Yellow Bricks

by Duncan Epping

evo:rail

HP ConvergedSystem 200–HC EVO:RAIL available now!

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Yesterday I was informed by the EVO:RAIL team that the HP ConvergedSystem 200–HC EVO:RAIL is available (shipping) as of this week. I haven’t seen much around additional pieces HP is including, but I was told though that they are planning to integrate HP One View. HP One View is a management/monitoring solution that gives you a great high level overview of the state of your systems but at the same time enables you to dive deep when required. Depending on the version included HP One View can also do things like Firmware Management, which is very useful in a Virtual SAN environment if you ask me. I know though that many people have been waiting for HP to start shipping as it appears to be a preferred vendor for many customers. In terms of configuration, the HP solution is very much similar to what we have already seen out there:

  • 4 nodes in 2U each containing:
    • 2 x Intel® E5-2620 v2 six-core CPUs
    • 192 GB memory
    • 1 x SAS 300 GB 10k rpm drive ESXi boot device
    • 3 x SAS 1.2 TB 10k rpm drive (VSAN capacity tier)
    • 1 x 400 GB MLC enterprise-grade SSD (VSAN performance tier)
    • 1 x H220 host bus adapter (HBA) pass-through controller
    • 2 x 10GbE NIC ports
    • 1 x 1GbE IPMI port for remote (out-of-band) management

As soon as I find out more around integration of other components I will let you folks know.

EMC VSPEX Blue aka EVO:RAIL going GA

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EMC VSPEX BLUEEMC just announced the general availability of VSPEX Blue. VSPEX Blue is basically EMC’s version of EVO:RAIL and EMC wouldn’t be EMC if they didn’t do something special with it. First thing that stands out from a hardware perspective is that EMC will offer two models a standard model with the Intel E5-2620 V2 proc and 128GB of memory, and a performance model which will hold 192GB of memory. That is the first time I have seen an EVO:RAIL offering with different specs. But that by itself isn’t too exciting…

When reading the spec sheet the following bit stood out to me:

EMC VSPEX BLUE data protection incorporates EMC RecoverPoint for VMs and VMware vSphere Data Protection Advanced. EMC RecoverPoint for VMs offers operational and disaster recovery, replication and continuous data protection at the VM level. VMware vSphere Data Protection Advanced provides centralized backup and recovery and is based on EMC Avamar technology. Further, with the EMC CloudArray gateway, you can securely expand storage capacity without limits. EMC CloudArray works seamlessly with your existing infrastructure to efficiently access all the on-demand public cloud storage and backup resources you desire. EMC VSPEX BLUE is backed by a single point of support from EMC 24×7 for both hardware and software.

EMC is including various additional pieces of software including vSphere Data Protection Advanced for backup and recovery, EMC Recovery Point for disaster recovery, EMC CloudArray gateway and the EMC VSPEX BLUE management software and EMC Secure Remote Service which will allow for  monitoring, diagnostics and repair services. This of course will differ per support offering, and there are currently 3 support offerings (basic, enhanced, premium). Premium is where you get all the bells and whistles with full 24x7x4 support.

What is special about the management / support software in this case is that EMC took a different approach then normal. In this case the VSPEX BLUE interface will allow you to directly chat with support folks, dig up knowledge base articles and even the community is accessible from within. Also, the management layer will monitor the system and if something fails then EMC will contact you, also known as “phone home”. Besides the fact that the UI is a couple of steps ahead of anything I have seen so far, it looks like EMC will directly tie in with LogInsight which will provide deep insights from the hardware to the software stack. What also impressed me were the demos they provided and how they managed to create the same look and feel as the EVO:RAIL interface.

EMC also mentioned that they are working on a market place. This market place will allow you to deploy certain additional services, in this example you can see CloudArray, RecoverPoint and VDPA but more should be added soon! Will be interesting to see what kind of services will end up in the market place. I do feel that this is a great way of adding value on top of EVO:RAIL.

One of the services in the market place that stood out to me was CloudArray. So what about that EMC CloudArray gateway solution, what can you do with that? The CloudArray solution allows you to connect external offsite store as iSCSI or NFS to the appliance. It can be used for everything, but what I find most compelling is that it will allow you to replicate your backup data off-site. The CloudArray will come with 1TB local cache and 10 TB cloud storage!

I have to say that EMC did a great job packing the EVO:RAIL offering with additional pieces of software and I believe they are going to do well with VSPEX BLUE, in fact I would not be surprised if they are going to be the number 1 qualified partner in terms of sales really fast. If you are interested, the offering will be shipping on the 16th of February, but can be ordered today!

Lego VSAN EVO:RACK

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I know a lot of you guys have home labs and are always looking for that next cool thing. Every once in a while you see something cool floating by on twitter and in this case it was so cool I needed to share it with you guys. Someone posted a picture of his version of “EVO:RACK” leveraging Intel NUC, a small switch and Lego… How awesome is a Lego VSAN EVO:RACK?! Difficult to see indeed in the pics below, but if you look at this picture then you will see how the top of rack switch was included.

Besides the awesome tweet, Nick also shared how he has build his lab in a couple of blog posts which are worth reading for sure!

Enjoy,

NetApp joins the EVO:RAIL party and includes a FAS

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NetApp announced yesterday that they are now part of the EVO:RAIL partner program. Although I have been part of the EVO:RAIL team it is not something I would have seen coming. But I can see why they decided to join and find their announcement interesting. I wasn’t planning on writing about it as Mike Laverick already did yesterday, but as I received 8 emails over night on this topic I figured I would share what is going to be included in this package.

NetApp has created a rapid deployment mechanism for theNetApp FAS unit that will be integrated with the  NetApp EVO:RAIL appliance. The FAS unit will connect into the same top of rack switch that the EVO:RAIL appliance will connect into. We have created a link and launch capability that NetApp can leverage from within the EVO:RAIL configuration engine to rapidly configure/integrate the FAS unit with the EVO:RAIL appliance. 

Yes, this does mean that that 2U hyper-converged appliance which includes vSphere, VSAN and LogInsight now also will include a FAS unit (FAS 2500 judging by NetApp’s website?) in NetApp’s case. Now this is not the first time I have seen vendors adding hardware to the VMware EVO:RAIL offering, but in most other cases physical switches were included. I think this is a very interesting play though, and am looking forward to see how these two products will be integrated. From a configuration perspective I can envision what this would look like, but from a management point of view that will be a bit more challenging and may take some more time. With cool features like Virtual Volumes coming out in the near future this could be a nice way of providing a customer multiple types of storage in a seamless way.

EVO:RAIL now also available through HP and HDS!

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It is going to be a really short blog post, but as many folks have asked about this I figured it was worth a quick article. In the VMworld Europe 2014 keynote Pat Gelsinger today announced that both HP and Hitachi Data Systems have joined the VMware EVO:RAIL program. This is great news if you ask me for customers all throughout the world as it provides more options for procuring an EVO:RAIL hyper-converged infrastructure appliance through your preferred server vendor!

The family is growing: Dell, Fujitsy, Hitachi Data Systems, HP, Inspur, NetOne Systems and SuperMicro… who would you like to see next?