Yellow Bricks

by Duncan Epping

startup

Datrium DVX goes GA

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I wrote an article about Datrium DVX when Datrium came out of stealth about 6 months ago. I am not going to rehash that as I think it was pretty clear around what Datrium DVX is. Datrium DVX is a combination of “host local data services” and network accessed storage capacity. This basically means that you utilize local flash resources for read caching (deduped before stored on the flash tier), writes will go directly to the “NetShelf” as Datrium calls it, which is basically your persistent layer. The write is compressed by the way before it is send to the NetShelf, and on theNetShelf itself there is a also a dedupe process that runs periodically to “collect garbage” and optimize the system for capacity.

I had a chat with the team from Datrium and we spoke about what was new with GA and stuff that I hadn’t covered yet in my previous article. Some of the facts from that call:

  • The DVX list price is $125,000. This includes a NetShelf D12X4 appliance and unlimited licenses for DVX Hyperdriver software on vSphere hosts
    • Servers and SSDs must be purchased and supported independently
    • There currently is a limit of 32 hosts connected to a NetShelf
    • With 32 hosts the expected aggregate is 1m IOPS
  • The NetShelf D12X4 appliance comes with 48TB raw, or 60TB – 180TB effective capacity at common deduplication and compression rates for Enterprise data (2x-6x)
    • Expected effective capacity on average is around 125TB
  • The NetShelf comes in an HA configuration with 2 controllers and mirrored NVRAM, no single point of failure
  • Datrium DVX takes up to 20% of the host CPU resources, but this is the most it will take and only when running at max speed, so typically CPU resources used will be much lower
  • Has “data locality”, meaning that when a VM is migrated between hosts than the cache will be read from the “source” host to the “destination” so that the “destination” warms up

I guess that says it all. Well there’s a bit around support for hypervisors and things like VVols and VAAI. Today Datrium only supports vSphere, and it wasn’t clear if and when other hypervisors would be supported. When it comes to VAAI it was mentioned that VAAI clones are fully supported as it stands today. On top of that Datrium is also working hard on enabling a VVol capable solution, they have joined the VVol program and are looking forward to release their VVol capable software, I am sure that when they do I will talk to them again.

A couple of things are missing in todays offering, which would definitely be nice to have, or in some cases even a must. Native replication and array based snapshots for instance. Today Datrium partners with Zerto, and of course VMware customers can use vSphere Replication for free. Snapshots rely on vSphere today, but there are plans to have them natively on the array at some point. Also, when you run out of capacity and you add a NetShelf, this will become a new mountpoint, it would be nice if this was scale-out, and the Datrium folks agreed but didn’t commit to anything (of course). Overall I think it is an interesting solution, and with 30 install sites for the beta I think it is safe to say that they will be a player to consider, but only time will tell.

Thanks guys for taking the time to brief me.

Startup intro: ZeroStack

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A couple of months back one of the people I used to work a lot with in the DRS team reaches out to me. He told me that he started a company with some other people I knew and we spoke about the state of the industry and some of the challenges customers faced. Fast forward to today, ZeroStack just came out of stealth and announced to the world what they are building and an A round funding of roughly $ 5.6m.

At the head of the company as CEO we have Ajay Gulati, former VMware employee and most known for Storage IO Control, Storage DRS and DRS. Kiran Bondapalati is the CTO and some may recognize that name as he was a lead architect on Bromium. The DNA of the company is a mix of VMware, Nutanix, Bromium, Cisco, Google an more. Not a bad list I must say

So what are they selling? ZeroStack has developed a private cloud solution which is delivered in two parts:

  1. Physical 2U/4Node Appliance which comes with KVM preinstalled named ZS1000
  2. Management / Monitoring solution which is delivered in a SaaS model.

