Yellow Bricks

by Duncan Epping

simplivity

Startup News Flash part 9

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There we are, part 9 of the Startup News Flash. As mentioned last time, last week was “Storage Field Day” so typically a bit more news then normally this time of year. I would highly recommend to watch the videos. Especially the Coho video is very entertaining.

The original founders of Fusion IO (David Flynn and Rick White) just received 50 Million in funding for their new startup called Primary Data. I mentioned them briefly in Startup News Flash part 3 when they announced they started a new company and it seems that they have something on their hands! They haven’t revealed what they are working on, they are aiming to come out stealth around the second quarter of 2014. In the WSJ the following was mentioned in terms of the space these guys will be playing in: “The company is developing software–though it actually will come bundled on standard server hardware–that essentially connects all those pools of data together, offering what Flynn calls a “unified file directory namespace” visible to all servers in company computer rooms–as well as those “in the cloud” that might be operated by external service companies.” Indeed, something with storage / caching / software defined / scale-out…

I guess scale-out hypervisor based storage solutions are hot… Maxta just officially announced their new product called MxSP. Some rumors had already been floating around but now the details are out their. Marcel v/d Berg did a nice article on them which I recommend reading if you like to get some more details. Basically Maxta created a Virtual Storage Appliance which pools all local storage and presents it as NFS to your hypervisor. Today VMware vSphere is fully supported and KVM / Hyper-V in a limited fashion. It offers functionality like VM-level snapshots and zero-copy clones, Thin provisioning, Inline deduplication and more. It looks like licensing is capacity based but no prices have been mentioned.

When first looking at Avere is was intrigued by their solution but somehow it didn’t really click. Primary focus was a caching layer in between your NFS storage and your hosts… But I wondered why I would want an extra box for that and not just use something host local. Last week Avere made announcement around a solution that allows you to pool local and cloud storage resources and present them via a common namespace and move data between these tiers. FlashCloud is what Avere calls it. Their paper describes it best, so a shameless copy of that: “FlashCloud software running on Avere FXT Edge filers addresses this challenge by storing cold data on cost-effective cloud storage at the core of the network and automatically and efficiently moving active data to the edge near the users.” I like the concept… If you are interested, check out their site here.

Far from a startup, but cool enough to be listed here… The release of the X-Brick aka XtremIO by EMC. The XtremIO solution is a brand new all-flash array which delivers screaming performance in a scale-out fashion. Although there are limitations from a scaling point of view today, it is expected that these will be lifted soon. One of the articles I enjoyed reading is this one by Jason Nash. What is most interesting about the product is the following, and I am going to quote Jason here as he is spot on: “There is no setup and tuning of XtremIO.  No LUNs.  No RAID Groups.  No pools.  No stripe sizes.  No tiering.  Nothing.  You have a pool of very fast storage.  How big do you want that LUN to be?  That’s all you really need to do!”

Another round of funding for SimpliVity, Series C… 58 Million led by Kleiner Perkins Growth Fund and DFJ Growth with contributions by Meritech Capital Partners and Swisscom Ventures. I guess this GigaOM quote says it all: “CEO Doron Kempel, an EMC veteran, said the cash infusion will enable the company to execute on plans to triple its staff and boost sales growth five fold in 2014”.

Startup News Flash part 7

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VMworld europe is this week and I’ve been very busy just running around on the show floor and doing sessions. Considering there were a couple of small but worthy updates I figured I would publish this one in between sessions… Here it is: Startup News Flash part 7.

announced yesterday that Ken Klein is taking on the role of Chief Executive Officer  and Former CEO and founder, Kieran Harty assumes the new role of Chief Technology Officer and will drive Tintri’s product strategy and roadmap.

has just announced a program called PernixPro, which gives industry experts free access to PernixData FVP software + various tools for collaborating with PernixData experts and R&D. If you are a vExpert or a VCDX and want to get familiar with FVP, sign up here.

“Traditionally” SimpliVity has been more focused on generic server virtualization with a high level of integration with regards to DR and Back-up / Recovery. This week SimpliVity announced they are entering the VDI space. They announced new partnership agreements with NVIDIA and Teradici. What I like about their platform is, that although they offer a hyperconverged solution, that you can connect from the outside in. Meaning scale compute independ of storage. Also, their platform offer inline deduple, optimized full clones, and 1:1 persistent desktops. For more details hit up their website.

Nutanix just announced that they have been validated by VMware for the VMware Horizon View Agent Direct-Connection, which is part of the Horizon Suite 5.3.

For those who missed it, read the Startup Intro I posted this week on CohoData. Interesting company / solution if you ask me!

Startup News Flash part 3

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Who knew so quickly after part 1 and part 2 there would be a part 3, I guess not strange considering VMworld is coming up soon and there was a Flash Memory Summit last week. It seems that there is a battle going on in the land of the AFA’s (all flash arrays), it isn’t about features / data services as one would expect. No they are battling over capacity density aka how many TBs can I cram in to a single U, not sure how relevant this is going to be over time, yes it is nice to have dense configurations, yes it is awesome to have a billion IOps in 1U but most of all I am worried about availability and integrity of my data.  So instead of going all out on density, how about going all out on data services? Not that I am saying density isn’t useful, it is just… Anyway, I digress…

