WoodITWork.com

Virtualisation Field Day 4 is happening in Austin, Texas from 14th-16th January and I’m very lucky to be invited as a delegate.

I’ve been previewing the companies attending, have a look at my introductory post: Virtualisation Field Day 4 Preview.

StorMagic has an interesting product called SvSAN which is a SAN specifically designed for remote offices which require local IT infrastructure that can’t be delivered remotely. StorMagic has previously presented at Storage Field Day 6.

Many companies need to run critical applications at what StorMagic call edge sites yet still require high availability. Think retail with PoS everywhere, manufacturing with numerous distributed sites, oil rigs, ships, manufacturing, in fact any company with a distributed geographic footprint. SvSAN can be managed centrally at scale with typically 10-10000 edge sites.

Their software runs as a VSA on vSphere or Hyper-V using local disks and can be clustered with synchronous mirroring using as little as two hosts to provide shared storage to VMs giving them HA/vMotion. You can also use it with stretched clusters. It presents an iSCSI LUN to the hypervisor and can use SSD for cache and target it to particular workloads.

Centralised management is at the cornerstone of StorMagic which you would need for the scale they support. You can deploy SvSAN across multiple sites fairly easily and quickly. The nodes can then continue to be easily managed centrally so you don’t need any local IT staff.

StorMagic doesn’t look like its going to take over the world but it has a solid use case along with a market opportunity and is price competitive. I think it needs some sort of snapshotting and could benefit from a way to replicate data back to head office for backup with some clever deduping. Interested to hear what they have to say.

Gestalt IT is paying for travel, accommodation and things to eat to attend Virtualisation Field Day but aren’t paying a penny for me to write anything good or bad about anyone.

Virtualisation Field Day 4 is happening in Austin, Texas from 14th-16th January and I’m very lucky to be invited as a delegate.

I’ve been previewing the companies attending, have a look at my introductory post: Virtualisation Field Day 4 Preview.

VMTurbo presented at the last Virtualisation Field Day 3 with an update at the VMworld SFO compact edition so the Tech Field Day community know what they are about.

VMTurbo has an application called Operations Manager (bland name IMO). VM management is a very crowded market even harder to penetrate when vendors have their own offerings (VMware with vRealize Ops previously VCOPS and Microsoft with SCOM).

VMTurbo differentiates itself with an interesting take by modelling your data center as an economic market. VMs need resources and can be thought of as buyers of what they need be it CPU, RAM, IO, latency etc. Your infrastructure is the seller offering up goods to satisfy the sellers. This means everything can be associated with a price and can use the economic laws of supply and demand to set prices. As resources are more utilised and become scarce, their price goes up for the VMs so they should shop around for a better price where there is more supply capacity and therefore lower prices. This economic model allows VMTurbo to solve the problem of where to run VMs. This also translates directly into reporting on cost/benefits and an opportunity cost framework that seems very interesting.

Now economics are incredibly complex, just ask the financial wizards to despite thinking they knew everything let the market crash beneath them.

Read more…

Virtualisation Field Day 4 is happening in Austin, Texas from 14th-16th January and I’m very lucky to be invited as a delegate.

I’ve been previewing the companies attending, have a look at my introductory post: Virtualisation Field Day 4 Preview.

Scale Computing has presented previously at Storage Field Day 5, this is their 1st Virtualisation Field Day but they must be keen to get their message out as they’ve already signed up for Virtualisation Field Day 5.

Scale Computing is another member of the hyper-converged space along with Nutanix, SimpliVity and VMware’s EVO:RAIL. They have been shipping hyper-converged as long as SimpliVity but are less well known. Their management provenance is from Avamar (now EMC), Double-Take, Seagate, Veritas and Corvigo.

The writing is on the wall that converged and hyper-converged will be the only way you purchase infrastructure in the future. Why waste time rolling your own? There is therefore plenty of opportunity for a massive market. Scale Computing started life as a scale-out storage platform and then added compute.

Scale Computing has a hyper-converged appliance called HC3 running on KVM so offering an alternative to the behemoth that is VMware and Microsoft. The HC3 name comes from Hyper-Converged 3 (being 1:servers, 2:storage and 3:virtualisation). Their marketing is all about reducing cost and simplifying virtualisation complexity and is ideal for those who haven’t adopted virtualisation due to cost and complexity or are looking for a new alternative and reduced cost. They generally target SMB size workloads but this can still grow fairly large.

Read more…

Virtualisation Field Day 4 is happening in Austin, Texas from 14th-16th January and I’m very lucky to be invited as a delegate.

I’ve been previewing the companies attending, have a look at my introductory post: Virtualisation Field Day 4 Preview.

SimpliVity is a just over two year old shipping hyper-converged infrastructure vendor who is making great strides in a very hot market segment. Simplivity are presenting for the 1st time at Virtualisation Field Day. They compete against the fierce marketers and Dell buddies Nutanix and have recently partnered up with Cisco which gives them more enterprise clout and a huge partner network.

Their unique selling point is a fantastic data reduction and replication engine along with global management. Data is compressed and deduped at ingestion and can be replicated still reduced very efficiently to other instances. If you have to move VM disk files around multiple offices, across the globe or backup to the cloud with AWS, SimpliVity is a great choice. They only support vSphere at the moment as their management is via a plug-in to vCenter which isn’t as easy to port to other hypervisors. They have mentioned KVM with OpenStack and Hyper-V are coming sometime so perhaps they have some news to share at VFD4.

SimpliVity has traditionally used Dell servers under their logo which makes for a complicated relationship since Dell is now in bed with Nutanix so I wonder if there are hardware changes afoot. SimpliVity is composed of two parts, the SimpliVity software along with a PCI-E hardware card which does all the clever deduping in real time reducing the IOPS that need to be sent to storage and allowing that clever and efficient global replication. This makes them not an entirely software solution which the SDDC purists will knock down but with advances in CPU processing perhaps this hardware reliance will be removed which would open up their options.

Their tie-up with Cisco is very interesting. SimpliVity on UCS is only just over 6 weeks old. Cisco has not come out with an EVO:Rail version so must be looking to SimpliVity to provide their hyper-converged solution with UCS rack mounted hardware they need alongside their converged UCS blade based Vblocks and FlexPods. UCS has done incredibly well which is good news for SimpliVity.

Cisco gives them a massive sales force into very closed ecosystem enterprises but I would presume be pushing for Hyper-V and KVM/OpenStack support seeing Vblocks are now an EMC thing with much closer ties to VMware.

Gestalt IT is paying for travel, accommodation and things to eat to attend Virtualisation Field Day but aren’t paying a penny for me to write anything good or bad about anyone.