ZeroStack showed me a demo and getting their appliance up and running took about 15 minutes, the configuration wizard wasn’t unlike EVO:RAIL and looked very easy to run through. The magic however if you ask me isn’t in their configuration section, it is the SaaS based management solution. I stole a diagram from their website which immediately shows the potential.

zerostack

The SaaS management layer provides you a single pane of glass of all the deployed appliances. These can be in a single site or in multiple sites. You can imagine that especially for ROBO deployments this is very useful, but also in larger environments. Now it doesn’t just show you the physical aspect, it also shows you all the logical constructs that have been created like “projects”.

At this part of the demo by the way I got reminded of vCloud Director a bunch of times, and AWS for that matter. ZeroStack allows you to create “tenants” and designate resources to them in the form of projects. These can even have a lease times, which is kind of similar to what vCloud Director offers also.

When looking at the networking aspects of ZeroStack’s solution it also has the familiar constructs like private networks and public networks etc. On top of that networking services like routing / firewall’ing are implemented also in a distributed fashion. And before I forget, everything you see in the UI can also be automated through the APIs which are fully Openstack compatible.

Last but not least we had a discussion about patching and updating. With most systems this is usually the most complicated part. ZeroStack took a very customer friendly approach. The SaaS layer is being updated by them, and this can happen as frequent as once every ten days. The team said they are very receptive to feedback and have a short turnaround time for implementing new functionality, as their goal is to provide most functionality through the SaaS layer. The appliance will be on a different patch/update scheme, probably once every 3 or 6 months, of course depending on the problems fixed and features introduced. The updates are done in a rolling fashion and non-disruptive to your workloads, as expected.

That sounds pretty cool right? Well as always with a 1.0 version there is still some functionality missing. Functionality that is missing in 1.0 is for instance a “high availability” feature for your workloads. If a host fails then you as an admin will need to restart those VMs. Also when it comes to load balancing, there is no “DRS-alike” functionality today. Considering the background of the team though, I can imagine both of those showing up at some point in the near future. It does however mean that for some workloads the 1.0 version may not be the right solution for now. Nevertheless, test/dev and things like cloud native apps could land on it.

All in all, a nice set of announcements and some cool functionality coming. These guys are going to be at VMworld so make sure to stop by their booth if you want to see what they are working on.

Tintri announces all-flash storage device and Tintri OS 4.0

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Last week I had the pleasure of catching up with Tintri. It has been a while since I spoke with them, but I have been following them from the very start. I met up with them in Mountain View a couple of times when it was just a couple of guys on a rather empty floor with a solution that sounded really promising. Tintri’s big thing is simplicity if you ask me. Super simple to setup, really easy to manage, and providing VM granular controls for about everything you can imagine. The solution comes in the form of a hybrid storage device (disks and flash) which is served up to the hypervisor as an NFS mount.

Today Tintri announces that they will be offering an all-flash system next to their hybrid systems. When talking to Kieran he made it clear that the all-flash system would probably be only for a subset of their customers. The key reason for this being that the hybrid solution already brings great performance and is at a much lower cost of course. The new all-flash model is named VMstore T5000 and comes in two variants: T5060 and T5080. The T5060 can hold up to 2500 VMs and around 36TB with dedupe and compression. For the T5080 that is 5000 VMs and around 73TB. Both delivered in a 2U form factor by the way. The expected use case for the all flash systems is large persistent desktops and multi TB high performance databases. Key thing here is of course not jus the number of IOPS it can drive, but the consistent low latency it can deliver.

Besides the hardware, there is also a software refresh. Tintri OS 4.0 and Global Center 2.1 are being announced. Tintri OS 4.0 is what is sitting on the VMstore storage systems and Global Center is their central management solution. With the 2.1 release Global Center now supports up to 100.000 VMs. It allows you to centrally manage both Tintri’s hybrid and all-flash systems from one UI and smart things like informing you when a VM is provisioned to the wrong storage system (hybrid but performance wise requires all-flash for instance). Not just inform you, but it also has the ability to migrate the VM from storage system to storage system. Note that during the migration all aspects that were associated with it (QoS, Replication etc) is kept. (Not unlike Storage DRS, but in this case the solution is aware of all that happens on the storage system) What I liked personally about Global Center is the performance views / health views. It is very easy to see what the state of your environment is, where latency is coming from etc. Also, if you need to configure things like QoS, replication or snapshotting for multiple VMs you can do this from the Global Center console by simply grouping them as show in the screenshot below.

