Announcements

August 25, 2014 by jdg Leave a Comment

Monday Morning Highlights from #VMworld2014

As VMworld 2014 kicks off, we set the tone for the whole conference. Most of the announcements that will be made are expected, but we’ll get to find out just how awesome they are. Also, maybe we’ll have a surprise or two! I’m live-blogging from the bloggers table in the Hang Space. If you’re at VMworld, stop by and say hello!

This morning, the following announcements bubbled up to the top of the list of highlights. These are exciting, to be sure!

EVO:RAIL

EVO:RAIL combines VMware compute, networking, and storage resources into a hyper-converged infrastructure appliance to create a simple, easy to deploy, all-in-one solution offered by our partners.

So VMware has decided to enter the hyper-converged game. This does not fall into the “surprise” category. With the introduction of VSAN and NSX, it looked a lot like VMware was leading up to this. I wonder what this means for Nutanix and Simplivity. They both have their own unique value add, but won’t customers be more comfortable sticking with vendors they’re familiar and comfortable with? To that end, Simplivity also has a big announcement around OmniStack in partnership with Cisco. More on that in another post.

VMware has never been in the hardware game, and I don’t think they will be. This will be OEM hardware from partners like Dell, EMC, Supermicro, etc.The building block is a 2U box that can include 4 nodes. One can stack 4 of these boxes for a total of 16 nodes – half of the current vSphere cluster size limit. EVO:RACK is currently being tested at VMware, and when this goes public it will allow for larger scale deployments.

There is an area in the Solutions Exchange showcasing EVO gear and doing demos. Be sure to stop by there and check it out if you’ve got some time!

vRealize Suite

At VMworld 2014 today, the Cloud Management team introduced the VMware vRealize Suite, a Cloud Management Platform. The need for a comprehensive Cloud Management Platform (CMP) arose from the convergence of multiple management disciplines employed by new models of developing, deploying, and managing applications. Essentially, CMP enables robust application and infrastructure delivery while managing to a set of polices in the most cost-efficient manner.

The vRealize suite provides an efficient way to manage a hybrid cloud. vRealize will swallow up vCAC and vCOps and ITBM. It will also contain two new things:

vRealize Air Automation – vCloud Automation Center offered as SaaS
vRealize Operations Insight – a new version of Log Insight

There is also a private beta program you can apply to be a part of! Register for the beta program here.

VMware Integrated OpenStack

VMware Integrated OpenStack (Beta) is a VMware-supported OpenStack distribution that makes it easy for IT to run an enterprise-grade OpenStack on top of their existing VMware infrastructure.

There’s no getting away from OpenStack – VMware administrators who aren’t already proficient with OpenStack should start working on it now. If you need ramp up material, I’d highly recommend Eric Wright‘s Pluralsight course Introduction to Openstack.

Because it is becoming so prevalent, enabling VMware customers to quickly and easily use OpenStack is a high priority for VMware. To address this, they’ve introduced VMware Integrated OpenStack (VIO). This is distributed as an OVA and it deploys a vApp containing all the components of an OpenStack deployment. This seems like a more mature iteration of VOVA. Once deployed, you will have access directly from the vSphere Web Client!

VIO — Image credit to @chriswahl – www.wahlnetwork.com

Thoughts

This is sure to be an exciting week, and I’m sure there’s many more new developments to research and discuss. Of the announcements so far, I’m most excited about EVO. Between EVO and Simplivity’s announcement about UCS, I see customers being a lot more interested and willing to get into the hyper-converged game. This afternoon will involve some Tech Field Day action, so be sure to tune in for that. I’ll be bumming around the Hang Space most of the day, and maybe pop over to the Solutions Exchange to pick up some vExpert gifts later on. See you around!

August 19, 2014 by jdg 4 Comments

DataGravity – First Look

Perhaps you’ve heard of DataGravity (@DataGravityInc), or perhaps you haven’t. They’ve been staying pretty quiet about what they’ve been working on. Today, however, they’re dropping the veil. Read on for a look into what you can expect from this exciting announcement!

Disclosure: I did not receive any compensation or benefit from DataGravity Inc. for writing this post. The product is purely awesome and excited me 🙂

Data-Aware Storage

What DataGravity has announced today with their Discovery Series is a storage array that is introspective and knows about the data being stored to a level that I’ve never seen before. Imagine if you could ask your array, “Who has accessed this file? How often? How old is it? Can you grab me a previous version of that?” This product does many things that we already have the ability to do with other tools; the difference between DataGravity and other like-tools is that this tool is providing you data about itself. Other tools look at your data and try to collect as much information as possible. This array has enough inherent intelligence to look at all the data being written and accessed and give you copious amounts of meta-information, all in realtime and without impact to production.

