Ilja Coolen \ ICSS

The last couple of days were a blast. It deserves a special note that the organisation of the “Seattle 2010 Tech Field Day” was
phenomenal. Everything was taken care of. The delegates had nothing to worry about, except maybe trying to look good on camera. After a while you actually didn’t notice the camera crew anymore and you wouldn’t worry about your appearance anymore.

We gathered at the Cedarbrook Lodge (which was a stunningly beautiful place to stay at actually) and had a welcoming dinner on Wednesday. This dinner was intended to get to know each other a bit better. There were a couple of newbies (like me) among the delegates, so this was quite a nice way to get introduced.

A shuttle bus took us from one conference location to the other. The schedule was tight, but given the live discussion we had during the sessions, this was actually a good thing, otherwise this conference would take a week. The locations were absolutely great. We get to spend some time at the “Microsoft Partner Center” two days in a row, and we went to the Microsoft on campus shop. Some of you who know me, would probably think “what the heck is he doing in a Microsoft shop”, but I would actually have bought a outdoor type jacket. The dumb thing however was, there was no clothing in my size. Most of the stuff was in 2XL to 6XL (US size charts), were I am only an XL in the European size chart. This is somewhere like a US medium size . Hey, I am just saying….

We also visited the F5 Networks HQ, and the NEC America site in Seattle. We were welcomed and treated with much hospitality everywhere we went. NEC might not have the most fancy office interior, their presentation to me was actually one of the best. I can’t explain why exactly I feel like that, but I think it has something to do with the way Gideon Senderov (NEC Director, Product Management & Technical Marketing of Advanced Storage Products) showed his knowledge of the NEC gear we went to see. His in depth knowledge was absolutely astounding. I don’t mean to say the other vendor’s presenters didn’t know their stuff, the absolutely did, but Gideon rose way above them. NEC, like F5, Compellent, Veeam and NimbleStorage did some live demo’s on their gear. They made it all happen, not a single glitch. Another impression I had during the NEC session, was they were a bit more open and honest about what their gear could and could not do. Most other vendors try to avoid answering questions that lead to an answer that points out that their gear cannot do a specific thing. Mostly it’s not a big deal.

The launch of the Nimble Storage company and their product introduction was also a very great experience. I think it takes  courage to launch a product in front of a bunch of tech analysts and critics. But Nimble pulled it of just great, and the product made a great impression.

Looking back on those days, there is absolutely nothing negative to say about the organisation and effort that was put into this event by the organizers, Stephen Foskett (@sfoskett) and Claire Chaplais (@-I-Dont-Twitter) and the sponsors. It was a great experience and a big thank you is in order. It was great meeting you all and thank you for making me part of it.

TIP: For all you guys that read this blog, if you ever get to go to Seattle WA, make sure you take the Seattle Underground tour to get to know the Seattle history a little better. It costs about $15 (US) and takes some 90minutes, but this is so worth it. You’ll love. Be sure to leave a comment if you do though.

OK, I know you guys are expecting more on the other “Gestalt IT – Tech Field Day sessions”. Please be patient. I have a bunch of notes I will work through, but I am going to work on them on my way home in the plane. Got plenty of time then. I am going to spend Saturday and a part of Sunday enjoying myself in Seattle WA.

What you can expect to be here soon ;

• DAY 1 - F5 Networks
• DAY 1 – Compellent
• DAY 2 - NEC HYDRAstor

The TechFieldDay success must be huge, when a company decides to use TFD as a platform to announce it’s launch. The delegates are all witnessing this launch. It is a great experience to be able to be part of an event like TFD, especially when you also get to be part of a new companies launch.

The introduction

The new company is called NimbleStorage, was founded in 2008 and is based in San Jose.  Nimble Storage offers a hybrid of flash and SATA storage array. The 3U high box services iSCSI storage and has a fixed size, no scale-up. Nimble Storage claims to achieve 60% cost reduction than existing solutions. Nimble’s storage architecture is “log-structured file system” which was created by Mendel Rosenblum (VMware founder).

• Varun Mentha (CEO & Co-Founder) kicks off by introducing his crew.
• Umesh Maheshwari (CTO & Co-Founder and filesystem expert)
• Dan Leary (VP Marketing)
• Ajay (Former Netapp)

Nimble Storage will be selling through VAR channels exclusively. At first they will be selling in the US only, but expansion to Europe will be in the works for 2011.

