Before starting Datera in 2013, a small group of us contributed the block storage subsystem to the Linux (“Linux-IO”) open source project, adopted by the likes of Google, Red Hat (now IBM) and a multitude of array manufacturers. Linux-IO eventually became the industry standard and emerged as an essential ingredient to software-defined IT infrastructure. While […]
How the Cloud moved from the Public Clouds to the Agile Enterprise The 1990s saw the emergence of a new sport that captured the attention of the world – Women’s Soccer (or for our European friends Football). The landscape changed, older styles of play were overtaken with a pace unbeknownst to the world, and voila, […]
Tesla? God no. I did my level best to avoid the media hype, the social chatter and the swarm to Tesla because I just didn’t want one. My resistance was due less to the character and quality of the car than to the polarizing stigma they have here in Silicon Valley, just another emblem of […]
IDC reports that 63% of companies are in the process of repatriating applications and data back on-prem from the public cloud. So is the public cloud going bust? Hardly. There is no bust going on, but simply the maturation of a $100 billion dollar industry – a service oriented “cloud-like” approach to IT – that […]
Software-Defined Storage Does Not Pass Go Without Advanced Automation The world will be creating 163 zettabytes of data a year by 2025, according to IDC. Switching from blocks to kilometers for a minute, one measurement shows “if each Terabyte in a Zettabyte were a kilometer, it would be equivalent to 1,300 round trips to the […]
There you were, top of the food chain for millenniums and then it happened, clouds rolled in and you were done. On the other side of the world things were happening that changed your climate, it got cloudy. Too big and too slow to adapt, you tried to survive, but the end was at hand. […]
As Datera announces the joining of HPE Complete Program to accelerate the enterprise transition to software-defined storage, it seems an ideal moment to capture some thoughts on video. A great digital revolution happens only every ten to twenty years, with Silicon Valley at its epicenter. The amazing team of engineers and thought leaders at Datera […]
Happy Holidays, Y’all! As the old year closes up shop and a new one struts in, many of us are in the habit of making a list of the things we’d like to do differently this time around. New Year’s Resolutions aren’t always realized but they are based on the intention to make a change […]
As the end of the year approaches, let me reflect with some pride on what we have achieved at Datera so far and provide some perspective on the path forward. Our most recently reported revenue growth showed us up 240% in the first half of this year alone, fueled by customer growth of more than […]
Tear up the old sheet music and improvise – the Software Defined Data Center is out on a World Wide Tour The Software defined data center (SDDC), like the spirit of the beloved Grateful Dead psychedelic band, is alive and well and headed out on the road despite what you may have last heard. The […]
Why is it when it’s your neck on the line that everyone in Silicon Valley queues up to lecture you on how critical it is that you take risks? From David Packard (“Take risks. Ask big questions. Don’t be afraid to make mistakes.”), to Steve Jobs (“The greatest artists like Dylan, Picasso and Newton risked […]
The information maintained in databases is the lifeblood of today’s enterprise. Yet organizations are living the nightmare of keeping up with their rapidly growing database farms, both in sheer size and volume. The old way of provisioning database servers is simply too expensive and slow. Procuring more gear, racking it up, checking operating system versions, […]
Nicky Nichols from Netflix’s Orange is the New Black (OITNB) pretty much summed up what is happening right now in the typical enterprise data center when she said “You Know, another layer of icing on a sh!tcake doesn’t make it taste good.” These clean rooms full of aisles, racks and blinking lights have lots of […]
Waze absolutely rules! Yes, I am a Wazer, as Google calls the users of its most popular community-based navigation app, and I’m better for it. By planning your departure, route, arrival and to some extent, your life, it optimizes your transport in the most valuable units imaginable – your time. How else could I get […]
Sometimes, it seems as if success comes from just sticking it out. Take for example the infamous WD-40® named for its Water Displacement formula – perfected on the 40th try. Or bubble wrap – a newfangled textured wallpaper that morphed into home insulation before finally finding its niche as packing material. In each case these […]
More and more of what we do these days at work and at play requires fast access to data. One of the most popular pastimes online today is a 100-player, app-like video game that is being played by over 125 million people worldwide. That’s a lot of data from a lot of people who expect […]
Last month, I found myself on the hook to transport all of my Mom’s worldly possessions from California to Colorado. Like so many of us who accumulate more and more data with every passing day, my Mom had collected an awful lot of stuff over the years. Before departing on my 1500 mile journey through […]
The discussion about digital transformation envelops the cloud, architecture and delivery models with almost too many choices. Private cloud? Public cloud? Hybrid cloud? Microservices? CI/CD? SaaS? And what about what’s already in place? You can bet those pushing toward a digital transformation already have an on-premises environment that required blood, sweat and tears to perfect. […]
There was a time when a single application owned data forever. Today, data is hybrid, used by many applications. It has left the proverbial nest – and for good reason. Data has the value and tying it to one application traps that value.
Datera had a recent win attributed to our radical simplicity. The previous supplier required 27 steps using three different tool sets to provision every single volume. Before performing them, someone had to figure out the answers to every question…
When customers ask about performance and availability of storage systems, the answers often are both theoretical and full of caveats. If you’re lucky enough to get an honest answer, it shouldn’t involve crossing your fingers or dealing with a disgruntled admin named Chris…
Today, everyone thinks hybrid means flash and disk. What they need is a storage architecture that was built to be hybrid. Just as important is a system that allows the ratios to be changed and new technology to be incorporated.
Everyone’s talking about the move to cloud. But for most, there’s an existing on-prem environment that required blood, sweat and tears to get right. And it’s working just fine – even thriving. To manage a hybrid IT environment, you just need a common data substrate.
After 30 years in the data storage industry, we can all agree that I am old. But, I would like to point out that everything has its time, and at some point, its time has passed. No, I’m not talking about me – I’m talking about using IOPS as the measure of performance.
The hype around self-driving cars keeps reaching new heights, with most pundits focusing on their immediate innovation and novelty. But the true transformation isn’t the self-driving car, it’s the underlying digital technology.
Having integrated, architected, scrutinized, acquired or dismantled dozens of scale-out architectures in my career as a CTO, I can tell you that scale-out is not new, it is not easy and it is not perfect – but it is valuable.
Datera is the only storage product built to natively support a declarative, intent-based paradigm for configuration and management. It’s a new idea, so I’m going to clarify why it will revolutionize the way you manage storage.
In our tests, our goal was to achieve as much of an apples-to-apples comparison as possible, so we used the same hardware, switches, network, load generation, testing tools and number of volumes. And the winner is…
The ability to leverage commodity servers to build large scale storage systems is undeniably the future. However, when we look under the covers of two such software-defined storage solutions – Datera and Ceph – the differences become clear.