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Powering the cloud 2012 report – Virtual Instruments

8 November 2012
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My briefing with Virtual Instruments, during the last Powering the cloud event, was with Skip Bacon (CTO) and Chris James (EMEA Marketing Director).

Virtual Instruments is a company focused in Infrastructure Performance Management for physical, virtual, and cloud computing environments. The VirtualWisdom® platform provides end-to-end visibility into real-time performance, health and utilization metrics from the entire systems stack. Virtual Instruments drives improved performance and availability while lowering the total cost of the infrastructure supporting mission-critical applications. continue reading…

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Powering the cloud report – Avere Systems

7 November 2012
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My briefing with Avere Systems, during the last Powering the cloud event, was with Rebecca Thompson (VP Marketing) and Bernhard “Bernie” Behn (Principal Technical Marketing Engineer).

Avere Systems brings to the market NAS Optimization solutions designed specifically to scale performance and capacity separately and take advantage of new Flash-based storage media using real-time tiering.

The company was founded on 2008 by a team of seasoned storage experts, and the President and CEO Ronald Bianchini, Jr. was a Senior Vice President at NetApp. Before it, he was CEO and Co-Founder of Spinnaker Networks, which developed the Storage Grid architecture acquired by NetApp. Also the CTO Michael Kazar has worked on versions of Carnegie Mellon University’s Andrew File System as well as the Andrew Toolkit, an OLE-like windowing toolkit.

The headquarter is at Pittsburgh (PA), but they also have an EMEA office in UK.

We have mainly discussed about their product to reduce the storage (NAS based) latency.

In a traditional storage solution there are some latency issues:

  • HDD latency (could be compensate by fast disks)
  • Storage CPU latency (queuing latency, could be compensate by mid-high level storage)
  • Geographic latency (depending on the distance and the bandwidth)

All traditional solutions to reduce the latency will increase the storage costs.

In the Avere solution there are two different roles:

  • Edge Filer (closer to the host part) could reduce the latency, increase the performance (by accelerate read, write & metadata operations), could gain linear performance scaling through clustering.
  • Core Filer (the traditional storage), that could become capacity optimized and can mix heterogeneous vendors in the same cluster.

Compared to other flash solutions this could resolve different issue:

  • Filer-Side Flash: flash are attached to some filer and hottest virtual machines must be placed on them. There could be some unused flash. And also could not optimize remote filer.
  • Server-Side Flash: flash are attached to some ESXi server (or other virtualization hosts) and hottest applications must be located on ESXi server with flash. Caching could only be read-only (due to the lack of high-availability protection for write-cached data). Also requires some custom drivers.

With the Avere FTX Edge Filer we have a Global Flash Pool that can perform read/write caching both for the data but also for the metadata, becose the edge terminated the NAS protocol and act as a “proxy” for the core filer (in this way also locking could be managed by the edge filer).

With more than two node, is possible not only scale the solution (with a linear scaling up to 50 nodes), but also have an HA configuration, where each node has another as a peer, but all are see as one with a transparent and global namespace based on the A3 architecture.

Also it’s possible reach an optimal density utilization of Edge Filer capacity, considering a 100:1 off-load typical for VMware, 1% of traffic transits the network. Al cases are actually based on VMware as a virtualization solution and they are also deploying specific off-load features.

On the front-end side actually it support SMB2 (maybe SMB3 in the future) and NFS. On the back-end side actually only NFS (maybe if the future they could implement also specific protocol support, for example to support public cloud storage solution).

One interesting user case of this type of solutions could be the ROBO (Remote Office/Branch Office) scenario: in this with we can have a central storage in the headquarter and several ESXi + Edge in each remote office!

For more information see also:

See also: full report list of Powering The Cloud 2012 event.

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Powering the cloud report – Violin Memory

6 November 2012
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My briefing with Violin Memory, during the last Powering the cloud event, was with Garry Veale (Managing Director, EMEA).

