It has been a couple of weeks since the last VMware / ecosystem / industry news flash… but we have a couple of items which I felt are worth sharing. Same as with the previous two parts I will share the link, my thoughts around it and hope that you will leave a comment with your thoughts around a specific announcement. If you work for a vendor, I would like to ask to add a disclaimer mentioning this so that all the cards are on the table.
- PernixData FVP 2.0 available! New features and also new pricing / packaging!
Frank Denneman has a whole slew of articles describing the new functionality of FVP 2.0 in-depth. If you ask me especially the resilient memory caching is a cool feature, but also the failure domains is something I can very much appreciate as it will allow you to build smarter clusters! The change in pricing/packaging kind of surprised me, an “Enterprise” edition was announced and the current version was renamed to “Standard”. The SMB package was renamed to “Essentials Plus” which from a naming point of view now aligns more with the VMware naming scheme, which makes life easier for customers I guess. I have not seen details around the pricing itself yet, so don’t know what the impact actually is. PernixData has upped the game again and it keeps amazing me how fast they keep growing and at which pace they are releasing new functionality. It makes you wonder what is next for these guys?! - Nutanix Unveils Industry’s First All-Flash Hyper-Converged Platform and Only Stretch Clustering Capability!
I guess the “all-flash” part was just a matter of time considering the price point flash devices have reached. I have looked at these configurations many times, and if you consider that SAS drives are now as expensive as decent SSDs it only makes sense. It should be noted that “all-flash” also means a new model, NX-9000, and this comes as a 2U / 2Node form factor. List price is $110,000 per node… As that is 220k per block and with a 3 node minimum 330K it feels like a steep price, but then again we all know that the street price will be very different. The NX-9000 comes with either 6x 800GB or 1.6TB flash device for capacity, and I am guessing that the other models will also have “all-flash” options as well in the future… it only makes sense. What about that stretched clustering? Well this is what excited me most from yesterdays announcement. In version 4.1 Nutanix will allow for up to 400KM of distance between sites for a stretched cluster. Considering their platform is “vm aware” it should be very easy to select which VMs you want to protect (and which you do not). On top of that they provide the ability to have two different hardware platforms in each of the sites. In other words you can run with a top of the line block in your primary site, while having a lower end block in your recovery site. From a TCO/ROI point of view this can be very beneficial if you have no requirement for a uniform environment. Judging by the answers on twitter, the platform has not gone through VMware vSphere Metro Storage Cluster certification yet but this is likely to happen soon. SRM integration is also being looked at. All in all, nice announcements if you ask me! - SolidFire announces two new models and new round of funding (82 million!)
What is there to say about the funding that hasn’t been said yet. 82 million in series D says enough if you ask me. SolidFire is one of those startups which have impressed me from the very beginning. They have a strong scale-out storage system which offers excellent quality of service functionality, a system which is primarily aimed at the Service Provider market. Although that seems to slowly change with the introduction of these new models as their smallest model now brings a 100K entry point. Note that the smallest configuration with SolidFire is 4 nodes, spec details can be found here. As stated, what excites me most with SolidFire is the services that the systems brings: QoS, data reduction and replication / SRM integration.
Thanks, and again feel free to drop a comment / leave your thoughts!
Hello – I asked the question during the presentation. – they mentioned minimum size was 3 nodes, so would that not be 330k?
Yes and that actually was in the article but somehow dropped off, not sure what happened. 3 node minimum indeed.
Hello Duncan,
Lukas from Nutanix here. We looked into doing the vMSC certification with VMware as well, but the program appears to have been at least temporarily retired and VMware is not accepting any applications for it.
Regards,
Lukas
Let me clarify that, the vMSC program / certification has NOT been retired. The program is still very much alive. I spoke with the PM and vMSC Architect about it last week. Not sure what the reason is for not accepting new applications at the moment though,