Andy Warfield | VMworld 2014
Channel: SiliconANGLE theCUBE
Date: 2014-08-25

Andy Warfield, Coho Data, at VMworld 2014 with John Furrier and Dave Vellante

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According to Coho Data Inc.’s CTO & Co-Founder Andy Warfield, the thing that really struck him and his team early on with PCIe Flash, in particular, was that it was quickly going in a similar direction as the CPU did 10 years ago, where it was an incredibly expensive resource to buy and operationally manage. In an interview for theCUBE earlier today at VMworld 2014, he expressed his frustration with Flash and how this actually took Coho Data to the software-defined network (SDN).

“The thing that you’re about to see with Flash is so performance dense per cost that it’s going to outweigh the CPU,” said Warfield. With Flash being an affordable and incredibly capable resource that is actually falling in price every one to two years, Warfield described his sentiment towards its coming performance density as “upsetting.”

After an attempt to saturate the Flash capabilities from Fusion-io cards failed, the Coho Data team realized that building a storage system with 10 of those devices behind a CPU and network in the way that they’ve always built storage doesn’t make any sense. Warfield believes that, because this Flash is so demanding and difficult to drive at speed to truly expose the value from it, it looks a lot like the CPU did, which is what took Coho Data to the SDN.

The company ended up converging storage and the network, programming the switch using OpenFlow APIs. With the realization that this Flash was so high-performance that network-distributed systems would have to built, Coho Data incorporated the switches and interconnect. Warfield added, by using the storage system to program the switch, the company is able to do things like make a single IP address or apparent NFS server scale across hundreds of devices.