The company was founded on 2005, but has started with first products released on 2009 (due to the long research and development and the high standard quality reached before goes to the market). The main focus is build Flash Memory Arrays for Enterprise Data Storage (note that the target is the Enterprise, and actually not the SMB). In the EMEA region they have offices in UK, France, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Spain with more than 50 people.

In the company’s board there are people with a lot of  previous experience:

  • Donald Basile – Chief Executive Officer – Prior to his role at Violin, Don was Chairman and CEO of Fusion-IO and pioneered the use of PCIe flash cards for servers and workstations.
  • Jon Bennett – Founder & CTO – Has a Bachelor of Computer Science degree (with Research Honors) from Carnegie Mellon and a Masters Degree from Harvard University.

They have a strong partnership with Toshiba for the required components of their storage.

Their products cover two different areas with two different approaches:

  • Application acceleration -> reduce the storage latency (interesting for Business Critical Applications, and not that there are some employees focused on Oracle and SQL database to help in performance tuning)
  • Virtualization -> 60% more dense (interesting for great consolidation projects)

The objective is reduce TCO, Capex, Opex in their solutions.

Products core is the Flash Memory Fabric, a resilient, highly available deep mesh of thousands of flash dies that work in concert to continuously optimize performance, latency, and longevity. Cache can work also on write to ensure maximum performance.

Contrary to SSD based systems that reuse legacy disk based architectures, the Flash Memory Fabric is the result of an all silicon system approach with patented flash optimization algorithms implemented in hardware, operating at line rate. All active components of the Flash Memory Fabric are hot-swappable for enterprise grade reliability and serviceability.

The arrays connect natively to existing 8Gb/s Fibre Channel, 10GE iSCSI, and 40Gb/s Infiniband network infrastructures. They are managed by the Violin Memory Operating System, providing a simple, easy GUI management interface for one or multiple enclosures.

 

In previous pictures you can notice a 6000 Series array that can reach 1 Million IOPS, latency in microseconds and up to 32 TB of RAW capacity in a 3U box.

Products are validated by several vendors, included VMware for the virtualization part (that include VAAI and a vCenter plugin), but also RHEL, SLES, Windows, Hyper-V, Citrix, AIX, Solaris SPARC, Solaris x86, HP-UX.

There are also interesting partnership with other vendor, especially with Fujitsu and Symantec:

See also: full report list of Powering The Cloud 2012 event.

vProducts ,

Powering the cloud report

1 November 2012
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So also this event is gone.

This was my first year at this kind of event and I think that was really useful and interesting, especially for the good meetings that I’ve got during those two days. I will post more about them on the next weeks.

continue reading…

Events

Powering the cloud – My speech

31 October 2012
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As already written, during this edition of Powering the Cloud, I have a speech:

In this session we will discuss how is possible increase the availability of business critical applications running in a virtual environment. First we will introduce the different level of availability and different type of technical solutions. Then we will discuss the difference between VMware HA (with VM and application monitoring), VMware FT and guest clustering. We will give more technical detail on how build a guest cluster (for availability purpose), by analyzing different approaches and different implementations. Finally we will discuss about applications designed to be scalable and high availability (and cloud ready).

All the session’s slides will be soon available on the event web site.

Events

Windows 8 and Windows Server 2012 are now GA

26 October 2012
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After years of development, Microsoft launched the latest version of Windows (with the NT version 6.2), with a official announce of its CEO Steve Ballmer during product’s launch event in New York on October 25, 2012.

It is most probably the most radical version of the Windows OS (at least in the aspect, in the design was NT 6.0) and the client OS is mainly designed for new mobile devices like tablets, but can also be used on desktop PC (but need more training on it).

Windows 8 is the new client OS and the launch event was focus on it and its different version, and of course on the Surface product (the Microsoft tablet). For more information see:

But there are also some negative opinions and and/or critiques on this OS:

And also there is the new Windows Server 2012 and the new Hyper-V3.

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Veeam Backup & Replication 6.5

26 October 2012
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Veeam has recently released the new version of his backup product, announced during the VMworld EU and with several new features. Also it include new compatibility matrix:

To download the product, or the trial go to the download page.

There is also a video with Doug Hazelman that explain the main new features:

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