by Arjan | Nov 7, 2012 | Storage Field Day 2, Storage Field Day 2012
Tomorrow we’ll have a busy schedule on the first day of Storage Field Day 2. I’m really looking forward on hearing about the cool stuff these companies will be presenting. Here is our schedule for tomorrow:
08:00-10:00 Nimble Storage
10:30-12:30 Nimbus Data
13:30-15:30 Zerto
16:00-18:00 Tintri
18:45-19:30 Asigra
Let’s take a closer look at the companies we’ll be visiting tomorrow (click on the pictures for more information):

The mission of Nimble Storage is simple: Give our customers the most efficient, high performing, and scalable storage platform on the market. Nimble arrays can easily handle all your applications, user data, and server and desktop virtualization projects. Based on the CASL™ architecture, Nimble Storage accelerates applications, protects more data, and empowers IT to take on new projects and drive growth.
Nimble Storage was founded and is run by industry veterans responsible for ground-breaking technologies and architectures around primary storage, backup storage, and data protection. They’ve built a tight-knit culture of innovation focused on changing the data storage game, taking a unique, bottoms-up approach to reinventing how the data for next-generation datacenter applications is stored, served, and protected.

Nimbus Data Systems, Inc. develops award-winning Sustainable Storage® systems, the most intelligent, efficient and fault-tolerant solid state storage platform engineered for server and desktop virtualization, databases, HPC, and next-generation cloud infrastructure. Combining low-latency flash memory hardware, comprehensive data management and protection software, and highly-scalable multiprotocol storage features, Nimbus systems deliver dramatically greater performance at a significantly lower operating cost than conventional disk-based primary storage arrays, all at a comparable acquisition cost.
In fact, up to 50x greater performance. Nimbus’ all-flash enterprise storage systems leverage the incredible IO performance of solid state technology to deliver superior application performance to Server and Desktop Virtualization, Databases and OLTP, and compute-intensive HPC and Rich Media.
Cut 80% of your storage power budget while reclaiming racks of datacenter space. Delivering the IOps equivalent of 14 racks of 15K RPM disks in just one rack of flash memory, and with power consumption as low as 5 watts per terabyte, Nimbus delivers the industry’s most efficient primary storage.
Dramatically simplify storage provisioning and high availability with unified storage. Complete software and enterprise-grade fault tolerance proven over 5 years at customers like eBay and the US Department of Defense simplify storage administration so your IT staff can deliver better uptime in less time.

Zerto provides enterprise-class disaster recovery and business continuity solutions for virtualized data centers and cloud environments.
Zerto provides large enterprises with data replication solutions designed specifically for virtualized infrastructure and the cloud. Zerto Virtual Replication is the industry’s first hypervisor-based replication solution for tier-one applications, replacing traditional array-based BC/DR solutions that were not built to deal with the virtual paradigm.
Today, enterprises of all sizes are deploying applications on virtualized IT infrastructures and clouds. The values of virtualization including flexibility, scalability and mobility can complicate business continuity efforts in times of disaster. The advantages of virtualization can be in conflict with your ability to recover the business in the event of disaster.

Tintri has an exceptionally strong team. With a demonstrated track record of recent success — including key leaders from VMware, NetApp & Data Domain — Tintri’s talent pool is unusually deep and accomplished. The fusion of pioneers from both virtualization and storage domains gives Tintri a unique perspective, unburdened by traditional orthodoxies and preconceptions.
From the beginning, Tintri has focused exclusively on storage for VMs. Tintri’s founders identified the clear mismatch between traditional networked storage approaches and an elegant shared storage model for VMs. This sharp focus enables both pervasive simplification, as well as the creative application of key new technologies in service of furthering virtualization.
Tintri’s vision is simple: everything in the data center should be virtualized. Our mission is to drive dramatically increased adoption of virtualization by providing a clearly superior alternative to traditional networked storage adapted to VMs. We believe that this is only possible with storage specifically designed for VMs.

Asigra brings a Cloud Model to backup and recovery – including the backup and recovery of mobile devices such as tablets and smart phones – through our Cloud Backup, Recovery and Restore software solution: Asigra Cloud Backup™ v11.
The business model is one of building and fostering partnerships. Asigra does not sell direct, but through a global ecosystem of Managed Service Providers (MSPs) and Resellers that are Powered by Asigra. We are not a MSP and there is no channel conflict between Asigra and our partners.
It’s great to see all these companies on the Storage Field Day. A few of them I’ve met on Storage Field Day 1 in April,, and a few of them I know from meeting them on VMworld or other conferences.
Make sure to tune in at TechFieldDay.com Or the live stream
by Arjan | Nov 7, 2012 | Storage Field Day 2, Storage Field Day 2012
Well to be honest the title should say: And if you’re going to San Jose (CA) because that’s where I’m heading right now (although I’ll land at San Francisco airport). For thursday and friday we’ll be with an a couple of independent bloggers visiting some really exciting companies in the bay area. But that for the next blog 😉
For tomorrow I’d like to invite to come to San Jose and join us for the TechField Day Next-Generation Storage Symposium. There is a great line-up of companies and speakers, that will go in depth on a couple of the storage questions many storage peeps have these days.
First, let’s take a look at the people and companies presenting (in random order):