Tintri QoS was demoed during the call, and I found this also particularly interesting as it allows you to define QoS on a VM (or VMDK) granular level. When you do things like specifying an IOPS limit it is good to know that Tintri normalizes the IOPS based on the size of the IO. Simply said, all IO of 8KB or lower becomes 1 normalized IOPS, an IO which is 16KB will be 2 normalized IOPS etc. This to ensure fairness in environments (this will be almost every environment) where IO sizes greatly vary. Those whom have ever tried to profile their workloads will know why this is important. What I’ve always like about Tintri is their monitoring things like latency for instance how they split that up in hypervisor, network and storage is very useful. They have done an excellent job again for QoS management.

Last but not least Tintri introduces Tintri VMstack. Basically their converged offering where Compute + Storage + Hypervisor is bundled and delivered as a single stack to customers. It will provide you the choice of storage platform (well needs to be Tintri of course), hypervisor, compute and network infrastructure. It can also include things like OpenStack or the vRealize Suite. Personally I think this is a smart move, but this is something I would have preferred to have seen launched 12-18 months ago. Nevertheless, it is a good move.

Rubrik 2.0 release announced today

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Today the Rubrik 2.0 release was announced. I’ve written about who they are and what they do twice now so I am not going to repeat that. If you haven’t read those articles please read those first. (Article 1 and article 2) Chris Wahl took the time to brief me and the first thing that stood out to me was the new term that was coined namely: Converged Data Management. Considering what Rubrik does and has planned for the future I think that term is spot on.

When it comes to 2.0 there are a bunch of features that are introduced, I will list them out and then discuss some of them in a bit more detail:

  • New Rubrik appliance model r348
    • Same 2U/4Node platform, but leveraging 8TB disks instead of 4TB disks
  • Replication
  • Auto Protect
  • WAN Efficient (global deduplication)
  • AD Authentication – No need to explain
  • OpenStack Swift support
  • Application aware backups
  • Detailed reporting
  • Capacity planning

Lets start at the top, a new model is introduced next to the two existing models. The 2 other models are also both 2U/4Node solutions but use 4TB drives instead of the 8TB drives the R348 will be using. This will boost capacity for  single Brik up to roughly 300TB, in 2U this is not bad at all I would say.

Of course the hardware isn’t the most exiting, the software changes fortunately are. In the 2.0 release Rubrik introduces replication between sites / appliances and global dedupe which ensures that replication is as efficient as it can be. The great thing here is that you backup data and replicate it straight after it has been deduplicated to other sites. All of this is again policy driven by the way, so you can define when you want to replicate, how often and for how long data needs to be saved on the destination.

Auto-protect is one of those features which you will take for granted fast, but is very valuable. Basically it will allow you to set a default SLA on a vCenter level, or Cluster – Resource Pool – Folder, you get the drift. Set and forget is basically what this means, no longer the risk of newly provisioned VMs which have not been added to the backup schedule. Something really simple, but very useful.

When it comes to applications awareness Rubrik in version 2.0 will also leverage a VSS provider to allow for transactional consistent backups. This applies today for Microsoft Exchange, SQL, Sharepoint and Active Directory. More can be expected in the near future. Note that this applies to backups, for restoring there is no option (yet) to restore a specific mailbox for instance, but Chris assured me that this on their radar.