How??

A question that has changed the data center dramatically in terms of compute is about to change the way we interact with data. “How can I make use of these idle resources?” In the compute realm, we realized we could run many virtual servers on one physical server to drive up utilization and reduce hardware spend (with resources that were previously being wasted). When the founders at DataGravity asked this question about storage, they realized that an Active/Passive array could utilize the resources on the passive node to collect and process information about the data that is already being mirrored to it! Let me reiterate that – a passive node already has a copy of all this data, and then it just sits there. So DataGravity decided to take all that idle power and turn it into insights and intelligence about your data!

The “Intelligence Node” chomps away on the secondary copy of your data while production IO hums happily along, none the wiser. This information is then digested and available for the business to use in as many ways as it can think of.

Put It To Work

So what are some of the ways DataGravity could help your business be more efficient, more secure, more intelligent? Here’s just a few:

DataGravity recognizes and indexes content from over 400 different file types. All this is then searchable, and you can perform action on it.
It identifies patterns within said file and can, for instance, alert you that a file contains PII like a Social Security Number. You can then contact the person who owns this document and ask them to remove the sensitive information.
It interfaces with AD/LDAP and file-level ACLs to give you information about who owns/uses/modifies any given file. A company could then generate reports or take action based on correlations drawn from this information.
Perform a file-level restore nearly instantly within a VM in a matter of clicks

Learn More

VMworld is coming up in a matter of days, and you can be sure that DataGravity will be there. You can find them at booth #1647 and if you have the time, you should be sure to stop by and have a chat with them. Also be sure to Follow them on Twitter and check out www.datagravity.com!

Write-ups by my friends:

Why Is DataGravity Such A Big Deal? – Stephen Foskett (@sfoskett)

March 26, 2014 by jdg 2 Comments

NEW CloudPhysics Offering – Storage Analytics

Today, CloudPhysics is entering your storage environment to give you the same level of awesome insight they’ve given into your compute cluster! The storage analytics aim to provide data about two main struggles that every data center has: storage capacity and storage performance.

Storage Capacity

Isn’t it sickening how quickly you can chew through terabytes of storage by not keeping an close eye on things like VM sprawl? Here’s an excerpt from the official blog post:

There are many fast-and-easy paths to storage waste in a virtualized datacenter. But the path to storage reclamation is typically slow and complicated. Take VM sprawl for example: it takes just seconds to spin up a new VM, but figuring out if and when it needs to be deleted takes hours, if not weeks. You can more easily reclaim CPU and memory resources by powering off the VMs, but powered off VMs still take up disk space. Over time, you may forget about them. That’s just one example of space waste – there are many more.

CloudPhysics is specifically addressing storage-induced capacity problems by providing unique, powerful insights into where and how your storage space is being consumed along with specific recommendations on how to reclaim the space. We’ve been working hard to develop the algorithms that solve this problem, while making all that complexity transparent to users. The screenshot below, which shows how we address the problem of unused VMs – is just a sample of what you’ll find in our storage analytics.

With the new storage analytics, it’s now stupid simple to find wasted space and take it back. Here’s a screen capture of one of the space reclamation dashboards:

Storage Performance

Another frustration: how much money do you waste buying spindles or upgrading flash cache to support your performance needs when what you should be doing is tuning your workload to perform better? You could potentially save boatloads of money if you could fix the problem instead of just throw spindles at it. The new Storage Analytics can help with that too!

There’s a strong relationship between storage waste and storage performance. Why? Many virtualization users simply overprovision the number of spindles, read/write cache, flash storage etc. to avoid the pain of troubleshooting storage performance issues. After all who wants to spend hours and hours of time combing through performance charts to understand correlations and do root cause analysis? Nobody does – but we have figured out how to leverage big data analytics to do it for you. For example, our fantastic new datastore contention analytics (see above) tells you when and where you are experiencing contention, and automatically identifies which VMs in your datastore are performance culprits (and which are victims). You can now solve performance issues literally in few clicks – which is a lot quicker and more efficient than overprovisioning your storage.

You can see from the screenshot below how quickly you can identify a problem and remediate it, instantly saving you pain. It won’t hurt your bottom line either!

I know I’d love to see this technology used in my data center to make my life easier. If you’d like to see it in yours too, you’re in luck! All it takes to give it a shot is to sign up for a free 30 day trial! Here’s the link to the sign-up page. If you give it a shot, let me know how it goes in the comments! I’d love to hear what you do with it, and let CloudPhysics know what else you’d like to see.