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This piece looks at developments and digital storage partners for public cloud company edge services, in particular AWS Outposts.We also look at a VAST Data GPU oriented AI storage offering as well as the introduction of LTO 9 magnetic tape technology in late 2020.

Public cloud companies have created services to bring their services to the edge of the network as well as in their hyperscale data centers.One example is AWS Outposts.Outposts was first announced in 2018, with general availability announced in December 2019.

Recently a number of storage companies made announcements on AWS Outposts partnerships.AWS Outpostsextends AWS infrastructure, services, APIs, and tools to customer datacenters, co-location spaces, or on-premises facilities.AWS Outposts is meant to provide low latency access to on-premises applications or systems and local data processing for local storage needs in a hybrid cloud storage environment.

These AWS Outpost connections included Zadara, who announced a partnership with data management provider Storage IT offering storage as a service solution in the AWS Marketplace.Qumulo also launched on AWS Outposts to enable file storage and data management.Qumulo on AWS Outposts allow customers to connect their file data to AWS and run AWS services.

VAST Data introduced its Universal Storage Platform that used Intels Optane SSDs in the front end of a storage system as a cache for data stored on quad level cell (QLC) SSDs in 2019.The company said that by using NVMe based Optane SSDs and QLC flash that they could bring the cost of a flash memory storage system to close to that of a HDD storage system.The company recently announced the availability of its next generation storage architecture that it calls LightSpeed.LightSpeed combines VASTs NAS appliance with NVIDIA GPU-based and AI processor-based computing for AI applications.

VASTs announcement says that GPUDirect enables customers running NVIDIA GPUs to accelerate access to data and avoid extra data copies between storage and the GPU by avoiding the CPU and CPU memory altogether as shown in the image below. In initial testing, VAST demonstrated over 90GB/s of peak read throughput via a single NVIDIA DGX-2 client, nearly 3X the performance of VAST's NFS-over-RDMA and nearly 50X the performance of standard TCP-based NFS.

GPU Direct storage access for AI applications using GPUs

The company says that LightSpeed uses a disaggregated, shared everything (DASE) architecture (using elements from its Universal Storage platform) to lower the costs of SSD storage and thus eliminate the need for storage tiering.LightSpeed doubles the performance of prior VAST storage solutions.It also provides NFS support for NVIDIA GPUDirect Storage.

The LTO program technology provider companies (HPE, IBM and Quantum), which manage the most popular digital magnetic recording tape format, officially announced the LTO 9 specification.LTO 9 tape cartridges support 18 TB of native storage capacity (less than the 24 TB native capacity for LTO 9 that was on prior LTO roadmaps).Whereas the most recent generations generally doubled storage capacity about every 2.3 years, this is a 50% increase from 12 TB native storage capacity for LTO 8.The LTO program says that they redid the LTO roadmap to reflect the changed capacity for LTO 9 and that following generations will double with each generation as shown below.

Updated LTO Magnetic Tape Roadmap

TheLTO generation 9 specifications include previously introduced features, such as multi-layer security support via hardware-based encryption, WORM (Write-Once, Read-Many) functionality and support for Linear Tape File System (LTFS). The new LTO generation 9 specifications include full backward read and write compatibility with LTO generation 8 cartridges.Quantum said that they will make LTO 9 tape drives available for their Scalar Tape Libraries and StorNext AEL archive systems beginning in December 2020.Other tape storage system vendors will be announcing LTO 9 support for products in late 2020.

AWS Outpost storage partners Zadara and Qumulo enable on-premises storage partnered with public cloud service.VAST Data introduces GPU AI high performance storage.The LTO program introduces LTO 9 tape technology with vendors providing products by late 2020.

See the rest here:
Cloud At The Edge, GPU Storage And LTO Gen 9 - Forbes