About Nexsan
Founded in 1999 and headquartered in Thousand Oaks, California, Nexsan Corporation provides a comprehensive range of enterprise-class, easy-to-use and efficient system solutions that offer customers the ultimate value proposition when it comes to meeting their ever-evolving storage requirements. Our hardware and software products uniquely combine the benefits of cost-effective performance, power and space efficiency, density, ease of use, outstanding scalability and unmatched reliability to provide Highly Efficient Storage (HES) performance and functionality.

About NimbusData
Nimbus Data Systems, Inc. develops award-winning Sustainable Storage® systems, the most intelligent, efficient and fault-tolerant solid state storage platform engineered for server and desktop virtualization, databases, HPC, and next-generation cloud infrastructure. Combining low-latency flash memory hardware, comprehensive data management and protection software, and highly-scalable multiprotocol storage features, Nimbus systems deliver dramatically greater performance at a significantly lower operating cost than conventional disk-based primary storage arrays, all at a comparable acquisition cost.

About Permabit
Permabit is a recognized leader in data efficiency technology. We enable OEMs to leverage their R&D investment, increase margin, accelerate time to market and achieve competitive advantage. Permabit Albireo software massively improves performance and efficiency of data creation, transmission and storage. Solutions built with Albireo are being delivered by leading hardware, software and service providers. Our partners include Hitachi Data Systems (HDS), LSI, StoneFly, and Overland Storage.

About PureStorage
Pure Storage has a simple mission: to enable the widespread adoption of flash in the enterprise data center.

About Scale Computing
Founded in 2007, Scale Computing has led the way in unified, scale-out, enterprise class storage for small and medium-sized enterprises. The company is rapidly growing with offices in California, Indianapolis and London with global distribution partners.
Our Intelligent Clustered Operating System (ICOS) technology has won dozens of awards including Storage Networking World’s Best Practices, PC Mall’s Innovator of the Year Award, and Network World’s Top Nine Storage Companies to Watch. In 2009, Forbes named Scale Computing one of America’s Most Promising Companies.

About SolidFire
SolidFire believes traditional storage is way too slow, far too complex, and much too expensive to deliver the infrastructure large-scale cloud computing environments demand.
We are passionate about delivering high-performance and high-efficiency storage systems to cloud service providers. In addition to building a great product, SolidFire is growing our world class team of people and looking for employees who want to work in a collaborative, supportive and high-energy company culture.

About Startboard Storage Systems
Starboard Storage tackles the toughest storage problem facing Small and Medium Enterprise (SME) IT administrators today — managing today’s application workloads that include unstructured, virtualized and structured data. The Starboard Storage AC Series delivers on the promise of sophisticated yet easy-to-manage storage for modern application workload environments.

About Tegile
Tegile Systems is pioneering a new generation of affordable feature-rich storage arrays that are dramatically faster, and can store more data than standard arrays. Incorporating Tegile’s unique metadata handling technology, MASS™, Zebi arrays deliver caching and on the fly de-duplication and compression for primary storage. Customers in the financial services, manufacturing, government, legal, healthcare and transportation industry sectors have deployed Zebi as primary storage in virtualized server, virtualized desktop (VDI), file services and database environments as well as for replicated storage. The company is led by a successful team of industry veterans and is committed to a philosophy of “customer first.”
Also the following famous speakers and moderators:

About Chris M Evans
An industry veteran with over 22 years’ experience in IT. Over his career Chris has provided consultancy and advice to a wide range of customers and industry segments. Chris runs his own storage consultancy (Brookend Limited) and recently co-founded Langton Blue Limited, to focus on resolving IT related business issues.

About Howard Marks
In over 25 years as an independent consultant Howard has built and/or reengineered server and storage infrastructures and networks for organizations from Borden Foods and The State University of New York at Purchase to accounting and law firms. He started testing and reviewing products at PC Magazine in the late 80s and has written hundreds of articles and product reviews for Network World, Network Computing and InformationWeek amongst others. He’s spoken at Comdex, Interop, Networks Expo and developed training programs for organizations including JP Morgan and American Express. Where other analysts typically have marketing or sales backgrounds Howard’s continuing involvement with users facing real problems brings a perspective those users find more useful.

About Robin Harris
StorageMojo is published by TechnoQWAN LLC which was founded by me, Robin Harris, in 2006 as an independent analysis and consultancy focused on emerging IT technologies, products and markets. My blogs, StorageMojo and Storage Bits at ZDnet are ranked 10th and 11th out of 400 IT analyst blogs and have been linked to from the Wall Street Journal, All Things Digital, e-Week, ComputerWorld and hundreds of other sites.

