NetApp predicts data management and IT trends will lead in the New Year

2019 was a year of rapid innovation—and disruption—for both the IT industry and the broader business community. With the widespread adoption of hybrid multicloud as the de facto architecture for enterprise customers, organizations everywhere are under tremendous pressure to modernize their infrastructure and to deliver tangible business value around data-intensive applications and workloads.

As a result, organizations are shifting from on-premises environments to using public cloud services, building private clouds, and moving from disk to flash in data centers—sometimes concurrently. These transformations open the door to enormous potential, but they also introduce the unintended consequence of increased IT complexity.

NetApp predicts that a demand for simplicity and customizability will be the number one factor that drives IT purchasing decisions in 2020. Vendors will need to offer modern, flexible technologies with the choice of how to use and to consume those technologies so that customers can keep pace with their evolving business models. As IT departments strive to deemphasize maintenance and hardware, to reduce overhead, and to adopt pay-as-you-go models, simplicity and choice will be crucial.

Achieving this simplicity will serve as the foundation for companies as they navigate the exciting technological trends that we identify in the following sections.

1. As the advent of 5G makes AI-driven Internet of Things (IoT) a reality, edge computing environments are primed to become even more disruptive than cloud was.

In preparation for the widespread emergence of 5G, lower-cost sensors and maturing AI applications will be used to build compute-intensive edge environments. This effort will lay the groundwork for high-bandwidth, low-latency AI-driven IoT environments with the potential for huge innovation—and disruption.

The advent of 5G is what AI-driven IoT has been waiting for. It will take a few more years for 5G data technology to spread across the entire United States. However, 2020 will see many players in the technology industry and business community invest in building edge computing environments to support the reality of AI-driven IoT. These environments will make possible new use cases that rely on intelligent, instantaneous, and autonomous decision-making, with low-latency, high-bandwidth capabilities. This evolution will bring us to a world where the internet will work on our behalf—without even having to ask.

This AI-driven IoT innovation, however, will depend on a massive prioritization of edge computing, further disrupting IT infrastructures and data management priorities. As edge devices move beyond home devices (such as connected thermostats and speakers) and become more far-reaching (such as connected solar farms), more data centers will be placed at the edge. Also, platforms such as artificial intelligence for IT operations (AIOps) will be necessary to help monitor complex environments across the edge, the core, and the cloud.

2. The impact of blockchain will be undeniable as indelible ledgers rapidly enable game-changing use cases outside of cryptocurrency.

The world is quickly moving beyond Bitcoin to adopt enterprise-distributed indelible ledgers, setting the stage for a transformation that’s exponentially bigger than the impact that cryptocurrency has had on blockchain in finance. 

While the crypto frenzy continues to steal the limelight when it comes to blockchain, most players in the industry understand the bigger picture of the technology and its potential. Going into 2020, we will see a tipping point for larger implementations as enterprises go a step further to adopt indelible ledgers based on Hyperledger, which represents the maturation of blockchain for wider use cases. Indeed, we will start to see blockchain go “mainstream” as it enables industries such as healthcare to create universal patient records, to improve chain-of-custody pharmaceutical processes, and more.

With such use cases validating blockchain and indelible ledgers, additional widespread adoption of the technology will drive transformation across society on a larger scale. This widespread adoption will build on the disruption that cryptocurrency has brought to finance to touch nearly every industry. As a result, new data management and compute capabilities will encourage companies to invest in indelible ledgers to build differentiated applications and to collaborate on critical, sensitive datasets.

3. Hardware-based composable architecture will have less short-term potential against commodity hardware and software-based infrastructure virtualization.

Continued improvements in commodity hardware performance, software-based virtualization, and microservice software architectures will eliminate much of the performance advantage of proprietary hardware-based composable architectures, relegating them to niche data center roles soon. 

Hardware-based composable architecture is being hyped as the next evolution of hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI). This architecture enables CPUs, networking cards, workload accelerators, and storage resources to be distributed across a rack-scale architecture and to be connected with low-latency PCIe-based switching. 

Although composable architecture does have potential, standardization has been slow, and adoption has been even slower. Meanwhile, software-based virtualization of storage, combined with software-based (but hardware-accelerated) compute and networking virtualization solutions, offers much of the flexibility of hardware-based composable architectures today with lower cost and consistently increasing performance.

Next year, attempts to build a true hardware-based rack-scale computing model will no doubt continue, and the space will continue to evolve quickly. However, most organizations that must transform within 2020 will be best served by a combination of modern HCI architectures (including disaggregated HCI) and software-based virtualization and containerization.

