Monday Hot Take: VMware Acquires Datrium

In this edition of Gina Rosenthal’s Monday Hot Takes, she breaks down the acquisition of Datrium by VMware. She discusses how VMware will integrate this acquisition into their overall cloud disaster recovery plans. To get up to date on all that Datrium offers, she went to the Tech Field Day presentation archives to get up to speed on their tech stack. What stuck her was how much of Datrium was built to be a competitor to VSAN, and how deliberate VMware was in their announcement to stick to a DRaaS play with the acquisition.

Commvault Big Bet

In this piece, Chin-Fah Heoh considers what the recent acquisition of Hedvig means for Commvault. As a not infrequent Field Day delegate, and well familiar with the world of enterprise storage in general, Chin-Fah breaks down what Commvault is getting in this acquisition, if it was a good exit for Hedvig, and what the future might hold. Be sure to dig into the details.

Catch Up (Fast) – IBM Spectrum Protect Plus

It’s been almost a full calendar year since Chin-Fah Heoh last heard from IBM at Storage Field Day. They returned again last month to give an update on IBM Spectrum Protect Plus. While still a relatively nascent offering, SPP is starting to gain industry recognition, and adding must-have features for the backup and recovery market. For Chin-Fah, the pricing is there to appeal to the SMB/SME market, and he sees potential in it with regional cloud service providers as well.

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.

HDD Capacity Threshold Reaches 15TB

Chris Evans highlights the new king of HDD capacity, the 15TB Ultrastar DC HC620 from Western Digital. While only representing a 7% increase in capacity from 14TB drives, the real innovation here is these drives use host-managed Shingled Magnetic Recording, as opposed to being managed directly on the drives. This has big implications for hyperscalers, who can see greatly improved performance. Dropbox is one of the initial customers to use the drives, and Chris got a deep dive into their “Magic Pocket” architecture at Storage Field Day earlier this year.

Storage Field Day 15: The open convergence by Datrium

Datrium presented at Storage Field Day last month. Lino Telera got to hear about their concept of Open Convergence. This bucks the trend of traditional HCI, offering a different model for delivering tier-1 and secondary data in a scalable solution. They do this with an architecture build around stateless compute nodes and stateful storage nodes. This provides less cross talk between nodes, and allows for truly remarkable scale, as Lino saw during their presentation.