Yellow Bricks

by Duncan Epping

News

VMware / ecosystem / industry news flash… part 2

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There we go, part two of the VMware / ecosystem / industry news flash. I expected a lot of news around VMworld as traditionally is always the case. I hope the below is a good summary, these are the articles / announcements I read and found interesting. It is the Monday after VMworld and I figured I would get this out there as I will be out for most of this week to recover.

  • Maginatics: A Virtual Filer for VMware’s Virtual SAN
    Last week I mentioned the Nexenta solution for VSAN… this week Maginatics is up. They also announced it last week, but somehow it fell through the cracks so I figured I would list it this week. MSCP offers a distributed file system with global deduplication, multiple caching layers and Content Distribution Network logic build in.
  • VMware EVO:RAIL was of course all over the news, with these being my fav posts Chris Wahl, Julian Wood, Dell, Chad Sakac)
    Do I really need to comment on this one? I am hoping everyone read my blog… Also, make sure to watch the demo!
  • Infinio announced version 2.0 of their acceleration platform
    A whole bunch of announcements around the 2.0 version of Infinio Acellerator. Support for Fibre Channel, iSCSI and FCoE is probably the biggest piece of functionality added. On top of that the extension of the monitoring / reporting section is very handy for those who want to tweak based on latency / IO information you will be able to do so. There are some more features announced, make sure to read the announcement for the full details.
  • VMware joins Open Compute Project
    I was surprised about this announcement, did not know it was coming… but I am very excited. The OCP solution is interesting as it is highly optimized around efficiency / power consumption / rack units etc. I have looked at some of the configurations for Virtual SAN but the problem I saw was hardware compatibility / support. Hopefully with this announcement these constraints will be lifted soon! Definitely one I will be following with a lot of interest!
  • Nutanix announced a new round of funding: 140 million
    What more can I say than: Congratulations! Hyper-converged infrastructure is hot, and Nutanix has a compelling solution for sure. 140 million (series e) is significant, and I guess they are on their way to an IPO (rumours have been floating around for months now).

That was it for now.

Startup News Flash part 15

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Number 15 of the Startup News Flash… What happened in the world of (storage / flash related) startup’s in the last couple of weeks? Not too much news, but I felt it was worth releasing anyway as other wise the below would be really old news.

One of the most interesting BC/DR startups of the last couple of years, if you ask me, just announced a new round of funding: 100 million. Investors include North Bridge, Greylock, Advanced Technology Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz, and Technology Crossover Ventures. For those who don’t know Actifio… Actifio offers what is commonly referred to as a “Data Copy Management” solution. It could be described as a solution which sits in between your storage solution and your hypervisor and can do things like: backup, cloning, replication, archiving etc. Really neat solution, with a brilliant super simple UI. Worth checking out if you are looking to improve your business continuity story!

A while back I wrote an introduction to SoftNAS. When doing that review there was one thing that stood out to me and that was that SoftNAS didn’t have a great availability story. I spoke with Rick Brady about that and he said that it would be one of the first things they would try to tackle in an upcoming release. In the just announced release SoftNAS introduces Snap HA. Snap HA provides an “active / passive” solution where when an issue arises ownership is transferred to the “passive” node which then of course becomes “active”. More details can be found in this blog post by Rick Brady. Awesome work guys!

Startup News Flash part 13

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Edition 13 of the Startup News Flash already. This week is VMware Partner Exchange 2014 so I expected some announcements to be made. There were a couple of announcements the last week(s) which I felt were worth highlighting. There is one that is not really a startup, but I figured should at least be included in the article and that is the fact that Scale.IO and SuperMicro / LSI / Mellanox / VMware showed an appliance at PEX that was optimized for View deployments. I found it an interesting move, and appealing solution. Chris Mellor wrote an article about it here for the Register.

DataGravity announced their Partner Early Access Program this week. They haven’t revealed what they are building, but judging by the quotes in the announcement publication they are aiming to bring a simple cost-effictive solution to enable analysis of unstructured data. Definitely interesting, and something I will look more closer in to at some point in time.

Atlantis ILIO USX was announced this week. I already mentioned it in my VSAN update. Atlantis ILIO USX is an in-memory storage solution. They added the ability to pool and optimize any class of storage including SAN, NAS, RAM or any type of DAS (SSD, Flash, SAS, SATA) to create a hybrid solution. A change of direction for Atlantis as there primary focus was caching so far, but it makes a lot of sense to me especially as they already have many of the data services for their caching platform.

PernixData announced their Beta program for FVP 1.5. They added support for vSphere 5.5, the vSphere Web Client and also in this version allow you to use a different VMkernel interface other than the vMotion interface which their product uses by default. If you want to know more, Chris Wahl wrote a nice article on his experience with FVP 1.5.