KIOXIA’s PCIe 4.0 enterprise NVMe SSDs strengthens storage performance; achieves PCI-SIG compliance and NVMe certification

KIOXIA America Inc. (formerly Toshiba Memory America, Inc.), the U.S.-based subsidiary of KIOXIA Corp., announced Wednesday that its lineup of PCIe 4.0 NVMe enterprise solid state drives (SSDs) has achieved PCI-SIG compliance for PCIe 4.0 and University of New Hampshire InterOperability Laboratory (UNH-IOL) certification. 

KIOXIA’s CM6 Series passed interoperability tests at the August 2019 PCI-SIG Compliance Workshop – that includes official PCIe 4.0 specification tests. KIOXIA America will be on hand at Supercomputing 2019 later this month to showcase new levels of flash performance enabled by its CM6 Series SSDs. 

KIOXIA develops PCIe 4.0 NVM Express SSDs and continues to push the limits of flash storage performance. The CM6 Series brings planned performance improvements of three times over its PCIe 3.0 predecessors and is 12 times faster than SATA drives. KIOXIA’s lineup of Gen4 PCIe SSDs also includes the CD6 Series, which is targeted to cloud and scale-out environments.

The PCIe 4.0 NVMe enterprise SSDs utilizes KIOXIA’s 96-layer BiCS FLASH 3D flash memory, PCIe 2x2 or 1x4 lane configuration options, targeted transfer rates up to 6,900 megabytes per second; and supports SFF-TA-1001 (also known as U.3) operation with universal backplanes for simplified customer use with SAS, SATA and NVMe SSDs.

KIOXIA was at Microsoft Ignite earlier this month to demonstrate the CM6 Series running in a Microsoft Azure hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) platform with Quanta Cloud Technologies – and enabling twice performance gains over a PCIe 3.0 solution. 

“We were able to show that our CM6 Series SSDs are capable of pushing SSD sequential read performance to over 55 gigabytes per second (GB/s) across eight drives – nearly 7GB/s per SSD – and we’re not done yet. KIOXIA will continue to push the performance envelope for our customers,” noted Alvaro Toledo, vice president of SSD marketing and product planning for KIOXIA America.

PCI-SIG hosts Compliance Workshops several times a year in various locations worldwide, giving members the opportunity to test and validate their products before entering the field. Compliance testing is completed against both PCI-SIG maintained systems and other manufacturers of PCI products. 

As the key testing and certification lab for NVMe technology and software, the UNH-IOL provides conformance and interoperability testing across various operating systems, drivers, and hardware platforms, as well as PCIe SSDs and PCIe-enabled servers. “The SSD market is quickly moving to NVM Express technology, and standards compliance is critical to ensure smooth adoption,” added Toledo.

Pavilion secures VMware Ready status for its Hyperparallel flash array offering; boosts data management features

Pavilion Data Systems announced Monday release 2.3 of its Hyperparallel Flash Array with VMware Ready status. The no-compromise enterprise storage platform now supports a complete suite of data management features for consolidation of VM sprawl and native Container Storage Interface (CSI) for simplified migration to PKS, Docker and Kubernetes containers. 

Release 2.3 includes native VMware support for vCenter, VMware Ready support for NFS along with backward compatibility for block-based iSCSI connectivity. Release 2.3 has been beta tested with numerous customers worldwide and is currently available.

The system is capable of supporting hundreds of thousands of Virtual Machines across 72 standard NVMe SSDs with capacities reaching 1+ PB using 16 TB NVMe drives. All of the Pavilion data management functions, including snapshots, thin provisioning, encryption and RAID-6 volume provisioning are now enabled under VMware vCenter for simplicity of scaling and consolidating enterprise VM sprawl.

One of the customers for Pavilion’s VMware consolidation is the Netherlands Central Bureau of Statistics (CBS). CBS selected Pavilion over several traditional all-flash arrays based on performance and footprint manageability. 

Last month, Pavilion Data Systems announced record-breaking results of STAC-M3 benchmarks in a new Securities Technology Analysis Center (STAC) Report.

The STAC-M3 benchmark specifications are maintained by the STAC Benchmark Council, which consists of more than 300 financial institutions and more than 50 vendor organizations. User firms include the largest global banks, brokerage houses, exchanges, hedge funds, proprietary trading shops, and other market participants. 

Such firms designed the STAC-M3 benchmark suite to represent a common set of performance-related challenges in financial time-series analytics. The STAC-M3 results were audited by the STAC, which facilitates the Council.

A solution using the Pavilion Data Hyperparallel Flash Array populated with standard SSDs for the test produced world-record performance in four analytical benchmarks against all other publicly disclosed systems, including systems with direct-attached storage and Intel Optane drives. The Pavilion array came ahead of all other publicly disclosed solutions involving kdb+ and flash arrays in eight tick analytics benchmarks.

