Yellow Bricks

by Duncan Epping

tintri

Startup News Flash part 12

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First edition of the 2014 of the Startup News Flash. I expect this year to be full of announcements, new rounds of funding, new products, new features and new companies. There are various startups planning to come out of stealth this year and all play in the storage / flash space, so make sure to follow this series!

On Tuesday the 14th of January Nutanix announced a new round of funding. Series D financing is co-led by Riverwood Capital and SAP Ventures, and the total amount is $101 million. The company has now raised a total of $172.2 million in four rounds of funding and has been valuated close to $ 1 billion. Yes, that is huge. Probably one of the most successful startups of the last couple of years. Congrats to everyone involved!

Tintri announced a rather aggressive program. The Register reported it here, and it is all about replacing NetApp systems with Tintri systems. In short: “The “Virtualize More with 50% Less” Program offers 50% storage capacity and rack space savings versus currently installed NetApp FAS storage to support deployed virtualization workloads”. I guess it is clear what kind of customers they are going after and who their primary competition is. Of course there is a list of requirements and constraints which the Register already outlined nicely. If you are looking to replace your current NetApp storage infrastructure I guess this could be a nice offer, or a nice way to get more discount.. Either way, you win.

SSD and PCIe flash devices are king these days, but SanDisk is looking to change that with the announcement of the availability of the ULLtraDIMM. The ULLtraDIMM is a combination of Diablo’s DDR3 tranlation protocol and SanDisk’s flash and controllers on top of a nice DIMM. Indeed, it doesn’t get closer to your CPU then straight on your memory bus. By the looks of it IBM is one of the first vendors to offer it, as they  recently announced that the eXFlash DIMM is an option for its System x3850 and x3950 X6 servers providing up to 12.8TB of flash capacity2. Early benchmarks showed write latency around 5-10 microsecond! I bet half the blogosphere just raised their hands to give this a go in their labs!

 

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 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!

 

Tintri releases version 2.0 – Replication added!

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I have never made it a secret that I am a fan of Tintri. I just love their view on storage systems and the way they decided to solve specific problems. When I was in Palo Alto last month I had the opportunity to talk to the folks of Tintri again and what they were working on. Of course we had a discussion about the Software Defined Datacenter and more specifically Software Defined Storage and what Tintri would bring to the SDS era. As all of that was under strict NDA I can’t share it, but what I can share are some cool details of what Tintri has just announced, version 2.0 of their storage system.

For those who have never even looked in to Tintri I suggest you catch-up by reading the following two articles:

  1. Tintri – virtual machine aware storage
  2. Tintri follow-up

When I was briefed initially about Tintri back in 2011 one of the biggest areas of improvement I saw were around availability. Two things were on my list to be solved, first one was the “single controller” approach they took. This was solved back in 2011. Another feature I missed was replication. Replication is the main feature that is announced today and it will be part of the 2.0 release of their software. What I loved about Tintri is that all data services they offered were on a virtual machine level. Of course the same applies to replication, announced today.

Tintri offers a-synchronous replication which can go down to a recovery point objective (RPO) of 15 minutes. Of course I asked if there were plans on bringing this down, and indeed this is planned but I can’t say when. What I liked about this replication solution is that as data is deduplicated and compressed the amount of replication traffic is kept to a limit. Let me rephrase that, globally deduplicated… meaning that if a block already exists in the DR site then it will not be replicated to that site. This will definitely have a positive impact on your bandwidth consumption, and Tintri has seen up to 95% reduction in WAN bandwidth consumption. The diagram below shows how this works.

The nice thing about the replication technique Tintri offers is that it is well integrated with VMware vSphere and thus it offers “VM consistent” snapshots by leveraging VMware’s quiescing technology. My next obvious question was what about Site Recovery Manager? As failover is on a per VM basis, orchestrating / automating this would be a welcome option. Tintri is still working on this and hopes to add support for Site Recovery Manager soon. Another I would like to see added was grouping of virtual machines for replication consistency; again this is something which is on the road map and hopefully will be added soon.

One of the other cool features which is added with this release is remote cloning. Remote cloning basically allows you to clone a virtual machine / template to a different array. Those who have multiple vCenter Server instances in their environment know what a pain this can be, hence the reason I feel this is one of those neat little features which you will appreciate once you have used it. Would be great if this functionality could be integrated within the vSphere Web Client as a “right click”, judging by the comments made by the Tintri team I would expect that they are already working on deeper / tighter integration with the Web Client, and I can only hope a vSphere Web Client plugin will be released soon so that all granular VM level data services can be managed from a single console.

All-in-all a great new release by Tintri, if you ask me this release is 3 huge steps forward!

Tintri follow up

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Back in March I wrote about this new and interesting storage vendor called Tintri which had just released a new NAS appliance called VMstore. I wrote about their level of integration and the fact that their NAS appliance is virtual machine aware and allows you to define performance policies per virtual machine. I am not going to rehash the complete post so for more details read it before you continue reading this article. During the briefing for that article we discussed some of the caveats with regards to their design and some possible enhancements. Tintri apparently is the type of company who listens to community input and can act quick. Yesterday I had a briefing of some of the new features Tintri will announce next week. I’ve been told that none of this is under embargo so I will go ahead and share with you what I feel is very exciting. Before I do though I want to mention that Tintri now also has teams in APAC and EMEA, as some of you know they started out only in North-America but now have expanded to the rest of the world.

First of all, and this is probably the most heard complaint, is that the upcoming Tintri VMstore devices will be available in a dual controller configuration which makes it more interesting to many of you probably. Especially the more up-time sensitive environments will appreciate this, and who isn’t sensitive about up-time these days? Especially in a virtualized environment where many workloads share a single device this improvement is more than welcome! The second thing which I really liked is how they enhanced their dashboard. Now this seems like a minor thing but I can ensure you that it will make your life a lot easier. Let me dump a screenshot first and then discuss what you are looking at.

The screenshot shows the per VM latency statistics… Now what is exciting about that? Well if you look at the bottom you will see the different colors and each of those represent a specific type of latency. Lets assume your VM experiences 40ms of latency and your customer starts complaining. The main thing to figure out is what causes this slow down. (Or in many cases, who can I blame?) Is your network saturated? Is the host swamped? Is it your storage device? In order to identify these types of problems you would need a monitor tool and most likely multiple tools to pinpoint the issue. Tintri decided to hook in to vCenter and just pull down the various metrics and use this to create the nice graph that you see in the screenshot. This allows you to quickly pinpoint the issue from a single pane of glass. And yes you can also expect this as a new tab within vCenter.

Another great feature which Tintri offers is the ability to realign your VMDKs. Tintri does this, unlike most solutions out there, from the “inside”. With that meaning that their solution is incorporated into their appliance and not a separate tool which needs to run against each and every VM. Smart solution which can and will safe you a lot of time.

It’s all great and amazing isn’t it? Or are there any caveats? One thing I still feel needs to be addressed is replication. With this next release it is not available yet but is that a problem now that SRM offers vSphere Replication? I guess that relieves some of the immediate pressure but I would still like to see a native Tintri’s solution providing a-sync and sync replication. Yes it will take time but I would expect though that Tintri is working on this. I tried to persuade them to make a statement yesterday they unfortunately couldn’t say anything with regards to a timeline / roadmap.

Definitely a booth I will be checking out at VMworld.