Special Report on Storage Visions 2017

Existing for a long time, the 16^th edition of Storage Visions conference, recently took place in Milpitas, CA, on October 16, 2017.

The event continues to exist even if the organization tends to be a bit traditional as all attendees noticed. Storage Visions is rather a seminar than a conference as the number of attendees is pretty limited, in the range of 100 to 150.

Besides its format, the event delivers an interesting content presented by talented speakers from many companies. The number of end-users was very limited and we met essentially vendors.

The expo got 20 sponsors and exhibitors, among them Intel, Quantum, Red Hat, Sony, Komprise, Active Storage, Cloudian, Kwilt, Newisys, Qumulo and SwiftStack.

Besides this organization, this event offered hot topics content such persistent memory, NVMe and associated fabric, AI, IoT and mobile impact on storage architecture and design, SDS in many forms, and cloud storage.

One superb presentation was the one delivered by Scott Miller, technology fellow for engineering and infrastructure, Dreamworks, who presented an interesting talk about storage at its animation studios.

It’s useful to understand the terms in this segment. The first one is about a ‘Scalable NAS’ as appliance or software and it seems that the presenter doesn’t care about scale-out or not. The network fabric is Ethernet. He insisted on the file services method and here NFS is the protocol of choice coupled with the automounter, standard for decades, to enable a dynamic global namespace for approximately 3,000 clients. POSIX and I/O semantics are two key file behavior capabilities required.

The studio also decouples storage capacity and file delivery having to distinct layers that can scale independently. The presenter explained these two notions as resources and his team manages capacity, bandwidth, ops/sec. and latency as resources aligned with movie production requirements. For performance, Dreamworks relies on NFS caching/proxies and this front-end layer uses Avere Systems appliances connected to back-end file servers farm represented by Qumulo machines. He also mentioned that, for the majority of the phases of the production, the team prefers to re-compute data instead of protecting with advanced techniques that could overload the production.

Based on the recent movie The Baby Boss produced and ‘built’ by Dreamworks, Miller gave some numbers:

At 24 frames per second, the 90 minutes movie has 130,000 frames in total,
500,000,000 digital files are needed to deliver the movie representing 350TB,
utilizing 10,000+ cores and 80,000,000 CPU hours of computing for 250,000,000,000 pixels.

At Dreamworks, 3 people manage 15PB.

He concluded by a few special words that mean a lot of thing today with digital information: “We create data, you watch data” and this is exactly this as a movie is purely machine-generated data. With this Dreamworks case study, we clearly understand that movie studio is the new HPC as requirements converge.

We also gathered some interesting info:

A few months after the shutdown of Formation Data Systems business, we learned that eBay finally acquired the ISV’s SDS technology, assets, IP and 8 engineers joined the giant auction company.
It seems that some Flash and NVMe vendors are looking for exit and potential acquirers, this is the case for Pavilion Data Systems, founded in 2014 with $16 million raised so far and a recent CEO change. We’ll see if this will be confirmed early 2018.
Some commercial object storage vendors would be in a raising fund campaign claiming $1 billion valuation, complete utopia and very bad indicator with many of them already with a series D for their last round. It seems that they don’t have alternative and continue capital dilution. Will we assist to exits similar to Nimble Storage or SimpliVity who finally got acquired for bargains by HPE? …