One of the companies which presented at Flash Memory Summit was Skyera. Skyera announced an interesting new product called skyEagle. Another all-flash array is what I can hear many of you thinking, and yes I thought exactly the same… but skyEagle is special compared to others. This 1u box manages to provide 500TB of flash capacity, now that is 500TB of raw capacity. So just imagine what that could end up being after Skyera’s hardware-accelerated data compression and data de-duplication has done its magic. Pricing wise? Skyera has set a list price for the read-optimized half petabyte (500 TB) skyEagle storage system of $1.99 per GB, or $.49 per GB with data reduction technologies. More specs can be found here. Also, I enjoyed reading this article on The Register which broke the news…

David Flynn (Former Fusion-io CEO) and Rick White (Fusion-io founder) started a new company called Primary Data. The WallStreet Journal reported on this and more or less revealed what they will be working on:”that essentially connects all those pools of data together, offering what Flynn calls a “unified file directory namespace” visible to all servers in company computer rooms–as well as those “in the cloud” that might be operatd by external service companies.” This kind of reminds me of Aetherstore, or at least the description aligns with what Aetherstore is doing. Definitely a company worth tracking if you ask me.

One of the companies I did an introduction post on is Simplivity. I liked their approach to converged as it not only combines just compute and storage, but they also included backup, replication, snapshots, dedupe and cloud integration. They announced this week an update on their Omnicube CN-3000 platform and introduced two new platforms Omnicube CN-2000 and the Omnicube CN-5000. So what are these two new Omnicubes? Basically the CN-5000 is the big brother of the CN-3000 and the CN-2000 is its kid brother. I can understand why they introduced these as it will help expanding the target audience, “one size fits all” doesn’t work when the cost for “all” is the same and so the TCO/ROI changes based on your actual requirements, but in a negative way. One of the features that made SimpliVity unique that has had a major update is the OmniStack Accelerator, this is a custom designed PCIe card that does inline dedupe and compression. Basically an offload mechanism for dedupe and compression where others are leveraging the server CPU. Another nice thing SimpliVity added is support for VAAI. If you are interested in getting to know more, two white papers were released which are interesting to read: a deep dive by Hans de Leenheer and Stephen Foskett and one with a focus on “data management” by Howard Marks.

A bit older announcement, but as I spoke with these folks this week and they demoed their GA product I figured I would add them to the list. Ravello Systems developed a cloud hypervisor which abstracts your virtualization layer and allows you to move virtual machines / vApps between clouds (private and public) without the need to rebuild your virtual machines or guest OS’s. What I am saying is that they can move your vApps from vSphere to AWS to Rackspace without painful conversions every time. Pretty neat right? On top of that, Ravello is your single point of contact meaning that they are also a cloud broker. You pay Ravello and they will take care of AWS / RackSpace etc. of course they allow you to do stuff like snapshotting, cloning and create complex network configurations if needed. They managed to impress me during the short call we had, and if you want to know more I recommend reading this excellent article by William Lam or visit their booth during VMworld!

That is it for part 3, I bet I will have another part next week during or right after VMworld as press releases are coming in every hour at this point. Thanks for reading,

Introducing SimpliVity, a new storage / compute platform

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Around VMworld many new companies are “born”… well most of them have been around for a while, but fact is that they go public around VMworld. With SimpliVity it is no different. SimpliVity is a new storage company, although “storage” might be understating what they actually do.

I had an intro to SimpliVity last week, and yesterday SimpliVity publicly announced their product the OmniCube. The OmniCube is a 2U unit which combines Compute and Storage resources in a single node combining SATA and SSD drives.

Yes I can hear you thinking aahhhh another Nutanix-alike solution… well not really and I will explain why in the upcoming paragraphs. I guess the biggest difference from a physical perspective is that this is not a multi-node 2U unit like Nutanix is. This is a single node 2U unit, it can hold a max of 768GB of memory but comes with 128GB by default. It holds two 6 core 2.5Ghz intel procs and 2 x 10Gbe and 2 x 1Gbe. From a storage perspective it comes with 4 x 200GB SSD and 8 x 3TB SATA drives. With deduplication and compression, usable capacity is around 20TB. This was calculated using conservative estimates for deduplication (1.5:1) and compression (1.5:1). Depending on the use case this is more than likely a lot higher. Yes the OmniCube is a beast.

But SimpliVity / OmniCube is not about hardware, SimpliVity in my opinion is really about the solution. SimpliVity took a VM centric approach, or should we say VM aware (Not unlike Tintri). All operations / policies are on a per VM basis. So if you want to enable replication, this will be on a per VM basis. Not just replication but they have added a whole bunch of other cool features like:

  • Global management
  • Snapshots
  • Deduplication / Compression (global!)
  • Cloud Integration

The cool thing of course that these features can be combined. Having your snapshots deduplicated will have an impact on the amount of data stored. Only replicating deduplicated and compressed blocks will lower your bandwidth requirements… and that especially comes in handy when you are replicating / storing data in a cloud environment as the dedupe / compression is on a global basis.

Combine all of that with a tight VMware vSphere integration and I believe we have a very interesting solution on our hands. Now I know some of you are skeptical about these new companies popping up, and I can also be skeptical but a quick search on linkedin reveals where these guys are coming from… and with most of their engineers having a strong storage and virtualization background you know they will be on top of their game.

Simplivity has a booth at VMworld, for anyone interested in new compute/storage architectures definitely recommended to stop by, or register for their session:

SPO3287 – Everybody Wants to Rule the World. 5 Steps to Successfully Building and Ruling a Virtual Infrastructure Empire

Cormac also posted a nice article on this topic, make sure to read it!