Infrastructure, Cloud & DevOps

Modern IT has a need for speed. In the digital era, data fuels decision making, enhances how businesses interact with their customers, and determines operational efficiency, plus in a growing number of cases, data is the product.

According to ESG research, 71% of IT organizations report that data storage technology is strategic to their organization’s IT and business operations. Additionally, nearly half (49%) of these organizations state that data is their business, with another 31% expecting to offer data-centric products and services within the next 24 months.

For these digital organizations, access latencies and bandwidth limitations have a direct cost to the business.

Traditionally for unstructured, or file, storage, there was an old saying (Yes, I said old) that only a small percentage of your data was going ever to be used at any given time, and the bulk of data was cold, something to be stored and not access, ideal for archiving. This idea was the basis behind many storage system designs.

Today, given the importance of analytics and the massive investment in machine learning, high performance access to large volumes of unstructured data is essential to business operations. In an ESG study of storage decision makers, 37% identified big data repositories for unstructured data as part of an AI or analytics initiative as a top growth area for on-premises data storage. This old idea of storing files but not needing to access them has quickly become irrelevant.

One storage innovator, Stellus, is helping to change things. Its Stellus Data Platform leverages an innovative Key-Value over Fabrics implementation to deliver high-performance and highly scalable storage for unstructured data.

And just last week, Stellus announced a record-breaking performance as the Stellus Data Platform was able to achieve a combined performance of up to 80GB/s aggregate bandwidth, and to a single Linux client Stellus achieved 33.2GB/s of sustained write throughput. I expect this level of performance to quickly become the expectation for digital businesses, especially in industries such as life sciences and media & entertainment.

If those record setting numbers aren’t enough to pique your interest, the ESG technical validation team was recently given the opportunity to take a look at the Stellus Data Platform. Needless to say, they too were impressed with what they saw. Some high-level takeaways include:

• The “read and write performance was particularly impressive, with the Stellus Data Platform exceeding the Stellus performance claims for the model under test, delivering 41.3 GB/sec write and 45.1 GB/sec read throughput, the fastest we have ever seen for a file storage system.”
• “The platform rebalanced data after loss of a 7.68TB drive in a 92TB data space in less than nine minutes with minimal impact to system performance.”
• “System upgrades were fast and simple to execute, enabling ESG to double storage capacity with a couple of clicks and less than 45 minutes processing time.”
• “The system also offers impressive density, scaling to 1.475 PB in just 17 RU.”

The way that businesses leverage data has changed. Now, the way that storage technology is architected must change with it. Stellus is helping lead the way.

Last week, Pure Storage announced some very impressive fourth quarter earnings results. Some highlights include:

• Q4 revenue $492.0 million, up 17% year-over-year.
• Full-year revenue $1.643 billion, up 21% year-over-year.
• Q4 GAAP gross margin 70.8%; Full-year GAAP gross margin 69.0%.
• Full-year free cash flow was $101.7 million, up 59% year-over-year.
• Pure added more than 500 new customers in the quarter, reaching over 7,500 total customers. (more…)

The edge, or the internet of things (IoT), is the next technology frontier. Though edge environments have existed for some time, it has recently become the wild west of technology, one defined by many harsh realities and a new ramp in investment, as businesses look for the next digital goldmine.

Nearly four out of ten (38%) storage decision makers believe IoT workloads will be a top driver of on-premises storage spending growth over the next 24 months, with one-third (33%) identifying IoT workloads for cloud storage spending over that same time period. IT is preparing for an onslaught of data growth resulting from these workloads, but how are IT vendors poised to address these needs of businesses at the edge?

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This week IBM announced an update to its FlashSystem storage portfolio. While new flash storage releases have become somewhat commonplace lately, thinking that IBM’s FlashSystems are just systems with flash does them a huge disservice. IBM has integrated some game-changing software innovation into its FlashSystems. While much of this technology has been in there for a while, the benefits extend far beyond the average storage system.

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At this year’s Dell Tech Summit, there were several high-impact announcements, each one important and each one valuable. But, with each, the real story will be whether these are just single isolated announcements or whether each one can become a first step in a larger journey that helps define Dell and its offerings moving forward.

With that, let’s walk through the big announcements.

• Dell Technologies on Demand: In a recent ESG study, a majority of IT organizations identified a preference to procure IT storage infrastructure on a pay-per-use basis. There are still, however, organizations that prefer the traditional model, so IT vendors such as Dell need to offer both options and many do. Dell’s technology breadth, however, should give it an advantage as IT organizations need simplification. The ability to have the same pay-per-use model and agreement across all your IT infrastructure, or even a significant portion, offers tremendous value. This should create significant value, saving personnel from wasting time managing paperwork, while helping reduce the cost of IT. The price can go up or down based on usage, capacity for storage and compute hours for servers. The use of compute hours as a term for servers is really intriguing. IT organizations can spin up and spin down workloads based on need and only pay when they are in use. The terms seem a little long, available in three, four, or five-year options, but this is a move in the right direction. Ideally this announcement is just the first step in Dell simplifying its payment process moving forward.
• Dell PowerOne: Autonomous infrastructure, that is the promise of Dell PowerOne. Even if it’s just a stretch goal, it’s good to hear. The PowerOne platform is a converged offering and its ability to save time and reduce risk via the automation of repetitive tasks is impressive. ESG was able to get a first look at the technology. So far, however, this automation technology is isolated to PowerOne. Does this capability come to other parts of the Dell portfolio? How will Dell bring the ideas of autonomous infrastructure to everything it does? PowerOne is exciting, and now the industry wants to see more.
• Dell’s Moonshot Goals to Deliver Good – Last, in this list, but certainly not least, Michael Dell kicked off this year’s Dell Tech Summit with several moonshot goals for Dell Technologies to achieve by 2030. These goals included a target of one-for-one recycling. For every system Dell builds in 2030 and beyond, it will recycle one system’s worth of components. While ambitious, it is not outside the realm of possibility. Dell already has a massive recycling program in place, and Michael was one of the industry’s earliest proponents of technology recycling. Dell also announced its goal for 50% of the Dell Technologies’ global workforce to be women by 2030, with 40% of the management positions. Again, this is ambitious, especially when you consider the global portion of this goal, but it is excellent to see an industry leader publicly putting a target out there and then actively working towards it.

All these announcements were significant, but ideally each is only a first step. All three address topics that the technology industry and the world at large have vested interests in. As a result, the potential is tremendous. The question Dell has to answer moving forward, however, is will it continue down these trajectories with additional investment, innovation, and commitment? Ideally, every year, Dell could highlight the strides the company has made to simplify IT procurement, automate IT operations, and achieve its moonshot goals, and I, for one, hope they will.