In recent years, there have been several very large advances in Storage both in connectivity and speed that will give companies and enterprises a huge boost to performance, capability and capacity. I stay on top of these trends and actively investigate how they can benefit a business, provide lasting value and a good ROI.
Affordability
Cheap SSDs
- SSDs are no longer prohibitively expensive
- Single / Multi-layer cell has increased in reliability
- Write Amplification has been limited by algorithms and storage mechanisms
- New and faster interfaces and connections
PCI-E / NVMe
Faster / Optimized Interfaces
- PCI-Express is much faster than legacy SATA / SAS connectors
- NVMe is optimized for the capability of flash storage
- NVMeoF will ultimately replace older protocols (iSCSI, Fiber Channel) as the end to end protocol for flash storage
100+ Gbp/s
High Throughput, Low Latency
- 100Gbp/s, 200Gbp/s, 400Gbp/s and soon to be 800Gbp/s
- NVMe over TCP – high throughput
- Low latency switching
- Legacy Protocols still work (iSCSI)
Storage Experience Overview
I’ve worked with numerous different storage vendors, protocols, optics / transports. I actively maintain a working knowledge of industry trends and solutions to bring about better solutions. Typically my role has been investigating technologies, learning them and their capabilities and making decisions, designing the ecosystem / architecture and recommendations based on that.
On Prem Hardware Specific Experience
- Fiber Channel
- iSCSI (100Gbp/s+)
- Spinning Disk
- All Flash Arrays
- Hybrid Arrays
- Branch Office Storage
- Vendor engagement (inception to ongoing support)
- Converged / Hyperconverged
- I/O Patterns and Block Sizes
- End to End Jumbo Frames
- All forms of Non-Volatile Storage (HDD, SSD, SED, NVME, NVRAM)
- NVMe / NVMeoF (while I’ve not used this in practice, they technology is there and I’ve done so in lab environments)
- SATA
- SAS and SCSI Command-sets (and connectors)
- Direct-attach Storage (DAS)
- RDMA
- Vendor Specific Algorithms (WAFL, CASL, ZFS, WORM, COW, etc…)
- Encryption at Rest and In Transit
- Data Destruction Standards and Methodologies (NIST 800-88, DOD 5220.22)
- Cloud Volumes / Cloud Storage
- LUNs / Volumes
- Capacity Management (Deduplication, Compression, Tiering)
- Scale Up / Out
- Big Data / NoSQL Storage (Hadoop, Elasticsearch, Logs, etc…)
- Tape (more info in Backups)
- JBOD
Platform Specific Experience
- HPE Storage (Alletra, Nimble, 3Par)
- Dell Storage (Equalogic, Compellent)
- NetApp
- Pure Storage
- Xiotech (acquired by Seagate)
- Nexsan
- Whitebox (RAID Controllers / JBOD)