Tintri announced it has closed a $75 million Series E funding round led by Insight Venture Partners, with participation from existing investors Lightspeed Venture, Menlo Ventures and NEA. Good to see Tintri getting another boost, and will be interesting to see how they move forward. I have been following them from the very start and have always been impressed with the ease of the solution they have built.

Startup News Flash part 1

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I am on PTO this week so have tried to avoid spending time behind my mac/iPhone/iPad, well tried I guess… It is difficult as most of you probaby know and have realized. While on vacation a couple of interesting things happened, hence this Startup New Flash blog post. The primary focus of this article is Startup news / Flash related news. Preferably in the storage / flash space. This can be flash caching, flash arrays, hybrid arrays, flash drives… you name it! I guess “new technologies from old companies” would even fit. Will try to make this a regular thing… Or at least use the same title when there is something flashy announced or worth calling out.

For those who have been living under a rock the last week, besides introducing a brand new logo, PernixData announced general availability of FVP 1.0. On Monday my RSS reader was filled with Pernix related articles, and I was almost at the point of muting “Pernix” on twitter. So why the excitement, what did they announce? Hopefully most of you have read my article on Pernix, or have been following Frank’s series of articles. I guess everyone is aware that Pernix offers a hypervisor based flash virtualization platform. Meaning that their solution is installed as a “vib” within ESXi, indeed not an appliance based approach. But others are doing this as well, so what is so unique about it? Write-back caching… Clustered write-back caching that is, so guaranteeing consistency of your IO. In other words, when within FVP you enable “write-back” caching, you can select how many relicas of the IO you want. (Currently it ranges from 0 to 2.) Pricing for the enterprise solution was also announced, $ 7500,- per host. The announcement mentions their will be a different SKU for SMB, so looking forward to hear the details on that. One thing which I didn’t know is that Pernix also has optimization for View environments, it contains a form of “dedupe” for the base images… Frank revealed this on the APAC podcast (episode 77) he was on, hosted by Mike Laverick. (Recommend listening to it.) All in all an exciting and unique 1.0 release… I guess you might wonder where I think they should focus on, for me that would be NFS support and potentially support for other hypervisors, but if I recall correctly Satyam or Frank mentioned that those are being worked on.

Diablo announced Memory Channel Storage (MCS). The next logical step if you ask me when it comes to reducing latency and increasing bandwidth. MCS basically brings flash closer to your CPU by leveraging the memory bus instead of PCIe/SAS/SATA. Interesting concept, something worth exploring. Especially considering you can present it as either normal memory (how about TBs of memory for a fraction of the price?) or as a block device. This means that you could potentially use Diablo as a target for a flash caching solution. One of the benefits many people listed is that this solution would be very useful in blade environments or hyperconverged due to the fact that it eliminate the need for a PCIe slot, or a disk slot… I guess that is somewhat true, in many of those cases the number of memory slots will also be limited so it doesn’t really solve those types of constraints immediately. Nevertheless, interesting solution which is worth exploring and definitely offers new opportunities.

Another interesting announcement came from a startup called Crossbar. Crossbar came out of stealthmode this week, and is working on RRAM. With 20x faster write performance at 20x lower power consumption and much higher capacity density compared to best of breed flash solutions you can understand why people are excited about Crossbar. The market opportunity is huge here, and various companies have been working on it… So far not many have been able to execute on it at scale, so congrats to Crossbar, and definitely a company and a solution to keep your eye on. I know I will, I have already added them to my twitter startup watch list.

Cisco and Granite Ventures invest in Hytrust

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I just received the following announcement and thought it would be interesting for you as well:

HyTrust, Inc., the leader in policy management and access control for virtual infrastructure, announced today that it has secured $10.5 million in Series B financing. New investors Granite Ventures and Cisco Systems participated in the round of financing, as did existing investors Trident Capital and Epic Ventures. Len Rand, partner at Granite Ventures, will take a seat on the HyTrust Board of Directors. HyTrust will use the capital to drive development, sales and marketing, and fuel the company’s next stage of growth.

“We are excited to welcome Cisco not only as a HyTrust partner but now also as a strategic investor,” added Chiu. “It’s great validation for HyTrust when the worldwide leader in networking places its confidence, via financial backing, in our approach to policy management and access control for virtual infrastructure. We look forward to deepening our relationship with the Server Access & Virtualization business unit at Cisco, tightening our existing integration with Cisco Nexus 1000v and Unified Computing System products, and working closely with Cisco’s Security business unit to address the needs of our joint customers. We feel strongly that policy management is key to enabling the ‘next generation data center’ and we couldn’t be more excited to have gained the backing of the company that coined the phrase.”

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