Thoughts on Transitioning to Dell EMC Midrange.NEXT

In this post, Chris Evans looks at the history of Dell EMC’s mid-range storage offerings, and how it might position the company’s offering going forward. This includes a look at XtremIO and Unity, which Chris got to see at Storage Field Day a few years ago. Ultimately, whether updating an existing line or building from the ground up, there isn’t an obvious solution for Dell EMC.

Is Pure Play Storage good?

Chin-Fah Heoh has seen a number of pure play storage companies present at Storage Field Day over the years. In this post, he looks at the Gartner Magic Quadrants from 2010 and 2017, looking how the Big 5 storage companies have fared in that time. NetApp remains the only company in the leaders quadrant, with Pure Storage as the notable new kid on the block. But for Chin-Fah, this doesn’t represent the death of pure play storage, rather representative of a changing of the guard.

Scality Zenko Product Brief

In this paper, Chris Evans outlines Scality’s Zenko platform. This acts as a storage controller across object stores, whether on-prem or in the cloud. This draws on much of what Chris saw from Scality at Storage Field Day last year.

#SFD16 – Dell-EMC PowerMax and CloudIQ

A Storage Field Day, René van den Bedem got an update from Dell EMC. They specifically focused on PowerMax, their evolution of VMAX All Flash now with NVMe. René looks at why PowerMax still represents the best option for legacy 3-tier hardware and mission-critical legacy applications.

PowerMax, VMAX, XtremIO – the Agony of Choice

Chris Evans looks at Dell EMC’s newly announced PowerMax, an all-NVMe storage array. When fully configured, PowerMax can hit up to 10 million IOPS at under 300 microseconds of latency, while still being able to access the mature data service of their VMAX line. Chris raises a similar to point to Dell EMC’s XtremeIO presentation at Storage Field Day last year, that with many families of storage arrays, Dell EMC needs to be very clear which line is best for prospective customers.

My dilemma of stateful storage marriage

Chin-Fah Heoh has been thinking about stateful data in stateful storage containers and how they would interact with distributed applications containers and functions-as-a-service. This led to a consideration of what a distributed data systems would look like, wherein the idea of a “data center” seems like an oxymoron. He’s seen some past Storage Field Day companies offer pieces on how to get to a distributed data system. Chin-Fah will be at Storage Field Day next month, and looks forward to seeing how Hedvig and WekaIO will offer more pieces to this puzzle.