Yellow Bricks

by Duncan Epping

Server

Just some random Virtual SAN tweets…

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I’ve been following twitter fairly close around Virtual SAN / VSAN related tweets, I do this to track feedback / sentiment and forward it to the engineering teams when and where applicable. There were a couple I wanted to share with you, I just like the vibe of these or find them funny… Some easy pre-holiday / friday reading I guess. I’ll be taking a couple of weeks off myself, so it will be quiet around here.

https://twitter.com/Captain_VSAN/statuses/412583712367575041

https://twitter.com/g_mulholland/status/411603125477183488

for 2014 I predict…

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John Troyer just blogged about how he doesn’t see much value in “2014 predictions” blog posts. I agree, but I do love predictions.

For 2014, I predict…

Pretty sure that those who know the song will be humming the tune the rest of the week “aahaahaa lalalalala I predict a riot…”

Startup News Flash part 11

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Last Startup News Flash of the year, part 11… It is relatively short this time, I am guessing everyone is wrapping up before the holiday season really starts. I know I am!

I want to congratulate Nimble on their very successful IPO. They introduced their stock at the price of $21.00 per share and are now at $ 35.00 after just a couple of days of trading. Not sure why, but for whatever reason I haven’t written about Nimble yet in-depth, personally I’ve been impressed by what they offer. If you look at the cost of their solution and hold it against quality and features they offer I am sure you will be impressed as well, definitely one of those companies I would be talking to when looking to invest in a new storage system! Once again, congrats to all involved on the successful IPO.

Infinio just announced a new round of funding. 12 million for Series B is not bad if you ask me. Investors include: Bessemer Venture Partners, Highland Capital Partners, Lightspeed Venture Partners, and Osage University Partners (a partner of Columbia University, home of Infinio’s roots). After having recently announced GA of their 1.0 product I guess it is full speed ahead with this new injection. Congrats and looking forward to the upcoming releases.

That was it for this year with regards to startups news , hopefully back next year with more Startup News!

Startup News Flash part 10

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There we are, part 10 of the Startup News Flash. Someone asked me on Twitter last week why Company XYZ was never included in the news flash. Let it be clear that I am not leaving anyone out (unless I feel they aren’t relevant to this newsletter or my audience), I have limited time so typically do not do briefings… Which means that if the marketing team doesn’t sent me the details via email and I haven’t somehow stumbled across the announcement it will not appear on here. If you want your company to be listed, make sure they sent their press releases over.

Some new models announced by Nutanix. Funny to see how they’ve been pushing hard from a marketing perspective to remove the “pure VDI play” label they had and now launch a VDI focused model called the 7000 series. (Do not get me wrong, I think this is a brilliant move!) The 7000 series offers you the option to include NVIDIA K1 or K2 Grid cards. Primarily intended to accelerate graphics, so if you are for instance doing a lot of 3D rendering or just are a heavy graphical VDI user these could really provide a benefit over their (and other vendors) normal offerings. On top of that the 3000 and 6000 series has been overhauled. The NX-3061 and NX-3061 with 10 Core (2.8GHz) Ivy Bridge have been introduced and the NX6060 and NX6080 10 Core (2.8 and 3.0GHz respectively) have been introduced. Haven’t seen anything around pricing, so can’t comment on that.

No clue what it is exactly these guys do to be honest. I find their teaser video very intriguing. Not much detail to be found around what they are doing other than “re-imagine enteprise computing”. Hoping to hear more from these guys in the future as their teaser did make me curious.

I don’t care much about benchmarks, but it is always nice to see a smaller (or the underdog) company beat the big players. Kaminario managed to outperform Oracle, IBM and Fujitsu with their SPC-2 Performance Benchmark using their scale-out all flash array K2 v4. Just a couple of weeks after breaking the SPC-1 Benchmark World Record again. Like I said, I don’t care much about benchmarks  as it doesn’t typically say much about the operational efficiency etc. Still it is a nice indication of what can be achieved, though your results may vary depending on your IO pattern of course.

Virtual SAN and maintenance windows…

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After writing the article that “4 is the minimum number of hosts for VSAN” I received a lot of questions via email and on twitter etc about the cost associated with it and if this was a must. Let me start with saying that I wrote this article to get people thinking about Sizing their VSAN environment. When it comes to it, Virtual SAN and maintenance windows can be a difficult topic.

I guess there are a couple of things to consider here. Even in a regular storage environment you typically do upgrades in a rolling fashion meaning that if you have two controllers one will be upgraded while they other handles IO. In that case you are also at risk. The thing is though, as a virtualization administrator you have a bit more flexibility, and you expect certain features to work as expected like for instance vSphere HA. You need to ask yourself what is the level of risk I am willing to take, the level of risk I can take?

When it comes to placing a host in to Maintenance Mode, from a VSAN point of view you will need to ask yourself:

  • Do I want to move data from one host to another to maintain availability levels?
  • Do I just want to ensure data accessibility and take the risk of potential downtime during maintenance?

I guess there is something to say for either. When you move data from one node to another, to maintain availability levels, your “maintenance window” could be stretched extremely long. As you would potentially be copying TBs over the network from host to host it could take hours to complete. If your ESXi upgrade including a host reboot takes about 20 minutes, is it acceptable to wait for hours for the data to be migrated? Or do you take the risk, inform your users about the potential downtime, and as such do the maintenance with a higher risk but complete it in minutes rather than hours? After those 20 minutes VSAN would sync up again automatically, so no data loss etc.

It is impossible for me to give you advice on this one to be honest, I would highly recommend to also sit down with your storage team. Look at what their current procedures are today, what they have included in their SLA to the business (if there is one), and how they handle upgrades / periodic maintenance.