Yellow Bricks

by Duncan Epping

Infinio

ScaleIO in the ESXi Kernel, what about the rest of the ecosystem?

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Before reading my take on this, please read this great article by Vijay Ramachandran as he explains the difference between ScaleIO and VSAN in the kernel. And before I say anything, let me reinforce that this is my opinion and not VMware’s necessarily. I’ve seen some negative comments around Scale IO / VMware / EMC, most of them are around the availability of a second storage solution in the ESXi kernel next to VMware’s own Virtual SAN. The big complaint typically is: Why is EMC allowed and the rest of the ecosystem isn’t? The question though is if VMware is really not allowing other partners to do the same? While flying to Palo Alto I read an article by Itzik which stated the following:

ScaleIO 1.31 introduces several changes in the VMware environment. First, it provides the option to install the SDC natively in the ESX kernel instead of using the SVM to host the SDC component. The V1.31 SDC driver for ESX is VMware PVSP certified, and requires a host acceptance level of “PartnerSupported” or lower in the ESX hosts.

Let me point out here that the solution that EMC developed is under PVSP support. What strikes me is the fact that many seem to think that what ScaleIO achieved is a unique thing despite the “partner support” statement. Although I admit that there aren’t many storage solutions that sit within the hypervisor, and this is great innovation, it is not unique for a solution to sit within the hypervisor.

If you look at flash caching solutions for instance you will see that some sit in the hypervisor (PernixData, SanDisk’s Flashsoft) and some sit on top (Atlantis, Infinio). It is not like VMware favours one over the other in case of these partners. It was their design, it was their way to get around a problem they had… Some managed to develop a solution that sits in the hypervisor, others did not focus on that. Some probably felt that optimizing the data path first was most important, and maybe even more important they had the expertise to do so.

Believe me when I say that it isn’t easy to create these types of solutions. There is no standard framework for this today, hence they end up being partner supported as they leverage existing APIs and frameworks in an innovative way. Until there is you will see some partners sitting on top and others within the hypervisor, depending on what they want to invest in and what skill set they have… (Yes a framework is being explored as talked about in this video by one of our partners, I don’t know when or if this will be release however!)

What ScaleIO did is innovative for sure, but there are others who have done something similar and I expect more will follow in the near future. It is just a matter of time.

Startup News Flash part 14

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Part 13 of the Startup News Flash… Hopefully not an unlucky one for the startups featured. Just a short one considering I am in Vietnam and away ‘from work’ for the last 2 weeks.

A3Cube is a startup which came out of stealth recently and announced as they call it a ‘brain inspired’ data plane encapsulated in a NIC designed to bridge supercomputing benefits to the enterprise. The core of their solution is called Ronnie Express. They aim is to eliminate the I/O performance gap between CPU power and data access performance for HPC, Big Data and data center applications. A3CUBE’s In-Memory Network technology allows direct shared non-coherent global memory across the entire network, enabling global communication based on shared memory segments and direct load/store operations between the nodes. Basically a server “interconnect” solutions for lrge scale. They took the word “scale” serious by the way and can go up to 64,000 nodes. For more details, I highly recommend to read this excellent article by Enrico.

Infinio just announced Infinio Accelerator 1.2. This new version of the Infinio Accelerator now supports vSphere 5.5. Useful to know for those who have a home lab, Infinio is running a limited-time offer of free non-expiring licenses for test labs. Hit their website to find out more.

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 8

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Part 8 already of the Startup News Flash. It is just a short one, not too many new things but some worth mentioning in my opinion.

Infinio just announced Infinio Accelerator 1.0. I wrote about what Infinio is and does in this article, in short: Infinio has developed a virtual appliance that sits in between your virtual machine storage traffic and your NFS datastore. The Infinio virtual appliance enhances storage performance by caching IO. Their primary use case is to do caching in memory. Infinio’s primary marketing message is: “100% software only – No new hardware, no reboots, no downtime”. It will accelerate any workload type running on NFS and is available for a shockingly (if you ask me) low price of 499, and they offer a free 30-day trial.

Recently a new startup was revealed named Coho Data, formerly known as Convergent.io. I wrote an introduction about them a couple of weeks ago which I suggest reading to get a better understanding of what Coho is or does. In short: Coho Data built a scale-out hybrid storage solution (NFS for VM workloads). With hybrid meaning a mix of SATA and SSD. This for obvious reasons, SATA bringing you capacity and flash providing you raw performance. Today I read an article about a new round of funding, 25 Million lead by Andreesseen Horowitz. Yes, that is no pocket change indeed. Hopefully this new round of funding will allow Coho to bring things to the next level! Congratulations…

Just a short one this round, hopefully more news next time… I would suspect so as Storage Field Day 4 is scheduled the week of the 13th.

Startup Intro: Infinio

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Infinio is demo’ing their brand new product today at Tech Field Day #9. I was briefed by Infinio a couple of weeks back and figured I would share some details with you. Infinio is releasing a product called Infinio Accelerator and describes it as a “downloadable storage performance” solution. That sounds nice, but what does that mean?

Infinio has developed a virtual appliance that sits in between your virtual machine storage traffic and your NFS datastore. Note I said “NFS datastore” and not just “datastore”, as NFS is their current focus. Why just NFS and not block storage? Currently that is because of the architecture they have chosen, or better said due to how they intercept traffic going to or coming from the datastore.

The Infinio virtual appliance enhances storage performance by caching IO. Their primary use case is to do caching in memory. So what does it look like? Basically every host in the cluster gets an Infinio appliance installed. This appliance has 2 vCPUs and 8GB of memory by default and from that memory a shared caching pool is created to accelerate read IO. (Yes there is a downside to using an appliance, read this article by Frank.) The nice thing is that this pool of memory is cluster wide deduplicated, considering though the appliance holds 8GB of memory that deduplication is a requirement if you ask me. (Just revealed at TFD is that the appliance will get deployed with 4, 8 or 16GB memory based on the amount of memory in the host.) The other key word here is “read IO”, for now Infinio Accelerator is a read cache solution, so no write back, but that might change in the future, who knows. The video below also mentions SSD caching, the Tech Field Day session revealed that this is something that is being worked on to be included in the future.

One thing where Infinio definitely excels is the installation / configuration process, and even the purchase options are simple. You download a simple installer, point it to your vCenter Server, do a couple of “next / next / finish” actions and that is that. You want to buy the product? It will be even easier then installing, just hit the website, grab your creditcard and that is it. Definitely something I always appreciate, companies keeping it simple.

One thing I want to call, I asked this question during the TFD broadcast, as that today there is no direct integration with vCenter Server or with VC Ops. In my opinion a missed opportunity, especially considering the product is focused on the virtualization market.

How do they compare to other caching solutions out there? Well that is difficult to say at the moment, if I can find the time and get some proper SSDs in my lab I might test and compare the various solutions at some point. If you ask me there are benefits to both SSD/Flash and “in memory” caching. What will determine their success is: how it is implemented (product quality), where they sit in the I/O stack, how resilient the solution is and what kind of caching they offer. As I said, maybe more in the future on this.

That is all about I can share for now, for some more details I suggest watching the 8 minute pitch by their Co-founder and CEO Arun Agarwal all the way at the bottom or the Tech Field Day introduction videos and deepdive.

When will it be available? The public beta is scheduled to be available around VMworld, and Infinio is aiming for a GA release in Q4 of 2013.

Tech Field Day – Introductions

Tech Field Day – Demo

Tech Field Day – Deepdive / How it works

8 Minute Pitch