In this iteration of Gestalt Server News:
– Caching vs Tiering? The On-Premise IT Roundtable wants to clear up the confusion!
– StorMagic’s SvSAN for the edge
– and weird DNA storage
Plus Preston de Guise begs the question: what constitutes a successful backup?
If you haven’t followed SolarWinds’ portfolio since 2014, they’ve made some key acquisitions to get up to speed on cloud monitoring, using them to form the backbone of a comprehensive solution. The best part is, though SolarWinds views this as a full stack solution, it’s not inherently bundled so you can use the components as needed. Their oldest acquisition in this span was the Swedish company Pingdom. Let’s take a look at how SolarWinds is using that IP.
Tom Hollingsworth rightly points out what makes IT conferences relevant: community. In large events like VMworld or Cisco Live, the community are what make these events enjoyable to attend. But for smaller conferences, that are either new or tightly focused, the community is what makes them relevant. It’s an interesting distinction.
Robin Systems does not mess around when it comes to the scope of their mission. Some companies set out to be iterative. They want to create something a little faster, a little more efficient, or a little easier to use. Robin Systems aims to reinvent infrastructure for modern distributed applications. It’s a company mission that certainly doesn’t lack for ambition.
In some ways, StorMagic has an old school approach to software-defined storage. Instead of a hyperconverged infrastructure approach that utilizes some of the same principals, but ultimately locks you into very specific hardware, StorMagic is strictly software only. Their goal is to provide software abstracted storage functions that allow organizations to run on their hardware of choice. They see their market at the edge of the enterprise. These would be remote locations for large organization where installing and deploying specialized hardware isn’t cost effective or physically feasible.
VMware NSX is a powerful multifaceted solution with a lot of dimensions. So much so that it’s actually a little hard to get a single understanding of it. That’s not to say that it is a bloated or convoluted offering, merely ambitious in scope. If you’re going to make a platform for network virtualization and security, it’s kind of go big or go home.
But when talking about NSX, it’s easier to do it in pieces. Once you do, you realize that many of the aspects of the platform are based around some basic guiding principals. In this piece, I’m going to focus particularly on the security aspects. VMware designed NSX security around micro-segmentation. Aside from being a useful buzzword, it’s also a very smart way to keep your VMs and applications secure.
I’ve heard for a while that DNA storage could be a potential replacement for magnetic tape, at least for archiving. It’s dense and has a long shelf life, which lends itself to the application. But I didn’t have a way to visualize that density. So, against my better judgement, I started doing some math.
Open source is not entirely new to NetApp, they’ve had an OpenStack team in the company since 2011, mainly contributing to the Cinder project. This provided on-demand block storage in OpenStack. In the past 18 months, this has been consciously expanded into an open ecosystem team, organized around thePub.
To be clear, the answer to “what is big data?” isn’t the On-Premise IT Roundtable. Nevertheless, our panelists discuss what exactly they mean when they use the term, why it’s the new hotness, and how they’ve seen it impact organizations.
Western Digital is enabling the network attached hoarder in your life. They’ve beefed up their WD Red and Red Pro lines with up to 10TB per helium-filled drive. To hit this capacity, WD is using seven 1.42 TB platters per drive, up from six on last year’s capacity topping 8TB models.
