Patient Care Healthcare Public Cloud Answers #DataStorage Demands The lack of workforce available to accommodate for the growth of traditional on-premises #datacenters is one of the main drivers for virtualized storage techniques. Virtualization scales back the amount of physical space needed to store data, meaning that organizations don’t need to hire additional staff. SDS is one of the architectural components that typically makes up a software-defined data center ( #SDDC). The other components include computer virtualization such as workspace-as-a-service and virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) and also software-defined networking. SDDC, sometimes referred to as a virtual data center, covers virtualization concepts geared toward automating and abstracting data center resources. Each element of the infrastructure - including networking, security, and storage - is virtualized and implemented as a service. SDDC uses abstraction to bring different components of infrastructure architecture together, usually managed through an application programming interface (API). The number of virtualized solutions within an SDDC makes it complicated to manage without an API assisting the developer. APIs abstract the layers of virtual technology within the data center, only displaying functions critical to the developer making the SDDC easier to manage. SDDC is not a technology organizations can adopt in one deployment and it’s rare to see any organization running on a fully virtual environment. Gartner outlined in an SDDC market overview that many organizations may be several years away from implementing an SDDC infrastructure or any other virtual infrastructure. “Simply changing a legacy infrastructure for a set of software-defined products is unlikely to yield the desired benefits,” Gartner analysts stated. “Before an activity is automated and self-service is implemented, the process associated with the IT service needs to be completely rethought and optimized. This may require new skills and a different culture to what is currently available within certain IT organizations.” Gartner Vice President and Analyst Dave Russell suggested examining all solutions making up an organization’s current infrastructure and figure out which component of the infrastructure will benefit the organization the most from being virtualized. Starting with the most mission critical components and planning to adapt the rest of the infrastructure over time is the best way to approach SDDC. Entities that are struggling with their storage infrastructure can look into virtualizing their storage tools to get the most out of their hardware and gain more control. SDS solutions are currently available for deployment in the healthcare industry but the healthcare industry tends to hesitate when adopting new technology, particularly virtualization technology. A report released by ZK Research earlier this year attributed evolving IT infrastructure technology as one of the major reasons why healthcare organizations have been slower to adopt software-defined solutions. “Historically, hospitals and other healthcare institutions have been slow to adopt new technology, as maintaining the status quo was viewed as safer than risking disruption from new technologies,” the report stated. As the amount of healthcare data being produced continues to grow, healthcare organizations will need to consider different ways of approaching storage. Storage solutions that allow rapid expansion and flexibility need to be considered to accommodate large and complex data files. Virtualizing is a good technique for organizations to get the most out of their IT infrastructure tools.

https://hitinfrastructure.com/news/how-virtualization-supports-healthcare-data-storage-needs

How Dell EMC’s modern infrastructure is helping CIOs in IT mutation

"Today IT transformation is the foremost requirement for every business growth. The legacy PSUs like HPCLs and BPCLs of the world are parallelly running modern infrastructure services with their in-house software to implant a new edge technology. Hence, IT transformation becomes a revolutionary step before acquiring digital mutation in any vertical. Before getting into the digital transformation journey, businesses need to secure their IT operations. Modern infrastructure is thus required to evangelize their data center for a better and secure IT environment.", Niladri Saha, GM- Modern Infrastructure, @Dell EMC India embarked. With businesses aggressively embracing the digital transformation, it is becoming important for them to stay competitive and ahead of changing customer expectations. CIOs play an important role and it is essential for them to adopt the technology systems and processes that will transform their internal operations, to meet the demands of fast moving businesses. This requires building agile infrastructures. “As the business drives new digital initiatives, IT must transform to accommodate massive growth in modernizing data centers, maintain the performance and reliability of legacy business applications, deploy a new breed of storage strategy and support increasingly complex workflows” Saha added. Further Saha discussed points that CIOs must keep in mind before initiating the modernizing their data centers:

1. High costs to operate: As companies expand into new markets, simultaneously they also gain or build data centers along the way. Each data center operated with its own set of practices and on its own hardware. Managing across these disparate systems and inconsistent processes is not at all cost-effective.

2. Aging technology: Enterprises have continued to operate using traditional data centers that weren’t up to modern standards — utilization and virtualization rates were low, automation was non-existent, etc. Over the time, this practice has not only contributed to high operating costs, which will not lead to many inefficiencies, making it nearly impossible for IT to meet the basic demands of the business.

3. High risk due to lack of redundancy: The organization’s fast growth and lack of standardization have always led to a gap in disaster recovery protection. Many applications — including key business systems — had zero redundancy. Hence, to reduce the redundancies, firms need to quickly modernize their operations as this risk to the business is too great to ignore.

4. Time lag in modernization: There is a huge time cost which is involved while migrating towards the new-age data centers. Without the right partner, an organization will easily dedicate twice as much time than it usually will take.

5. Resource cost avoidance: Alternative of choosing the right partner is running the migration project in-house. This would require bringing in contractors, experts and IT admins, which will involve an exorbitant cost. Hence, conducting the project on its own will not only lead to significant resource requirement but there are greater chances that the project may get extended.

In a modus operandi of migrating legacy data centers to modern technology, CIOs prefer not to scale out their old servers. "In such deployment, SDS helps in consolidating all the servers which brings out storage piece from a heterogeneous state and get a merger solution for old servers. And that’s how software defined storage helps organizations to accommodate new betel technology" he added. Software-defined storage data centers (SDDC) will lay a better foundation of storage infrastructure equipping the business with tools to analyse this data for better business plans and improved consumer deliverables, eventually increasing the scale of the business. Not only this, SDDC will also prove to be a game changer for the businesses by introducing them to the idea of innovation. With the rising consumers’ demands, data is bound to grow exponentially, making it impossible for businesses to provide real-time solutions with manual workforce/processes. "Therefore, businesses need to switch from manual to automated workforce/processes to reduce cost and optimize operations which will eventually drive growth. Software Defined Storage Data Centres will act as a catalyst in this transition as businesses will be able to transfer as well as streamline their processes on digital platform, thereby increasing efficiency"he further explains. Not only this, automation will improve communication, reduce human errors, enabling businesses to provide effective instant solutions to the consumers’ demands

https://cio.economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/strategy-and-management/how-dell-emcs-modern-infrastructure-is-helping-cios-in-it-mutation/62289621