Interrrrrresting
I watched the architecture overview video on their site and, although the devil is always in the detail, this looks like a very interesting approach. Its almost like the next evolution of what Compellent was trying to do back in the day and looks like it might overcome some of the problems with their approach.
My one question though is whether this is still a problem that needs fixing. Dell are now just recommending customers buy flash only for many workloads on their SC series (Compellent as was) and are pricing them accordingly. Consequently the allure of auto-tiering is starting to fade. We found that we never had enough static data to reap the promised rewards of cheap slow disks and had to keep bumping up the 15k pool. No we are moving to SSD and dedup which seems to work very well.
I like the time based metadata idea though and will be keeping an eye on developments.
Hilarious attendees at the seminar on the vbideo btw.