“Release 2.3 extends Pavilion’s leadership from webscale and HPC customers directly into the heart of the Fortune 100 where VMware is the predominant operating environment,” said Gurpreet Singh, Pavilion CEO. “By natively supporting VMware NFS, demonstrating the upcoming VMware-native NVMe-oF functionality and enabling all of our data management functions inside vCenter, we enable orders of magnitude more consolidation than the nearest competitor and simplify operations in a familiar way for VMware administrators.”

Pavilion Data announced in August that its Series C funding of US$25 million, bringing the total funding to $58 million. New investors are Taiwania Capital and RPS Ventures.

All existing investors: Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Korea Investment Partners, DAG Ventures, Artiman Ventures, SK Telecom, and Tyche Partners participated in this round. The investment will accelerate the delivery of the company's NVMe-oF products, expanding to new markets, and growing the team to support customer demand.

HPE advances HPE SimpliVity to deliver an AI-driven experience, modernizes data protection and enhances usability

Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) announced on Monday advancements to its HPE SimpliVity, its hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) platform, ushering in a new generation of HCI powered with artificial intelligence to simplify virtual machine (VM) management and free IT staff to focus on innovation. 

Building upon its software-defined architecture, HPE SimpliVity is enhancing its customer experience with HPE InfoSight, one-click cluster upgrades, and the integration of HPE StoreOnce.

HPE SimpliVity has always gone beyond standard HCI consolidation. In early days, one could argue that IT architectures were “hardware confined.” Most systems incorporated only a very basic consolidation of servers, storage and hypervisor in each node. Software-defined technology and traditional hyperconvergence soon overtook the original architecture, allowing for tremendous IT productivity and efficiency gains over the previous infrastructure. 

Software-defined infrastructure removed the IT silos and replaced wasteful, manual processes and over-provisioning with efficient, fluid pools of virtual compute and storage. Throughout that evolution, HPE SimpliVity provided data centers with game-changing HCI features, from built-in backup, rapid recovery, inline deduplication and compression, to a HyperGuarantee that guarantees simplicity, efficiency and power of the platform.

HPE SimpliVity makes it simple for any VM administrator to deploy, manage, scale, and upgrade their infrastructure. As the industry’s most efficient all-in-one system, HPE SimpliVity eliminates more infrastructure and management silos than its competitors. HPE SimpliVity intelligently self-manages efficiency, performance, and resiliency without the need for manual tuning or configuration tradeoffs. 

The first release of HPE InfoSight for HPE SimpliVity, enables customers to gain predictive resource planning that takes the guesswork out of managing capacity. HPE InfoSight provides HPE SimpliVity customers global visibility and analytics into detailed system, performance, and capacity utilization insights, along with support automation with automatic alerts and signature detection into complex problems.

One-click cluster upgrades for HPE SimpliVity enable a seamless full-stack software upgrade that simplifies and removes risk. Customers now have the ability to upgrade firmware, hypervisor, and HPE SimpliVity software across the nodes in a HPE SimpliVity cluster in one click, delivering confidence to simply, and non-disruptively perform upgrades across sites.

HPE SimpliVity is hyper-efficient, uniquely combining compute, storage, and networking with built-in backup and recovery, delivering consolidation and cost savings. HPE SimpliVity has improved data efficiency with 90 percent storage capacity savings across primary VMs and backups. These savings are guaranteed with the HPE SimpliVity HyperGuarantee. 

Only HPE SimpliVity deduplicates compresses, and optimizes data inline, globally, enabling customers to save on expensive capacity resources, and enabling VM mobility.

Modernized data protection with HPE StoreOnce integration. As HPE SimpliVity is accelerating into more enterprises, customers are looking to continually improve their data protection strategy. HPE is integrating with HPE StoreOnce for HPE SimpliVity, enabling enhanced protection and data mobility across HPE storage. 

HPE StoreOnce integration with HPE SimpliVity enables an app-aware data protection solution with rapid recovery and policy-based automation for simple management and cost-effectiveness. This solution complements the HPE SimpliVity built-in backup and recovery capability for long-term retention and compliance.

HPE SimpliVity customers gain space-optimized, intelligent HCI for multi-site deployments, enabling VMs to benefit from performance, efficiency and resiliency in the smallest possible footprint. For edge sites, zero administration is enabled by centralized, unified management across all sites, empowering customers to manage workloads across distributed sites where staff resources are scarce. 

For superior business continuity, customers can rapidly failover virtually any number of edge sites in the event of disaster, using single click edge-to-core VM mobility and recovery. Orchestration is fast and efficient, enabling all edge workloads to be recovered quickly, minimizing business downtime.