Getting the most out of your home lab is essential for keeping up on certifications, and to keep expanding your skill sets in general. Matt Crape set himself the ambitious goal of expanding his home lab using the hopeful budget of $0.00, a man after my own heart.
The Brave New World of NVMe: The On-Premise IT Roundtable
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 11:57 — 7.3MB)
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The roundtable discusses how NVMe is impacting the storage industry. Is this just an iteration on what we’ve already seen with flash, or does it represent a sea change that will fundamentally change IT?
Excelero’s NVMesh Magic
Excelero recently came out of stealth, and wants to provide the software layer to allow businesses to build a high performance scale out storage infrastructure. It’s a software only play, running on commodity hardware. That may not sound like the new hotness, but I’m here to tell you, Excelero is exciting!
Back to the Storage Future with Intel’s SPDK
A decade ago, flash began changing the storage market in profound ways. We’re now seeing similar disruptions with NVMe. But the speeds of the new interface bring to light new bottlenecks for performance, especially at scale. Intel designed their Storage Performance Development Kit to specifically focus on driving down latency to allow for scaling that borders on linear.
X-IO: On the Edge of Reinvention
X-IO Technologies understand the dilemma of reinvention. They’ve been around since 2002, originally as part of the Seagate Advanced Storage Group. A fifteen year company history and a focus on traditional storage arrays combine to make it hard for the company to seem like the new hotness. This is not to take away from the company’s accomplishments. The traditional enterprise storage market is ruthlessly competitive, and they’ve carved out over 1,500 customers. The company remains dedicated to these customers.
But the company can also read some tea leaves. There is a decided move away from custom hardware, and an embrace of commodity, perhaps best exemplified by the announced death of Dell EMC’s DSSD. In response to this, X-IO looks to pivot with an entirely new line of business. They’ve moving to the edge.
Lenovo Caches In with Intel Optane ThinkPads
Just ahead of CES, Lenovo announced that they are refreshing their Thinkpad line. Ordinarily, a common refresh with slightly faster processors or a little more RAM isn’t much to get excited or upset about. But in the press release, Lenovo let slip a major announcement. These machines will be based on Intel’s Kaby Lake platform, but much more importantly, will use Intel’s Optane, which is their 3D XPoint NVRAM implementation.
NVMe for Absolute Beginners
J Metz writes on the Cisco Data Center and Cloud Blog: There are different ways to use Flash, of course, and different architectures abound in the marketplace — from fully “All Flash Arrays” (AFA), “Hybrid Arrays” (which are a combination of Flash and spinning disk), to more traditional systems that have simply replaced the spinning […]