Yellow Bricks

by Duncan Epping

startup

Startup News Flash part 9

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There we are, part 9 of the Startup News Flash. As mentioned last time, last week was “Storage Field Day” so typically a bit more news then normally this time of year. I would highly recommend to watch the videos. Especially the Coho video is very entertaining.

The original founders of Fusion IO (David Flynn and Rick White) just received 50 Million in funding for their new startup called Primary Data. I mentioned them briefly in Startup News Flash part 3 when they announced they started a new company and it seems that they have something on their hands! They haven’t revealed what they are working on, they are aiming to come out stealth around the second quarter of 2014. In the WSJ the following was mentioned in terms of the space these guys will be playing in: “The company is developing software–though it actually will come bundled on standard server hardware–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 operated by external service companies.” Indeed, something with storage / caching / software defined / scale-out…

I guess scale-out hypervisor based storage solutions are hot… Maxta just officially announced their new product called MxSP. Some rumors had already been floating around but now the details are out their. Marcel v/d Berg did a nice article on them which I recommend reading if you like to get some more details. Basically Maxta created a Virtual Storage Appliance which pools all local storage and presents it as NFS to your hypervisor. Today VMware vSphere is fully supported and KVM / Hyper-V in a limited fashion. It offers functionality like VM-level snapshots and zero-copy clones, Thin provisioning, Inline deduplication and more. It looks like licensing is capacity based but no prices have been mentioned.

When first looking at Avere is was intrigued by their solution but somehow it didn’t really click. Primary focus was a caching layer in between your NFS storage and your hosts… But I wondered why I would want an extra box for that and not just use something host local. Last week Avere made announcement around a solution that allows you to pool local and cloud storage resources and present them via a common namespace and move data between these tiers. FlashCloud is what Avere calls it. Their paper describes it best, so a shameless copy of that: “FlashCloud software running on Avere FXT Edge filers addresses this challenge by storing cold data on cost-effective cloud storage at the core of the network and automatically and efficiently moving active data to the edge near the users.” I like the concept… If you are interested, check out their site here.

Far from a startup, but cool enough to be listed here… The release of the X-Brick aka XtremIO by EMC. The XtremIO solution is a brand new all-flash array which delivers screaming performance in a scale-out fashion. Although there are limitations from a scaling point of view today, it is expected that these will be lifted soon. One of the articles I enjoyed reading is this one by Jason Nash. What is most interesting about the product is the following, and I am going to quote Jason here as he is spot on: “There is no setup and tuning of XtremIO.  No LUNs.  No RAID Groups.  No pools.  No stripe sizes.  No tiering.  Nothing.  You have a pool of very fast storage.  How big do you want that LUN to be?  That’s all you really need to do!”

Another round of funding for SimpliVity, Series C… 58 Million led by Kleiner Perkins Growth Fund and DFJ Growth with contributions by Meritech Capital Partners and Swisscom Ventures. I guess this GigaOM quote says it all: “CEO Doron Kempel, an EMC veteran, said the cash infusion will enable the company to execute on plans to triple its staff and boost sales growth five fold in 2014”.

Startup News Flash part 8

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Part 8 already of the Startup News Flash. It is just a short one, not too many new things but some worth mentioning in my opinion.

Infinio just announced Infinio Accelerator 1.0. I wrote about what Infinio is and does in this article, in short: Infinio has developed a virtual appliance that sits in between your virtual machine storage traffic and your NFS datastore. The Infinio virtual appliance enhances storage performance by caching IO. Their primary use case is to do caching in memory. Infinio’s primary marketing message is: “100% software only – No new hardware, no reboots, no downtime”. It will accelerate any workload type running on NFS and is available for a shockingly (if you ask me) low price of 499, and they offer a free 30-day trial.

Recently a new startup was revealed named Coho Data, formerly known as Convergent.io. I wrote an introduction about them a couple of weeks ago which I suggest reading to get a better understanding of what Coho is or does. In short: Coho Data built a scale-out hybrid storage solution (NFS for VM workloads). With hybrid meaning a mix of SATA and SSD. This for obvious reasons, SATA bringing you capacity and flash providing you raw performance. Today I read an article about a new round of funding, 25 Million lead by Andreesseen Horowitz. Yes, that is no pocket change indeed. Hopefully this new round of funding will allow Coho to bring things to the next level! Congratulations…

Just a short one this round, hopefully more news next time… I would suspect so as Storage Field Day 4 is scheduled the week of the 13th.

Startup News Flash part 7

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VMworld europe is this week and I’ve been very busy just running around on the show floor and doing sessions. Considering there were a couple of small but worthy updates I figured I would publish this one in between sessions… Here it is: Startup News Flash part 7.

announced yesterday that Ken Klein is taking on the role of Chief Executive Officer  and Former CEO and founder, Kieran Harty assumes the new role of Chief Technology Officer and will drive Tintri’s product strategy and roadmap.