The technology

• (MLC) Flash and Low-cost High-capacity SATA disks iSCSI based storage targeted at the mid-sized enterprises.
• Point in time snapshot primary Replication based DR
• Capacity optimized snapshots in stead of traditional backup to eliminate backup windows.
• Listpricing < $3/GB
• Cache Accelerated Sequential Layout (CASL Highlists)
  • LZ-ish based inline compression reduces data 2-4x (no dedupe)
  • Flash caters to high-performance for all active data
  • SATA disk cost-effectively stores all primary data and 90 days worth of snapshots
  • WAN efficient offsite replication
• Application aware snapshots/backups (Microsoft VSS and VMware integration)
• Nimble Storage says they are 35x time more space efficient than leading vendors in this market (eg:Dell/Equalogic)
• Different retentions periods for local and remote data
• Bi-directional replication
  • System many-to-one replication.
  • Volume is one-to-one replication. This means many systems can replicate to one, but a single volume only has a single replication relationship.
• Rapid fail-over between sites (including flexible iqn identities)
• Version 1.0 is not cascaded replication, but it will be there in future releases
• Application templates
  • Predifined application aware storage and data protection configuration
  • LUN Blocksizes are matched to the application
  • LUN Caching is matched to the application
• Zero-copy hypervisor integrated cloning (included in the package)
• Web based GUI, and SSH based full featured CLI interface
• Full autosupport feature built-in (Real-Time Phone Home Support)
• MPIO is used for fail-over, no network based LACP

The flash storage is used as an intelligent cache that holds all the active data. What is active data is determined by the use frequency (and more). The cache is indexed. All data is written to SATA disks, so the flash disks are really only used as cache. All incoming data is compressed inline. Due to compression, the actual blocksize of the written data can vary. Because all the data is written sequentially to the SATA disks, the various blocksizes pose no real issue, and they are all supported. This also enables an application specific blocksize. By using templates in the definition for volumes, you can match the blocksize to match the blocksize to for example an Microsoft Exchange database volume, and another volume for it’s logs where both have different blocksizes.

All volumes can have their own snapshot schedules, or they can be grouped together in Protection Sets, which can be considered consistency groups (volume groups, not hosts groups).

You might be affraid that the SATA disk would provide bad performance, but the sequential reads and writes are actually something SATA disks can do pretty well. So this performance risk is mitigated by the compression-sequential-write (full blocks) part of the array’s code.

The flash cache is made up out of SSD’s, and are hot-replaceable and are shared between the controllers. All data is already on disk and therefore there is no need for any means of protection for these cache disks.

Products

• 3RU Units, large flash layer, multicore Intel Xeon processors
• Comes with 2 x quad GbE NICs
• Everything is redundant (controllers are active/passive)
• All drives are hot swapable
• peer-to-peer clustering
  • CS220: 9TB primary + 108TB backup
  • CS240: 18TB primary + 216TB backup ($99.900.-)
    • 1.3TB flash capacity based on 2x compression
    • 12 x 2TB disks (1x hot-spare/2x parity)
• Annual maintenance between $4000 and $6000 .

Roadmap

Although NimbleStorage wasn’t going to give us any formal roadmap intel at the moment, the following features are surely being introduced in upcoming upgrades/updates.

• Cascaded replication                        
• VMware SRM integration
• 10GbE NICs
• V1.1 Scale out, LUN’s can be striped across arrays.
• Role based access.
• QoS for replication sessions (including time of day based policies)
• SNMP alerting
• FCoE

Overall impression

Curtis W. Preston asked (and I was pondering on it) “why not NAS?”. The midsize customer segment doesn’t use a lot of NFS and for CIFS, the tend to use a regular Windows file server with (iSCSI) block storage from the SAN. The context to me was actually that it was not a need-to-have feature for the product launch. There might be a different view on the file services option in the future.

I am very impressed by these guys. They bring a ton of experience into the company which is transfered into their products. It is clear the products are functional and quite complete, but a couple of relevant features are still missing. The relevance is dependent on the size and level of operations of the client looking into this product. Smaller customer might not be depending on SNMP alerting or 10GbE interfaces. These features and the aforementioned features are sure to be introduced shortly after this launch.

The Nimble Storage guys presenting at Tech Field Day are brave in my book. They come in to present a new company and new products to a group of tech guys that could give them a really hard time, but they stood tall, and gave us a very great presentation. They definitely believe in their product, and at the same time respect their competition.

I will be watching them closely.

Resources

• Nimble Storage
• In The News (Gestalt IT)
• Twitter @NimbleStorage
• Facebook

Hey all,

I am trying to set up some live streaming here, like @Kiwi_si dit last event. Hopefully it will work. If my webcam is not capable of delivering proper audio and video, I will check @Rodos‘s new pocketcam.

