Yellow Bricks

by Duncan Epping

startup

Startup Intro: SoftNAS

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Last week I had a chat with Rick Braddy from SoftNAS. Some of you might know Rick from when he was the CTO of a hosted virtul desktop company called Virtual-Q and others from when he was the CTO of Citrix for XenApp and XenDesktop. Today Rick is the CTO for SoftNAS, a software and appliance based storage solution. Rick gave me an introduction to what it is SoftNAS (Professional) does and offers and I figured I would do a short write-up as an introduction to SoftNAS.

Ultimately SoftNAS is a virtual appliance that offers up local storage as shared storage. SoftNAS is build on top of CentOS and leverages ZFS. It is deployed as a virtual machine, which means that it takes a couple of minutes to set up. SoftNAS has a nice looking user interface which allows you to quickly create shared storage for your virtual environment. When I say quickly I mean in a matter of minutes you have shared storage to your disposal: select your volumes –> create a storage pool –> create a volume –> use it. For those who care, besides VMware vSphere SoftNAS also supports Hyper-V and Amazon EC2. [Read more…] about Startup Intro: SoftNAS

Introducing startup PernixData – Out of stealth!

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There are many startups out there that do something with storage these days. To be honest, many of them do the same thing and at times I wonder why on earth everyone focuses on the same segment and tries to attack it with the same product / feature set. One of the golden rules for any startup should be that you have a unique solution that will sell itself. Yes I realize that it is difficult, but if you want to succeed you will need to stand out.

About a year ago Satyam Vaghani (former VMware principal engineer who was responsible for VMFS, VAAI, VVOLs etc.) and Poojan Kumar (former VMware Data products lead and ex-Oracle Exadata founder) decided to start a company – PernixData. PernixData was conceptualized based on their experiences working on the intersection of virtualization, flash based storage and data. Today PernixData is revealed to the world. For those who don’t know, Pernix means “agile”. But what is PernixData about?

How many of you haven’t experienced storage performance problems? It probably is, in fact, the number one bottleneck in most virtualized environments. Convincing your manager (director / VP) that you need a new ultra-fast (and expensive) storage device is not easy; far from it. On top of that, data will always hit the network first before being acknowledged and every read will go over your storage network. How cool would it be if there was a seamless software solution that solves all your storage performance problems without you requiring to rip and replace your existing storage assets?

Server-side flash overcomes problems associated with network based storage and server-side caching solutions provide some respite. Yet, server-side caching solutions usually neither satisfy enterprise class requirements for availability nor transparently support clustered hypervisor features such as VMware vMotion. In addition, while they accelerate reads they fail to do much for writes. Customers are then stuck between either overhauling their entire storage infrastructure or going with caching solutions that work for limited use cases. PernixData is about to release a cool new product – a flash virtualization platform – that bridges this gap. By picking up where hypervisors left off, PernixData is planning to become the VMware of server flash and is aiming to do to server flash what VMware did to CPU and memory. So, what is this flash virtualization platform and why would you need it?

PernixData’s flash virtualization platform virtualizes all flash resources across all server nodes in a vCenter Server cluster into a single high-performance, enterprise class data tier. The great thing is that this happens in a transparent way. PernixData sits completely within the hypervisor and in the data-path of your virtual machine. Note that there are no requirements to install anything in the guest (virtual machine). PernixData is not a virtual appliance because virtual appliances introduce performance overhead and would need to be managed with all costs and complexity associated.

PernixData is also flash technology agnostic. It can leverage SSD or PCIe flash (or both) within the platform. The nice thing is that PernixData uses a scale-out architecture. As you add hosts with flash they can be dynamically added to the platform. On top of that, PernixData does both read and write acceleration while providing full data protection and is fully compatible with VM mobility solutions like vMotion, Storage vMotion, HA, DRS and Storage DRS.

Even more exciting PernixData will support both Write-through and Write-back modes. The cool part is that PernixData also ensures IO is replicated for high availability purposes. You don’t want to run your VM in Write-back mode when you cannot guaranteed data is highly available right?! I guess that is one of the unique selling points of the solution. A distributed, scale out, flash virtualization platform which is not only flash agnostic but also non-disruptive for your virtual workloads.

I would imagine this is many times cheaper than buying a new storage array. Even without knowing what the cost of PernixData will be, or which flash device (PCIe or SSD) you would decide to use… I bet when it comes to overall costs of the solution (product + implementation costs) it will be many many times cheaper.

As I started off with, the golden rule for any startup should be that they have a unique solution that sells itself. I am confident that PernixData FVP has just that by being a disruptive technology that solves a big problem in virtualized environments  in a scale-out and transparent manner while leveraging your existing storage investments.

If you want to be kept up to date, make sure to follow Satyam, Poojan , Charlie and PernixData on twitter. If you are interested in joining the PernixData FVP Beta, make sure to sign up!

Make sure to also read Frank’s article on PernixData.

<update>

I recommend watching the Storage Field Day videos for more details from Satyam Vaghani himself, note the playlist this is 4 videos!

</update>

CloudPhysics, not so much stealth mode start-up anymore…

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<disclaimer: I am a technical advisor for CloudPhysics>

cloud physics logoToday at the New England VMUG CloudPhysics has their first official “public appearance”. Yes some of you have heard the name a couple of times before and some of you might even know who the brains are behind this new start-up… for those who don’t let me give a brief introduction.

CloudPhysics was recently founded by John Blumenthal and Irfan Ahmad. Some of you might recognize their names as they used to work at VMware, John was a Product Manager for storage and Irfan was the person who was responsible for awesome features like Storage DRS and Storage IO Control. Together with several other brilliant people, including no one less than Carl “TPS / DRS” Waldspurger acting as an advisor and consultant, they founded a new company.

So what is CloudPhysics about? CloudPhysics is about big data, about centralized data, about analytics, about modeling data. CloudPhysics is essentially about helping you! How? Well let me try to explain that without revealing too much.

We’ve all monitored and managed environments, some of you are responsible for 3 hosts and some might be responsible for 80 hosts in different sites and in different companies. We all face several challenges and in many cases these are similar… How do you find common themes? How do you validate best practices are applied on all levels in your environment? How do you validate if your practices are actually used by others, and do you benefit from them? How do you know if you sized correctly? How do I solve specific problems? Would I benefit from a different storage platform or SSD? All of these are questions or problems you probably face daily and that is where CloudPhysics aims to come in to play.

CloudPhysics will enable you to find common best practices and problems in your environment. CloudPhysics will provide you guidance, this could be custom but also generic through for instance a link to a VMware KB article. They will enable you to compare and explore performance results. Find patterns in your environment… See trends and provide you with meaningful statistics about your environment. Sounds amazing right and probably something you wouldn’t mind testing today… The CloudPhysics product will come as a virtual appliance. The data gathered will go up to the cloud and all of the analysis will happen outside of your environment, of course with various degrees of anonymity.

CloudPhysics is constructing an analytics platform for vSphere for the application of collective intelligence to individual, local vSphere environments and users.  At the same time the platform is intended to service the needs of consulting companies, customers and the blogging community by providing APIs to enable unique exploration and discovery within the dynamic, changing dataset CloudPhysics continuously generates. Access to this dataset enables them to transform qualitative discussions into quantitative views of vSphere design and operation. CloudPhysics is not seeking to build a community; rather, it exists to empower the engineer and architect in all of us, particularly the commentators and critics essential to the industry.

For those who can’t wait, sign up at www.cloudphysics.com now for announcements and news on the beta. I am excited about CloudPhysics and I hope you all are as well.