UPDATED 12:08 EDT / MAY 13 2014

How Coho Data integrates SDN + storage to automate scale | #OpenStackSummit

Doug Fallstrom - Openstack Summit Atlanta 2014 - theCUBEThis week’s OpenStack Summit event, brought to you live by SiliconANGLE’s theCUBE, is being held at the Georgia World Congress Center in Atlanta. In this interview, Stu Miniman sits down with Coho Data’s Doug Fallstrom, Senior Director of Product Management, to find out more about this rapidly growing startup.

Miniman started off the interview by asking Fallstrom to talk about himself and Coho. Fallstrom mentioned that he’s been in product management storage for 15 years. He believes that Coho has a great story in the way that they integrate software defined networking (SDN) and the storage stack.

Fallstrom went on to explain that they use a standard open flow protocol to integrate into today’s Arista switch. “Our intention is not to prod ourselves to define networking hardware; it’s merely using the functionality within the switch itself,” said Fallstrom.

  • OpenStack and virtualization

After briefly talking about what Coho is doing at the OpenStack Summit, Miniman went on to ask Fallstrom if they’re a part of the OpenStack developer community. He replied that they will be joining the community to provide code as well as expertise from the storage and Xen background.

Miniman then asked Fallstrom where Coho sits with virtualization and OpenStack. Fallstrom said that they’re agnostic. They choose to start with VM because of dominant market share. With OpenStack, they can introduce KBM into the mix and then look into Hyper-V. Additionally, physical access is extremely important to the company.

Coho’s market position

 

With an interest in Coho, Miniman asked Fallstrom to offer some basics on the company. Fallstrom said the company has been about three years in the making, emerging from stealth in October 2013. Their funding consists of $10M in the first round and $25M in the second.

To find out more about Coho, Miniman questioned Fallstrom about what their customers were saying about them. Fallstrom first stated that a big part of their customer base is service providers. Their pay-as-you-grow model fits very well into that environment.

In terms of scale, Coho’s is very linear. You can run as much IS as you can to their solution. They receive about 180,000 IOPS out of one chassis. Also, they’ve tested up to 10 chassis and that scales lineally, achieving over one million IOPS. As they’re able to reprogram the data path behind the switch, they can automatically move clients from an overloaded array into a newly brought up system without any intervention.

“You, literally plug in, physically turn on, wait 15 minutes, and that’s it,” said Fallstrom about their scaling process.

Miniman then asked Fallstrom how Coho’s solution compares to a traditional storage array. Compared to traditional vendors where you spend time configuring a box and creating volume groups, Coho allows you to just plug in, power on and keep plugging in arrays, with everything taken care of in the backend. Also, as hardware architecture gets added and they move into new versions, their system will automatically relay data behind the scenes.

Again, there’s no need for intervention. “We’re taking more like a cloud like mantra,” said Fallstrom.

In terms of flash as an architecture, Fallstrom said that Coho finds it really exciting. With flash, they’re able to metric every IO and trace every IO coming into the box with any overhead. Everything that ends up in the box, ends up in flash.

Miniman then asked Fallstrom if he could share information on the economics of their solution. Fallstrom said that they use an operational model. What customers benefit from the most is not only the high performance, but also from the non-operational model. You don’t have buy a huge array to start with. You just have to buy a small chassis and grow when you need more capacity and/or performance. “You need to be able to consume storage as a utility,” Fallstrom added.

Concluding the interview, Miniman asked Fallstrom why this point in time is critical for the future of infrastructure. Fallstrom replied that OpenStack is rapidly growing and, in fact, is booming three times the speed of Linux. It’s the right time for IT organizations to start deploying it in production. When it comes to enterprise, Fallstrom said that “OpenStack is a fantastic opportunity to move them to the next level where they need to be.”


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