If file systems are cool, then distributed file systems are Miles Davis. They’re also incredibly hard. A lot of “distributed” file systems only fit the term in the broadest sense. Many rely on a centralized model, which can potentially be fine, but really limits how you can scale. Others offer true distribution but run into performance trouble. Elastifile’s solution is the Elastifile Cloud File System. This isn’t just simple distribution, they are offering a application-level distributed file system, with the goal of offering the flexibility of the public cloud, with all the enterprise data services expected in a hybrid cloud.

StarWind offers what they are calling a hardware-based “cloud gateway”, in partnership with AcloudA. I’m honestly surprised a lot of other storage vendors aren’t trying something similar, but I imagine StarWind has done all the hard work on the backend to make this appear deceivingly simple. The basic hardware is a single board with a SATA/SAS interface. This would be connected to your server or storage appliance just like any other drive.

If you live in the world of containers and Docker, then DockerCon is probably a pretty big deal. It’s being held out in Austin, April 17-20. For those of you who’re not getting their fill of all things Docker during those days, Tech Field Day Extra is planned for the Monday before DockerCon, on April 17. This event is being done in partnership with Docker, and they will be presenting to TFD’s inquisitive panel of delegates along with other companies from their ecosystem. Full video of all presentations will also be available after the event. Tech Field Day was there last year, and they’re excited to return to DockerCon!

After hearing about it for too long, Intel finally released its first product using 3D XPoint memory, the Optane P4800X. For a cool $1,520, you can buy the 375GB PCIe based SSD.

For anyone who’s even remotely followed Microsoft, the change in the company over the last few years is nothing less than startling. Under Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer, the company focused on driving everything toward Windows. Their best software ran on Windows, and they pushed as much as possible to have Windows take over the world. Since this is a proprietary OS, the result was a very monolithic company that tried to lock down everything. Combined with aggressive (and often legally dubious) business practices, Microsoft developed a reputation as the “Evil Empire”. So the change in company culture when current CEO Satya Nadella took over was nothing less than seismic.

ARM-based servers in the data center are a lot like free beer, it always seems like you have to wait until tomorrow. Yet, unlike that mythical pint of the latter, we might be getting closer to the day when the former is a common reality. The first of many steps to make that happen is hardware. We’ve seen a few vendors making serious strides in the space. At the end of 2016, Qualcomm showed off their Centriq 2400-series SoC, with 48 cores on a single socket server. Now AppliedMicro is ready to sample their X-Gene 3 ARM server SOC.

Ray Lucchesi recently weighted in on where innovation is occurring in IT, hardware or software. He considered Dell EMC’s decision to kill their DSSD NVMe storage device, and frames it in the continuing debate. Ray thinks it’s further evidence that we are in a software innovation cycle. As further evidence, recent releases by both Excelero and E8 Storage. Both are using commodity hardware to achieve high level performance, over 4 million IO/sec with ~120 to ~230µsec response times. It’s an interesting discussion, and Ray gives both sides their due.

Chris Marget wrote up a nice piece looking into a similar bug. It’s probably not going to by as hyped as Y2K, but it’s nonetheless important. Because of the 32-bit signed integer used in Unix-based systems, there’s a maximum value of 2.1 billion seconds in the “epoch”, before it basically runs out and started back over at the beginning with 10000000000000000000000000000000. That may sound like a lot, but it’s actually about 68 years. Since the Unix epoch begins on January 1, 1970, this means we’re due for an epoch reset around 2038.

I recently watched a brief talk given by Dave Hitz, a founder and Executive VP at NetApp. His particular portion didn’t get down into the weeds of what NetApp is bringing to the table with their Data Fabric or StorageGRID. There were presentations before he spoke that sated my need for technical details. Instead, Dave focused on giving a broader vision of what NetApp was trying to do. This is always a bit of a risky bet when addressing a more technically minded crowd. It’s easy to sound grandiose with your overall corporate vision, and too often these talks stray into marketing. Fortunately, Dave took the time to make it an engaging discussion.

At the Open Compute Summit, AMD went into some more details about it’s high end server CPU, codenamed “Naples”. At one time, the company’s Opteron processors were used in supercomputers. While never the dominant force in the data center, AMD had carved out a niche. The last decade has proven more problematic in the enterprise. AMD thinks Naples is not only competitive with the best from Intel, but will serve as a bulwark against what they describe as the problem of server “incrementalism”.