Who knew so quickly after part 1 and part 2 there would be a part 3, I guess not strange considering VMworld is coming up soon and there was a Flash Memory Summit last week. It seems that there is a battle going on in the land of the AFA’s (all flash arrays), it isn’t about features / data services as one would expect. No they are battling over capacity density aka how many TBs can I cram in to a single U, not sure how relevant this is going to be over time, yes it is nice to have dense configurations, yes it is awesome to have a billion IOps in 1U but most of all I am worried about availability and integrity of my data. So instead of going all out on density, how about going all out on data services? Not that I am saying density isn’t useful, it is just… Anyway, I digress…
One of the companies which presented at Flash Memory Summit was Skyera. Skyera announced an interesting new product called skyEagle. Another all-flash array is what I can hear many of you thinking, and yes I thought exactly the same… but skyEagle is special compared to others. This 1u box manages to provide 500TB of flash capacity, now that is 500TB of raw capacity. So just imagine what that could end up being after Skyera’s hardware-accelerated data compression and data de-duplication has done its magic. Pricing wise? Skyera has set a list price for the read-optimized half petabyte (500 TB) skyEagle storage system of $1.99 per GB, or $.49 per GB with data reduction technologies. More specs can be found here. Also, I enjoyed reading this article on The Register which broke the news…
David Flynn (Former Fusion-io CEO) and Rick White (Fusion-io founder) started a new company called Primary Data. The WallStreet Journal reported on this and more or less revealed what they will be working on:”that essentially connects all those pools of data together, offering what Flynn calls a “unified file directory namespace” visible to all servers in company computer rooms–as well as those “in the cloud” that might be operatd by external service companies.” This kind of reminds me of Aetherstore, or at least the description aligns with what Aetherstore is doing. Definitely a company worth tracking if you ask me.
One of the companies I did an introduction post on is Simplivity. I liked their approach to converged as it not only combines just compute and storage, but they also included backup, replication, snapshots, dedupe and cloud integration. They announced this week an update on their Omnicube CN-3000 platform and introduced two new platforms Omnicube CN-2000 and the Omnicube CN-5000. So what are these two new Omnicubes? Basically the CN-5000 is the big brother of the CN-3000 and the CN-2000 is its kid brother. I can understand why they introduced these as it will help expanding the target audience, “one size fits all” doesn’t work when the cost for “all” is the same and so the TCO/ROI changes based on your actual requirements, but in a negative way. One of the features that made SimpliVity unique that has had a major update is the OmniStack Accelerator, this is a custom designed PCIe card that does inline dedupe and compression. Basically an offload mechanism for dedupe and compression where others are leveraging the server CPU. Another nice thing SimpliVity added is support for VAAI. If you are interested in getting to know more, two white papers were released which are interesting to read: a deep dive by Hans de Leenheer and Stephen Foskett and one with a focus on “data management” by Howard Marks.
A bit older announcement, but as I spoke with these folks this week and they demoed their GA product I figured I would add them to the list. Ravello Systems developed a cloud hypervisor which abstracts your virtualization layer and allows you to move virtual machines / vApps between clouds (private and public) without the need to rebuild your virtual machines or guest OS’s. What I am saying is that they can move your vApps from vSphere to AWS to Rackspace without painful conversions every time. Pretty neat right? On top of that, Ravello is your single point of contact meaning that they are also a cloud broker. You pay Ravello and they will take care of AWS / RackSpace etc. of course they allow you to do stuff like snapshotting, cloning and create complex network configurations if needed. They managed to impress me during the short call we had, and if you want to know more I recommend reading this excellent article by William Lam or visit their booth during VMworld!
That is it for part 3, I bet I will have another part next week during or right after VMworld as press releases are coming in every hour at this point. Thanks for reading,