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Garbage Collection #005 – Disaggregated Storage

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In this podcast, recorded on 6th September 2017, Chris, Martin and Gavin discuss the subject of disaggregated storage.  With the move to NVMe, traditional dual controller architectures are hamstrung by the need for all data to go via the processor(s).  Disaggregation takes the component parts and makes them scalable, while removing the controller bottleneck.  The guys discuss why these solutions are needed, who the players are in the market and what we can expect to see as this section of the storage industry develops.

Elapsed time: 00:21:02

Timeline

  • 00:00:00 – Introductions – What do we mean by disaggregation?
  • 00:01:10 – Legacy architectures and dual controllers
  • 00:03:57 – NVMe or not – it’s irrelevant
  • 00:04:28 – Violin is back!
  • 00:05:00 – Lost NVMe performance
  • 00:06:00 – Thinking about tomorrow’s workloads and IoT
  • 00:07:00 – A Raspberry Pi Diversion
  • 00:08:28 – The old Mac versus PC debate again
  • 00:09:00 – Vendor roundup
  • 00:10:13 – Much of this looks like HCI – is the problem the interconnect?
  • 00:11:30 – The Storage admin is dead
  • 00:11:53 – Howard Marks, Pure and Nutanix
  • 00:13:20 – X-IO and interconnects
  • 00:14:51 – OK, let’s summarise the architectures
  • 00:17:30 – Pure Storage – disaggregated or not?
  • 00:19:05 – Wrap Up

Companies/Products Mentioned in this Podcast

Copan Systems, Cohesity, Coho Data, Pure Storage, Violin Systems, Excelero, Micron, Kaminario, Datrium, EMC DSSD, VMware Virtual SAN, X-IO, SymbolicIO, E8 Storage, Vexata, EMC Symmetrix.

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  1. […] The Violin Concerto platform did offer a form of scale-up, but not really scale-out compared to something like SolidFire.  The scale-out market seems to have been superseded by HCI, with most vendors now offering a limited form of scale-up.  With recent increases in flash capacity, there’s a question here as to whether scale-up is limited by design and throughput.  Dis-aggregated storage seems to be an option to get around this and could be the future of scale-out, rather than the current scale-out SolidFire model.  Violin still has a dual controller architecture, which in the future represents a real bottleneck. […]

  5. […] The Violin Concerto platform did offer a form of scale-up, but not really scale-out compared to something like SolidFire.  The scale-out market seems to have been superseded by HCI, with most vendors now offering a limited form of scale-up.  With recent increases in flash capacity, there’s a question here as to whether scale-up is limited by design and throughput.  Dis-aggregated storage seems to be an option to get around this and could be the future of scale-out, rather than the current scale-out SolidFire model.  Violin still has a dual controller architecture, which in the future represents a real bottleneck. […]

  6. […] This week’s podcast episode continues the discussion on SmartNICs and DPUs with Fungible, a company that claims to have originally coined the term DPU. Chris and Martin talk with Pradeep Sindhu (CEO and co-founder) and Jai Menon (Chief Scientist) about Fungible’s storage cluster and host-based DPU. The Fungible architecture aims to solve the challenges of disaggregation, a topic we first looked at back in September 2017. […]