<disclaimer: I am a technical advisor for CloudPhysics>
Today at the New England VMUG CloudPhysics has their first official “public appearance”. Yes some of you have heard the name a couple of times before and some of you might even know who the brains are behind this new start-up… for those who don’t let me give a brief introduction.
CloudPhysics was recently founded by John Blumenthal and Irfan Ahmad. Some of you might recognize their names as they used to work at VMware, John was a Product Manager for storage and Irfan was the person who was responsible for awesome features like Storage DRS and Storage IO Control. Together with several other brilliant people, including no one less than Carl “TPS / DRS” Waldspurger acting as an advisor and consultant, they founded a new company.
So what is CloudPhysics about? CloudPhysics is about big data, about centralized data, about analytics, about modeling data. CloudPhysics is essentially about helping you! How? Well let me try to explain that without revealing too much.
We’ve all monitored and managed environments, some of you are responsible for 3 hosts and some might be responsible for 80 hosts in different sites and in different companies. We all face several challenges and in many cases these are similar… How do you find common themes? How do you validate best practices are applied on all levels in your environment? How do you validate if your practices are actually used by others, and do you benefit from them? How do you know if you sized correctly? How do I solve specific problems? Would I benefit from a different storage platform or SSD? All of these are questions or problems you probably face daily and that is where CloudPhysics aims to come in to play.
CloudPhysics will enable you to find common best practices and problems in your environment. CloudPhysics will provide you guidance, this could be custom but also generic through for instance a link to a VMware KB article. They will enable you to compare and explore performance results. Find patterns in your environment… See trends and provide you with meaningful statistics about your environment. Sounds amazing right and probably something you wouldn’t mind testing today… The CloudPhysics product will come as a virtual appliance. The data gathered will go up to the cloud and all of the analysis will happen outside of your environment, of course with various degrees of anonymity.
CloudPhysics is constructing an analytics platform for vSphere for the application of collective intelligence to individual, local vSphere environments and users. At the same time the platform is intended to service the needs of consulting companies, customers and the blogging community by providing APIs to enable unique exploration and discovery within the dynamic, changing dataset CloudPhysics continuously generates. Access to this dataset enables them to transform qualitative discussions into quantitative views of vSphere design and operation. CloudPhysics is not seeking to build a community; rather, it exists to empower the engineer and architect in all of us, particularly the commentators and critics essential to the industry.
For those who can’t wait, sign up at www.cloudphysics.com now for announcements and news on the beta. I am excited about CloudPhysics and I hope you all are as well.
Great idea Duncan! Is there information on who the competitors are and how/where this approach difers?
yes there are products already with a similar them and you could checkout NetApp’s Oncommand Balance ..
Use Balance to:
– Manage virtual infrastructure end-to-end from virtual and physical servers to storage disks
– Reduce troubleshooting time by 80%
– Optimize VM densities
– Improve server and storage utilization
– Manage service levels
and more !!
I don’t know NetApp’s solution, but it is important to understand that this solution is aiming to model and provide analytics not only based on “local data” but on a common large dataset. This dataset could be be used to detect trends etc.
Analytics and modeling based on local data is something that many do. (VCOps?!) Gathering all this data in to a huge dataset and providing access to this dataset to analyze where and how improvements can be made locally is not something anyone is doing today. (To my knowledge that is.)
hm very interesting – would love to catch up with Blumenthal to hear more. Would be curious to see what storage platform they use in the back-end 🙂