About Scott D. Lowe
Scott Lowe has worked in the technology field since 1994, starting his career as a jack of all trades handling networking duties, database administration/programming projects and help desk support. Scott has also held positions as the Associate Director of IT in charge of network services for a private college in upstate NY, the lead network analyst for the City of Gaithersburg, MD and as a Systems Engineer for Thomson Financial. In 2001, Scott assumed his first full-time management role as the Director of IT for the National Association of Attorneys General. Scott was most recently the Vice President and Chief Information Officer at a private Missouri college where he was a hand-on leader providing primary support for the virtualization environment alongside his other responsibilities.

About Stephen Foskett
Stephen Foskett is a pack rat personally, though I’m the opposite professionally! I’ve worked as a vendor-independent IT/business consultant to end users for more than a decade, managing services and “doing the work” at companies like Paranet, StorageNetworks, GlassHouse Technologies, Contoural, Nirvanix, and now as Foskett Services.
So if this didn’t already made you want to come to this very promising symposium, maybe my top 3 topics will change your choice (click on them for more info):
Really hope to see you tomorrow at this awesome event!
Arjan
by Arjan | May 21, 2012 | Storage Field Day 2012
During Storage Field Day 1 we also visited the Drobo Headquarters. Drobo provided us with a great show and even better information. One of the great solutions I noticed for SMB environments is the combination of a Drobo B800i or B1200i and the Veeam Backup and Replication v6 software. First let’s dive a bit deeper into these Drobo products.
The Drobo B800i:
“The Drobo B800i is optimized for small businesses to provide reliable and high-performance storage to servers running applications like file services, data protection, email, and server virtualization. It integrates seamlessly into your TCP/IP network infrastructure and utilizes the industry-standard iSCSI protocol to provide simple, consolidated storage for your servers.”
The Drobo B1200i:
“The Drobo B1200i is optimized for Small and Medium Business (SMB) IT to provide reliable, high-performance, and self-optimizing storage for server virtualization, email, and data protection. It integrates seamlessly into your TCP/IP network infrastructure and utilizes the industry-standard iSCSI protocol to provide powerful, yet simple, consolidated storage for your IT environment.”
A great thing about the Drobo B1200i is that it can filled with SSD’s. This can be done by using 3,5″ OCZ Talos SSD’s or you could use a bracket for 2,5″ SSD’s. To be able to give your I/O consuming application the boost it needs you can add SSD’s and use BeyondRAID to easely setup a superfast datastore. Speaking of BeyondRAID, let’s dive into that feature a little more.
BeyondRAID:
Traditional SAN storage uses different kind of RAID levels. RAID levels 0,1,5,6,10,50 and 60 are most commonly in the SAN these days. Where enterprises often have a team of Storage administrators/Specialists to take care of the complex Storage environments (including the RAID levels), SMB’s most of the time have one or two system administrator’s that take care of the whole IT infrastructure (including the Storage environment).
Drobo created BeyondRAID to overcome the complexity of a Storage environment. Things like changing a LUN from RAID5 to RAID6, expanding a LUN and debilitated state after a drive failure are overcome by BeyondRAID. By providing an easy to use webinterface every IT-administrator is able to create and manage a Drobo.
BeyondRAID vs. RAID
Veeam Backup and Replication v6
Veeam Backup and recovery is developed specifically for virtual enironments, and with v6 it supports both VMware and Microsoft Hyper-V. With features like:
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Scalability: provides the oppertunity for multiple proxy servers (data movers). Dynamically assign VM’s to a proxy server and intelligent load balancing.
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2-1 backup & replication: Offers backup and replication in a single solution with one price point
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De-duplication and Compression: Cuts backup storage requirements up to 75% by compressing backup and network traffic and eliminating duplicate blocks of data.
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Agentless: There are no agents for you to license or deploy, manage, monitor or update on hosts or VMs.
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Synthetic Full Backups: Takes previous full and incremental backups to make a new full backup recovery point without duress on primary storage.
Veeam Backup and Replication v6 is one of the leading backup and recovery software suites in the field.

Bringing it all together:
Currently if you buy 2 B800i’s or 1 B1200i you will get a FREE Veeam Essential Standard Edition (2 Socket license). And as told by combining these very powerfull and industry leading products the SMB will be able to deliver the performance needed for their environment with and be able to backup, replicate and restore using a an easy to use but incredible solution. Veeam and Drobo are a match made in heaven for the SMB.
Ps. For people using Drobo (or other Storage devices) at home and thinking of buying another one…. Just hold your horses and wait for a month or two…. During the event Drobo took us Back to future, and believe me it’s looking great ;-P