Pernix has just announced a program called PernixPro, which gives industry experts free access to PernixData FVP software + various tools for collaborating with PernixData experts and R&D. If you are a vExpert or a VCDX and want to get familiar with FVP, sign up here.

“Traditionally” SimpliVity has been more focused on generic server virtualization with a high level of integration with regards to DR and Back-up / Recovery. This week SimpliVity announced they are entering the VDI space. They announced new partnership agreements with NVIDIA and Teradici. What I like about their platform is, that although they offer a hyperconverged solution, that you can connect from the outside in. Meaning scale compute independ of storage. Also, their platform offer inline deduple, optimized full clones, and 1:1 persistent desktops. For more details hit up their website.

Nutanix just announced that they have been validated by VMware for the VMware Horizon View Agent Direct-Connection, which is part of the Horizon Suite 5.3.

For those who missed it, read the Startup Intro I posted this week on CohoData. Interesting company / solution if you ask me!

Startup intro: Coho Data

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Today a new startup is revealed named Coho Data, formerly known as Convergent.io. Coho Data was founded by Andrew Warfield, Keir Fraser and Ramana Jonnala. For those who care, they are backed by Andreessen Horowitz. Probably most known for the work they did at Citrix on Xenserver. What is it they introduced / revealed this week?

Coho Data introduces a new scale-out hybrid storage solution (NFS for VM workloads). With hybrid meaning a mix of SATA and SSD. This for obvious reasons, SATA bringing you capacity and flash providing you raw performance. Let me point out that Coho is not a hyperconverged solution, it is a full storage system.

What does it look like? It is a 2U box which holds 2 “MicroArrays” which each MicroArray having 2 processors, 2 x 10GbE NIC port and 2 PCIe INTEL 910 cards. Each 2u block provides you 39TB of capacity and ~180K IOPS (Random 80/20 read/write, 4K block size). Starting at $2.50 per GB, pre-dedupe & compression (which they of course offer). Couple of things I liked looking at their architecture, first and probably foremost the “scale-out” architecture, scale to infinity is what they say in a linear fashion. On top of that, it comes with an OpenFlow-enabled 10GbE switch to allow for ease of management and again scalability.

If you look closely at how they architected their hardware, they created these highspeed IO lanes: 10GbE NIC <–> CPU <–> PCIe Flash Unit. Each highway has its dedicated CPU, NIC Port, ad on top of that they PCIe Flash, allowing for optimal performance, efficiency and fine grained control. Nice touch if you ask me.

Another thing I really liked was their UI. You can really see they put a lot of thought in the user experience aspect by keeping things simple and presenting data in an easy understandable way. I wish every vendor did that. I mean, if you look at the screenshot below how simple does that look? Dead simple right!? I’ve seen some of the other screens, like for instance for creating a snapshot schedule… again same simplicity. Apparently, and I have not tested this but I will believe them on their word, they brought that simplicity all the way down to the “install / configure” part of things. Getting Coho Data up and running literally only takes 15 minutes.

What I also liked very much about the Coho Data solution is that Software-defined Networking (SDN) and Software-defined Storage (SDS) are tightly coupled. In other words, Soho configures the network for you… As just said, it takes 15 minutes to setup. Try creating the zoning / masking scheme for a storage system and a set of LUNs these days, even that takes more time then 15 – 20 minutes. There aren’t too many vendors combining SDN and SDS in a smart fashion today.

When they briefed me they gave me a short demo and Andy explained the scale-out architecture, during the demo it happened various times that I could draw a parallel between the VMware virtualization platform and their solution which made is easy for me to understand and relate to their solution. For instance, Soho Data offers what I would call DRS for Software-Defined Storage. If for whatever reasons defined policies are violated then Coho Data will balance the workload appropriately across the cluster. Just like DRS (and Storage DRS) does, Coho Data will do a risk/benefit analysis before initiating the move. I guess the logical question would be, well why would I want Coho to do this when VMware can also do this with Storage DRS? Well keep in mind that Storage DRS works “across datastores”, but as Coho presents a single datastore you need something that allows you to balance within.

I guess the question then remains what do they lack today? Well today as a 1.0 platform Coho doesn’t offer replication to outside of their own cluster. But considering they have snapshotting in place I suspect their architecture already caters for it, and it something they should be able to release fairly quickly. Another thing which is lacking today is a vSphere Web Client plugin, but then again if you look at their current UI and the simplicity of it I do wonder if there is any point in having one.

All in all, I have been impressed by these newcomers in the SDS space and I can’t wait to play around with their gear at some point!

Startup News Flash part 6

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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!