Yellow Bricks

by Duncan Epping

startup

Platform9 manages private clouds as a service

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A couple of months ago I introduced you to this new company founded by 4 former VMware employees called Platform9. I have been having discussions with them occasionally about what they were working on and I’ve been very intrigued by what they are building and am very pleased to see there first version go GA and want to congratulate them with hitting this major milestone. For those who are not familiar with what they do, this is what their website says:

Platform9 Managed OpenStack is a cloud service that enables Enterprises to manage their internal server infrastructure as efficient private clouds.

In short, they have a PaaS based solution which allows you to simply manage KVM based virtualization hosts. It is a very simple way of creating a private cloud and it will literally get your KVM based solution up and running in minutes which very welcome in this world where things seem to become increasingly more complex, and especially when you talk about KVM/Openstack.

Besides the GA announcement the pricing model was also announced. The pricing model follows the same “pay per month” model as CloudPhysics has. In the case of  Platform9 the costs are $49 per CPU per month with an annual subscription being required. This is for what they call their “business tier” which has unlimited scale. There is also a “lite tier” which is free but will have limited scale and is mainly aimed for people to test Platform9 and learn about their offering. An Enterprise tier is also in the works and will offer more advanced features and premium support. Features it will include additionally to what the Business tier offers appear to be mainly in the “software defined networking”  and security space, so I would expect things like firewalling, network isolation, single sign-on etc.

I highly recommend watching the Virtualization Field Day 4 videos as they demonstrate perfectly what they are capable off. The video that is probably most interesting to you is the one where they demonstrate a beta of the offering they are planning for vSphere (embedded below). The beta shows vSphere hosts and KVM hosts in a single pane of glass. The end-user can deploy “instances” (virtual machines) in the environment of choice using a single tool which from an operational perspective is great. On top of that, Platform9 discovers existing workloads on KVM and vSphere and non-disruptively adds them to their management interface.

Startup Intro: Eco4Cloud

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This week I had the pleasure to be briefed by Eco4Cloud on what it is they bring to the world of IT. First thing which stood out instantly that this startup is based out of Italy, yes indeed… Europe and not a Silicon Valley based startup… that is a nice change if you ask me! Not just from a geographical perspective are they different then most startups today, but also in terms of what solution they are building. Eco4Cloud is all about datacenter optimization and efficiency. What does this mean?

Most of you probably have heard of vSphere DRS and DPM, if you look at DPM from a conceptual perspective then you could say it is all about lowering cost by consolidating more virtual machines on fewer physical hosts and powering off the unneeded hosts. Eco4Cloud is targeting to do something similar, but doesn’t stop just there. Lets look at what they can do today.

Workload Consolidation is the name of the their core piece of technology (in my opinion). Workload Consolidation analyses your hosts and virtual machines and tries to increase consolidation to allow for hosts to be powered off without impacting the virtual machine SLAs. In other words, if your VM is using 1024MB and 2GHz it should have this available after the consolidation as well. (vMotion is used to move VMs around.) Now it does this in a smart way of course by ensuring that resources are properly balanced both from a CPU and Memory point of view. E4C has done many proof of concepts now and they have shown that they can for instance reduce power consumption between 30-60%, as you can imagine this is huge for larger datacenters. Of course it is not just the decrease of power consumption, but it is also reduction in carbon footprint etc.

Besides consolidation of your workload E4C also has a number of features that can help with optimizing your workloads itself. For instance Smart Ballooning which will preemptively, and in a smart way, claim unused memory from specific virtual machines so that other virtual machines can use the memory when needed. But more importantly, free up claimed resources which are not used anyway to avoid the scenario where you reach a state of (false) overcommitment.

Of course it is best to right size your virtual machines in the first place, but as we all know this is fairly difficult and especially with the ever growing demands of the application owners it is not going to get any easier. E4C can also help with that part, they can provide you the data needed to show VMs are oversized and help providing them the correct resources: Capacity Decision Support Manager. It doesn’t just allow you to analyze the current scenario, but also provides you the option to do “what if” scenarios. These “what if” scenarios are very useful in the case where you expect a growth. CDSM will be able to tell you how many hosts you will need to add, but can also help identifying which type of hosts.

Last but not least there is E4C Troubleshooter, a monitoring solution that will help identifying configuration problems for hosts and virtual machines. It can help you with identifying problems in different areas, but for now the focus seems to be SLA compliance, VM mobility and resource accessibility.

So who is doing this? E4C showed me a case study they have done with Telecom Italia, and out of the 500 hosts Telecom Italia had they were able to place 100 hosts in hibernation mode, leading to a 440MWh decrease (avg 20%). What I like about the solution by the way, as that you can run it in analysis mode without having it apply the recommendations. That way you can see first what the potential savings are.

So how does this thing work? Well it is fairly straight forward, as far as I understand. It is a simple appliance and installing it is no rocket science… Of course you will need to ask yourself how you would benefit from this solution, if you have 2 hosts then it probably will not make sense, but in large(r) environments I can definitely see how costs can be dramatically lowered leveraging their datacenter optimization solution.

** disclaimer: I was briefed by E4C, I have no direct experience with their products. E4C is actively looking for Enterprise customers who are willing to test out their solution in there data center. If you work for an Enterprise and are wondering if you can benefit from this, please leave a comment and I can get you in touch with them directly! **

Startup Into: Platform9

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Yesterday a startup came out of stealth which was founded by a couple of former VMware veterans. I happen to know the majority of them, and have had the pleasure to have worked with them on various things in the past. For instance Platform9‘s three of the four co-founders were all heavily involved in vCloud Director, and the fourth co-founder was VMware employee number 27… but that is not where it stops… there is much more talent on-board. But that is not what this blog is about, this blog is about Platform9, the new company that they have formed and the product they are building.