When it comes to usability a lot of improvements have been made starting with things like reporting and capacity planning. One of the reports which I found very useful is the SLA Compliancy reporting capability. It will simply show you if VMs are meeting the defined SLA or not. Capacity planning is also very helpful as it will inform you what the growth rate is locally and in the cloud, and also when you will be running out of space. Nice trigger to buy an additional appliance right, or change your retention period or archival policy etc. On top of that things like object deletion, task cancellation, progress bars and much more usability improvements have made it in to the 2.0 release.

All in all an impressive release, especially considering the 1.0 was released less than 6 months ago. It is great to see a high release cadence for an industry which has been moving extremely slow for the past decades. Thanks Rubrik for stirring things up!

Platform9 announcements / funding

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Clearly VMworld is around the corner as many new products, releases and company announcements are being done this week and next. Last week I had the opportunity to catch up with Sirish Raghuram, Platform9‘s CEO. For those who don’t know who/what/where I recommend reading the two articles I wrote earlier this year. In short, Platform9 is a SaaS based private cloud management solution which leverages OpenStack. By Platform9 also described as “Openstack-as-a-Service”.

Over the last months Platform9 has grown to 27 people and is now actively focussing on scaling marketing and sales. They have already hired some very strong people from companies like Rackspace, EMC, Metacloud and VMware. Their series A funding was $ 4.5m by Redpoint Ventures, and now they announced a $ 10m Series B round which was led by Menlo Ventures and included Redpoint Ventures. Considering the state of Openstack startup community that is a big achievement if you ask me. The company has seen good revenue momentum in first two quarters of sales with QoQ growth of 200%, multiple site wide license agreements for 400+ servers in each quarter and customer deployments in 17 countries

So what is being announced? The GA of support for vSphere which has been in Beta since early this year. Basically this means that as of this release you can now manage local KVM and vSphere hosts using Platform9’s solution. What I like about their solution is that it is very easy to configure, and it is SaaS based so no worries about installing/configuring/upgrading/updating or maintenance of the management solution itself. Install / Configure takes less than 5 minutes. Basically you point it at your vCenter Server, a proxy VM will be deploy and then resources will be sucked in. The architecture for vSphere looks like this:

The cool thing is that it will integrate with existing vSphere deployments and if you have people managing vSphere with vCenter and they make changes then Platform9 is smart enough to recognize that and reconcile. On top of that all vSphere templates are also automatically pulled in so you can use those immediately when provisioning new VMs through Platform9. Managing VMs through Platform9 is very easy, but also if you are familiar with the OpenStack APIs then automating any aspect of Platform9 is a breeze as it is fully compatible. When it comes to managing resources and workloads, I think the UI speaks for itself. Very straight forward, very easy to use. Adding hosts, deploying new workloads or monitoring capacity, typically all done within a few clicks. When it comes to vSphere they also support things like the Distributed Switch and have support for NSX around the corner, for those who have the need for advanced networking / isolation / security etc.

Platform9 also introduces auto-scaling capabilities based on resource alarms and application templates. Both scaling-up and scaling-down of your workloads when needed is supported, which is something that comes up on a regular basis with customers I talk to. Platform9 can take care of the infrastructure side of scaling out, you worry about creating that scale-out application architecture, which is difficult enough as it is.

When it comes to their SaaS based platform it is good to know that their platform is not shared between customers. Which means that there is no risk of one customer high-jacking the environment of another customer. Also, the platform will scale independently and will scale automatically as your local environment grows. No need to worry about any of those aspects any longer, and of course because it is SaaS based Platform9 will take care of patching/updating/upgrading etc.

Personally I would love to see a couple of things added, I would find it useful if Platform9 could take care of Network Isolation… Just like Lab Manager was capable of doing in the past. It would also be great if Platform9 could manage “stand alone” ESXi hosts instead of having being pointed to vCenter Server. I do understand that brings some constraints etc, but it could be a nice feature… Either way, I like the single pane of glass they offer today, it can only get better. Nice job Platform9, keep those updates coming!