Yellow Bricks

by Duncan Epping

nutanix

VMware / ecosystem / industry news flash… part 3

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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!

Startup News Flash part 12

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First edition of the 2014 of the Startup News Flash. I expect this year to be full of announcements, new rounds of funding, new products, new features and new companies. There are various startups planning to come out of stealth this year and all play in the storage / flash space, so make sure to follow this series!

On Tuesday the 14th of January Nutanix announced a new round of funding. Series D financing is co-led by Riverwood Capital and SAP Ventures, and the total amount is $101 million. The company has now raised a total of $172.2 million in four rounds of funding and has been valuated close to $ 1 billion. Yes, that is huge. Probably one of the most successful startups of the last couple of years. Congrats to everyone involved!

Tintri announced a rather aggressive program. The Register reported it here, and it is all about replacing NetApp systems with Tintri systems. In short: “The “Virtualize More with 50% Less” Program offers 50% storage capacity and rack space savings versus currently installed NetApp FAS storage to support deployed virtualization workloads”. I guess it is clear what kind of customers they are going after and who their primary competition is. Of course there is a list of requirements and constraints which the Register already outlined nicely. If you are looking to replace your current NetApp storage infrastructure I guess this could be a nice offer, or a nice way to get more discount.. Either way, you win.

SSD and PCIe flash devices are king these days, but SanDisk is looking to change that with the announcement of the availability of the ULLtraDIMM. The ULLtraDIMM is a combination of Diablo’s DDR3 tranlation protocol and SanDisk’s flash and controllers on top of a nice DIMM. Indeed, it doesn’t get closer to your CPU then straight on your memory bus. By the looks of it IBM is one of the first vendors to offer it, as they  recently announced that the eXFlash DIMM is an option for its System x3850 and x3950 X6 servers providing up to 12.8TB of flash capacity2. Early benchmarks showed write latency around 5-10 microsecond! I bet half the blogosphere just raised their hands to give this a go in their labs!

 

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.

Startup News Flash part 7

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VMworld europe is this week and I’ve been very busy just running around on the show floor and doing sessions. Considering there were a couple of small but worthy updates I figured I would publish this one in between sessions… Here it is: Startup News Flash part 7.

announced yesterday that Ken Klein is taking on the role of Chief Executive Officer  and Former CEO and founder, Kieran Harty assumes the new role of Chief Technology Officer and will drive Tintri’s product strategy and roadmap.

Pernix has just announced a program called PernixPro, which gives industry experts free access to PernixData FVP software + various tools for collaborating with PernixData experts and R&D. If you are a vExpert or a VCDX and want to get familiar with FVP, sign up here.

“Traditionally” SimpliVity has been more focused on generic server virtualization with a high level of integration with regards to DR and Back-up / Recovery. This week SimpliVity announced they are entering the VDI space. They announced new partnership agreements with NVIDIA and Teradici. What I like about their platform is, that although they offer a hyperconverged solution, that you can connect from the outside in. Meaning scale compute independ of storage. Also, their platform offer inline deduple, optimized full clones, and 1:1 persistent desktops. For more details hit up their website.

Nutanix just announced that they have been validated by VMware for the VMware Horizon View Agent Direct-Connection, which is part of the Horizon Suite 5.3.

For those who missed it, read the Startup Intro I posted this week on CohoData. Interesting company / solution if you ask me!

Startup News Flash part 4

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This is the fourth part already of the Startup News Flash, we are in the middle of VMworld and of course there were many many announcements. I tried to filter out those which are interesting, as mentioned in one of the other posts if you feel one is missing leave a comment.

Nutanix announced version 3.5  of their OS last week. The 3.5 release contains a bunch of new features, one of them being what they call the “Nutanix Elastic Deduplication Engine”. I think it is great they added this feature is ultimately it will allow you to utilize your flash and RAM tier more efficiently. The more you can cache the better right?! I am sure this will result in a performance improvement in many environment, you can imagine that especially for VDI or environments where most VMs are based on the same template this will be the case. What might be worth knowing is that Nutanix dedupe is inline for their RAM and flash tier and then for their magnetic disks is happening in the background. Nutanix also announced that besides supporting vSphere and KVM they also support Hyper-V as of now, which is great for customers as it offers you choice. On top of all that, they managed to develop a new simplified UI and a rest-based API allowing for customers to build a software defined datacenter! Also worth noting is that they’ve been working on their DR story. They’ve developed a Storage Replication Adapter which is one of the components needed to implement Site Recover Manager with array based replication. They also optimized their replication technology by extending their compression technology to that layer. (Disclaimer: the SRA is not listed on the VMware website, as such it is not supported by VMware. Please validate the SRM section of the VMware website before implementing.)

Of course an update from a flash caching vendor, this time it is Proximal Data who announced the 2.0 version of their software. AutoCache 2.0 includes role-based administration features and multi-hypervisor support to meet the specific needs of cloud service providers. Good to see that multi hypervisor and cloud is part of the proximal story soon. I like the Proximal aggressive price point. It starts at $999 per host for flash caches less than 500GB, which is unique for a solution which does both block and file caching. Not sure I agree with Proximal’s stance with regards to write-back caching and “down-playing” 1.0 solutions, especially not when you don’t offer that functionality yourself or were a 1.0 version yesterday.

I just noticed this article published by Silicon Angle which mentions the announcement of the SMB Edition of FVP, priced at a flat $9,999, supports up to 100 VMs across a maximum of four hosts with two processors and one flash drive each. More details to be found in this press release by PernixData.

Also something which might interest people is Violin Memory filing for IPO. It had been rumored numerous times, but this time it seems to be happening for real. The Register has an interesting view by the way. I hope it will be a huge success for everyone involved!

Also want to point people again to some of the cool announcements VMware did in the storage space, although far from being a startup I do feel this is worth listing here again: introduction to vSphere Flash Read Cache – introduction to Virtual SAN.