** note, I did not test the product… it is impossible to provide an analysis of what works / does not work and how they play in this space or compete with others, this is based on a conversation and a demo **

Platform9 is as they say themselves:

… the easiest way for enterprises to implement a private cloud, with intelligent, self-service provisioning of workloads onto their computing infrastructure.

  • 100% Cloud Managed: Platform9’s cloud-based model means that there is no complex management software to setup, monitor and upgrade, thus simplifying the operational experience.
  • Single Pane of Glass: Platform9 offers unified management across diverse environments – Docker, KVM and VMware vSphere – across datacenters and geographies.
  • Based on OpenStack: Platform9 customers get the best of OpenStack with 100% API compatibility.

When I met them last month, they gave a demo and showed me what they had implemented so far: Management of KVM based hypervisors using a very easy to use and slick using web-based user interface. Where the whole management solution was running in “the cloud”.

Creating a new “instance” was literally a few clicks, snapshotting / cloning it… same thing, just a couple of clicks. Now what stood out to me during the demo was the use of the word “instance” instead of “virtual machine”. So I asked them why not “virtual machine”, considering they are all VMware veterans that made more sense to me. The explanation was simple: we want to manage multiple layers. We want to manage KVM VMs, vSphere VMs but for instance also Docker containers. That is why we used a different term than we would normally use… and yes that did make sense to me. I also wondered if they would be able to mix different environments and type of instance in their UI, and the answer was yes. Docker containers, KVM VMs, vSphere VMs (etc) will also be seen in the same single pane of glass. I really like the fact that Platform9 did not limit themselves to just vSphere, or just VMs but rather is focusing on the needs of developers and providing what they require.

Similar to CloudPhysics, Platform9 is taking SaaS approach. The major benefit of course being the agility at which new features/functionality can be introduced to the outside world, or tested against a small subset of customers. Same of course applies to bug fixes / updates. No need to do that yourself, Platform9 will take care of that for you. Promising indeed.

Now there is a lot of competition in this space, as also emphasized by  Ben Kepes in his post on Platform9… But to be honest, if I look at one of the examples listed like ServiceMesh, they seem to cater for a completely different market. Platform9 is all about simplicity and managing instances, not so much about creating complex recipes etc. I agree though that there are a lot of vendors playing in this space (and as such competition), or somewhat related space, but that makes it even more interesting to see how Platform9 evolves in my opinion.

For more info, a demo, or a trial:

Platform9 will showcase its product in its booth #324 at VMware’s VMworld Conference, taking place the week of August 25th in San Francisco. The product is currently in beta with general availability planned for later this year. Platform9 currently supports KVM with upcoming support for Docker and VMware vSphere. To register for a free trial, go to: http://www.platform9.com.

Startup News Flash part 17

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Number 17 already… A short one, I expect more news next week when we have “Storage Field Day”, hence I figured I would release this one already. Make sure to watch the live feed if you are interested in getting the details on new releases from companies like Diablo, SanDisk, PernixData etc.

Last week Tintri announced support for the Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization platform. Kind of surprising to see them selecting a specific linux vendor to be honest, but then again it probably also is the more popular option for people who want full support etc. What is nice in my opinion is that Tintri offers the exact same “VM Aware” experience for both platforms. Although I don’t see too many customers using both VMware and RHEV in production, it is nice to have the option.

Startup News Flash part 17 CloudVolumes, no not a storage company, announced support for View 6.0. CloudVolumes developed a solution which helps you manage applications. They provude a central management solution, and the option to distribute and elimate the need for streaming / packaging. I have looked at it briefly and it is an interesting approach they take. I like how they solved the “layering” problem by isolating the app in its own disk container. It does make me wonder how this scales when you have dozens of apps per desktop, never the less an interesting approach worth looking in to.

Startup News Flash part 16

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Number 16 of the Startup News Flash, here we go:

Nakivo just announced the beta program for 4.0 of their backup/replication solution. It adds some new features like: recovery of Exchange objects directly from compressed and deduplicated VM backups, Exchange logs truncation, and automated backup verification. If you are interested in testing it, make sure to sign up here. I haven’t tried it, but they seem to be a strong upcoming player in the backup and DR space for SMB.

SanDisk announced a new range of SATA SSDs called “cloudspeed”. They released 4 different models with various endurance levels and workload targets, of course ranging in sizes from 100GB up to 960GB depending on the endurance level selected. Endurance level ranges from 1 up to 10 full drive writes per day. (Just as an FYI, for VSAN we recommend 5 full drive writes per day as a minimum) Performance numbers range between 15k to 20k write IOps and 75 to 88K read IOps. More details can be found in the spec sheet here. What interest me most is the FlashGuard Technology that is included, interesting how SanDisk is capable of understanding wear patterns and workloads to a certain extend and place data in a specific way to prolong the life of your flash device.

CloudPhysics announced the availability of their Storage Analytics card. I gave it a try last week and was impressed. I was planning on doing a write up on their new offering but as various bloggers already covered it I felt there was no point in repeating what they said. I think it makes a lot more sense to just try it out, I am sure you will like it as it will show you valuable info like “performance” and the impact of “thin disks” vs “thick disks”. Sign up here for a 30day free trial!