Live stream:
Watch live video from TechFieldDat Seattle 2010 brought to you by Ilja Coolen on Justin.tv

Yep, it is now 23:00 (11pm for those who have trouble deciphering 23:00 ) and I am sitting in my hotel room. Quickly jotting down some words to keep a record of my TechFieldDay Seattle 2010 adventure, start to finish.

Started my journey at 19:53 saying goodbye to my loved ones. Spend a couple of hours in the train, twittering and reading and working my way to a backlog of personal documents. The train didn’t  go at its regular speed, due to planned maintenance work on the railroad tracks and some new tracks being laid out, so my trip didn’t start of a full speed. The flight will probably make up by going supersonic (zzzZZzzzzzZZZzz, oh darn, I am already dreaming, must be tired)…

I checked in to the citizenM (@citizenM) hotel and was kinda surprised by the funkiness of the rooms. Coming through the door, you’ll immediately notice the two large circles in the floor. One is the shower floor, and the other is the toilet area. So no separate bathroom here (budget part of the citizenM mantra). It looks like I have two Star Trek transporter pads in my room. I can transport from shower to toilet, and back.

In the far end of the room there is a huge bed. It’s not made, but the pillows and covers are “somewhat” folded on the bed. What more do you want for a short stay, during which all you want is get some sleep.

Another eye catcher is the Philips Pronto TSU9300 remote control sitting on the nightstand.
This would probably be the luxury part of the citizenM mantra.

It’s programmed to control the alarmclock, lights (adjust room lighting colors to match your mood), music, TV set and the room temperature setting.

All this, just to be able to catch your plane in time tomorrow morning. See, the fun starts now

I think I’ll go and see how funky the bar is.

Hi all,

Just got another email about the delegates and schedule for Tech Field Day Seattle 2010. The list of delegates looks at least as impressive as the ones present at previous Tech Field Day events. I must say, I feel honored to be among such great names, even without the list being 100% complete.

Check out the #TFD site to view the confirmed delegates. Two other great names are 99% certain to attend, but some paperwork needs to be sorted out.

Judging on the mail, Thursday will have a great surprise in store for us all. Don’t be a fool and miss out on this, so make sure you are tuned in for twitter, live blogging or live video streams. I am also looking forward to the Friday presentations, because I would really like to see what one of the presenting companies is up to these days. They aren’t that well known for their IT business over here in Europe.

In the mean time, I am trying out some services and tools to enable a live video stream like @Kiwi_Si did on the previous #TFD event in Boston. Any recommendations would be greatly appreciated.

Disclosure:

I am invited to this event, and all is paid for. Travel expenses, meals and such are all sponsored. As consideration I will be venting my (candid and independent) opinion on what is presented through blogging and probably Twitter.

Just like Derek Schauland I recently got the final invitation to Tech Field Day, Seattle 2010 edition.
I am looking forward to being a delegate since it’s first start, back in November 2009. Back then I had arranged for Stephen Foskett to present a session at the annual Dutch Storage Expo, but unfortunately he could not make it because of delayed flights. (note: I am so hoping this doesn’t happen to me while flying to Seattle).

Being a professional like he is, we somehow managed to still get him to present, through Skype. It didn’t work out the way we intended it to, but nonetheless it was a great session. We still got some very good reviews afterwards. Stephen afterwards told me about the TFD events and I really wanted to join. Due to the short notice, I wasn’t able to make it.  But yay, here’s a new chance to join the impressive list of TFD delegates.

I am not a blogger like most on the list, but I do have my own opinion on things and as an independent storage consultant I do want to know all I can on whatever storage related news is out there. I never have had an urge to express my opinions, but in the more recent years this has changed. I haven’t found much I thought was worth mentioning however, considering everything was already talked about on the internet. My perspective on this is changing.

Tech Field Day is a great opportunity to meet peers and get some insight in products from well known vendors and the not-so-well-known (to me) vendors. I will also use this event to crank up my blogging a nudge, willingly.

Like Derek said, it has the appearance of a conference. But the invitation and free-of-charge part is not something that defines a conference. I consider it an intimate/private tech update, with the intention to create buzz and some great exposure in the online community. Considering the previous TFD’s popularity, creating exposure should not be a problem.

For the international delegates, this will be a couple of tough days. Long flights, long days, intense discussions and presentations, and of course a party or two will not make these couple of days a walk in the park. But then again, its not intended to be.

I am looking forward to meeting all other delegates in real life. Check out this Twitter list.

Disclosure:

I am invited to this event, and all is paid for. Travel expenses, meals and such are all sponsored. As consideration I will be venting my (candid and independent) opinion on what is presented through blogging and probably Twitter.