Quantum Fireball of Solace?
OK, I'm going
Name's BOND, JBOND: Igneous's ARM strap-on is for your drives only
You wait for a bus for ages, and then two come along at once. Two data-transfer buses. Something like that. Both OpenIO and Igneous have launched plug-on ARM server cards for storage drives: these single-board computers each snap onto a hard drive to form nano-servers that are organized into a grid of object storage nodes. …
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Wednesday 21st December 2016 11:32 GMT Ogi
I actually quite like this idea
If they marketed an ARM based add on like this that just gave out ISCSI or AoE, it would be pretty cool. I could scale out my storage server just by plugging in more drives into a switch. Would not need to worry if I have enough SATA ports, or if I need another SATA card, or even need to have the drives in the same place as the NAS.
Both ISCSI and AoE allow for concurrent access, so could even distribute storage between my machines as and when needed, without having to unplug and replug drives.
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Wednesday 21st December 2016 13:38 GMT Down not across
Re: I actually quite like this idea
Would be even nicer if they could get the drives powered by PoE...
Quite. PoE powered drive enclosure with little ARM board presenting iSCSI over couple of 1GbE (or better) interfaces would be neat. With PoE+ you could probably power couple of disks if the ARM board is frugal enough.
Someone had a similar idea back in 2009...
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Thursday 22nd December 2016 13:36 GMT Ian Michael Gumby
@Ogi Re: I actually quite like this idea
What they are selling is a rack mountable box with these micro controllers. You would need to of course buy the switches (box == 60 micro cards, switch == 48 ports. ) Hence no need for PoE.
So not really that new or novel. They've written a FS API that support's AWS's S3 FS. While they asked about HDFS (someone at El Reg has been reading up on Big Data) but they didn't ask about actual access to the card and the underlying Linux OS or direct access to the drive.
What also wasn't asked was what happens when the drive fails?
Do they run some sort of replication and balancer behind the scenes?
Unlike a more traditional Hadoop cluster... you get to use the CPU for compute power. Although... this is most likely positioned as an iceberg storage layer.
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Thursday 22nd December 2016 00:01 GMT John Brown (no body)
Interesting....
....how the pricing seems to be based purely on a rental model though. Are they planning on selling too or is just the way things are going.
Having been through "Print as a service" supplier change I wonder if it's not just cheaper to by the feckin' printers and buy in just the maintenance contract. It'd certainly make changing supplier a LOT less painful. I'm not sure I'd ever want to go through a "storage as a service" supplier change over.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
