There’s so much information to read and only a limited time to write about it. Here are some of the recent more notable announcements from vendors, websites and blogs. Hopefully these will be weekly roundups, depending on time available.

• Micron unveils 1TB microSD card. This is pretty amazing. On our end-of-year Storage Unpacked show we were discussing HDDs reaching 1TB in capacity in 2009. Now we can do that in a fingernail-sized package with much greater random performance than a hard drive could ever reach. The new cards will achieve 90MB/s (read), 40MB/s (write) and QLC technology.
• Micron releases new 7300 & 5300 SSD models. Micron is refreshing their enterprise NVMe and SATA drives with new models. This in itself isn’t a big story, but continues to highlight the non-stop progression of SSD capabilities.
• Scality introduces native Azure Blob support. There are essentially two object storage APIs of note – the dominant S3 and Microsoft Azure Blob storage. Naturally, Microsoft isn’t going to support the competition, so needs to promote their own standard. The interesting development here is whether Scality can support both S3 and Azure Blob on the same data, while translating things like security credentials. This has been an ongoing industry requirement for years (NetApp did it with NFS/SMB).
• Excelero announces NVEdge – do-it-yourself all-flash arrays. Surely we have enough all-flash platforms? The difference here is this is a software play that can use SmartNICs. Expect to see more happening in this area during 2020.

From the Twitters

DockerCon is going virtual in 2020. Effectively DockerCon as an event is over and following the slow demise of the parent company. The rise of containerisation has been analogous to the home computer revolution of the early 1980s, where many new variations come to market and eventually only one or two win out. We learn lots along the way, but eventually the ecosystem settles on one architecture. In this case, it’s Kubernetes with container runtimes underneath.

No doubt much will get written about the failure of Docker, but we should reflect on the positives. Docker seeded a new part of the IT industry that is enabling hybrid and cloud-native architectures. There’s still a long way to go, but containerisation is here to stay.

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