Episode 004 is out! This time we talk to Cody Hosterman, Director of Product Management at Pure Storage, about Virtual Volumes aka vVols! Cody shares with us the past, present, and future of vVols. I especially enjoyed his explanations around the benefits of vVols for traditional and cloud-native workload. It is also great to hear that VMware is working with Pure Storage on designing and developing a stretched cluster capability for vVols based environments. Listen below, or via Apple, Google, Spotify etc.
pure storage
Startup News Flash part 6
There we are again and just a short one this time, Startup News Flash part 6. VMworld Europe is around the corner so I expect a bit more news next week, I know of at least 1 company revealing what they have been working on… So what happened in the world of flash/startups the last three weeks?
Fresh:
My buddies over at Tintri just announced two new products. The first one being the Tintri VMstore T600 series, with the T620 providing 13.5 TB of usable capacity and the T650 providing 33.5 TB of usable capacity, allowing you to run up to 2000 VMs(T650, the T620 goes up to 500 VMs) on these storage systems. What is unique about Tintri is how they designed their system, FlashFirst and VM-aware as they call it. Allowing for sub-millisecond latencies with over 99% IO coming out of flash, and of course VM-granular quality of service and data management (snapshots, cloning, and replication). Second announcement is all about management: Tintri Global Center. Let me take a quote from their blog, as it says it all: “The first release of Tintri Global Center can administer up to 32 VMstore systems and their resident VMs. Future versions will add additional control beyond monitoring and reporting with features — such as policy based load balancing and REST APIs to facilitate customized automation/scripts involving a combination of features across multiple VMstore systems such as reporting, snapshots, replication, and cloning. ”
Atlantis seems to be going full steam ahead announcing partnership with NetApp and Violin recently. I guess what struck me personally with these announcements is that we are bringing “all flash arrays” (AFAs) and “memory caching” together and it makes you wonder where you benefit from what the most. It is kind of like a supersized menu at McD, after ordering I always wonder if it was too much. But to be honest I have to read the menu in more detail, and maybe even try it out before I draw that conclusion. I do like the concept of AFAs and I love the concept of Atlantis… It appears that Atlantis is bringing in functionality which these solutions are lacking for now, and of course crazy performance. If anyone has experience with the combination, feel free to chime in!
Some older news:
- Nothing to do with technology but more about validation of technology and a company. Vaughn Stewart, former NetApp executive, announced he joined Pure Storage as their Chief Evangelist. Pure Storage went all out and create an awesome video which you can find in this blog post. Nice move Vaughn, and congrats Pure Storage.
- The VSAN Beta went live last week and the community forums opened up. If you want to be a part of this, don’t forget to sign up!
Startup News Flash part 5
After the VMworld storm has slowly died down it is back to business again… This also means less frequent updates, although we are slowly moving towards VMworld Barcelona and I suspect there will be some new announcements at that time. So what happened in the world of flash/startups the last two weeks? This is Startup News Flash part 5, and it seems to be primarily around either funding rounds or acquisitions.
Probably one of the biggest rounds of funding I have seen for a “new world” storage company… $ 150 million. Yes, that is a lot of money. Congrats Pure Storage! I would expect an IPO at some point in the near future, and hopefully they will be expanding their EMEA based team. PureStorage is one of those companies which has always intrigued me. As GigaOm suggests this boosts will probably be used to lower the prices, but personally I would prefer a heavy investment in things like disaster recovery and availability. It is an awesome platform, but in my opinion it needs dedupe aware sync and a-sync replication! That should include VMware SRM integration from day 1 of course!
Flash is hot… Virident just got acquired by Western Digital for $685 million. Makes sense if you consider WD is known as the “hard disk” company, they need to keep on growing their business and the business of hard disks is going to be challenging in the upcoming years with SSD becoming cheaper and cheaper. Considering this is the second acquisition (sTec being the other) related to flash by WD you can say that they mean business.
I just noticed that Cisco announced they intent to acquire Whiptail for $415 million in cash. Interesting to see Cisco moving in to the storage space and definitely a smart move if you ask me. With UCS for compute and Whiptail for storage they will be able to deliver the full stack considering they more or less already own the world of networking. Will be interesting to see how they integrate it in their UCS offerings. For those who don’t know, Whiptail is an all flash array (afa) which leverages a “scale out” approach, so start small and increase capacity by adding new boxes. Of course they offer most functionality other AFA vendors do, for more details I recommend reading Cormac’s excellent article.
To be honest, no one knew what to expect from this public VSAN Beta announcement. Would we get a couple of hundred registrations or thousands? Well I can tell you that they are going through the roof, make sure to register though if you want to be a part of this! Run it at home nested, run it on your test cluster at the office, do whatever you want with it… but make sure to provide feedback!