Tech Field Day

January 15, 2015 by jdg 1 Comment

#VFD4 Live – CommVault

This post is live-blogged from the CommVaullt presentation at #VFD4. The structure and organization will undoubtedly be poor, since this is all captured on the fly from our chat.

Overview

This is not CommVault’s first time at Virtualization Field Day – I also saw them at #VFD3. It’s good to have them back! They specifically called out that they had made some major changes since the last time they were here. CommVault has historically been known for data protection and recovery. At this stage in the game, there’s more than that though! The major value in CommVault over another similar product is not just their ability to back up or recover your data, but the ability to index at catalog that data, and make it available to end-users in a “versioning” sort of way. The backup target possibilities are pretty diverse – tape, disk, public cloud storage, private cloud storage, and so on. Another big offering is the ability to convert and move workloads from VMware to AWS, or from VMware to Azure, or various other configurations of the same type of migration. At this time, this migration is one-way, but the goal for the future would be able to move workload OUT of public cloud and into your data center with ease as well.

Deep-dive/Demo

I have often been known to talk about the idea that if you don’t provide a service that users want as an IT organization, they will go to an external public organization to get it. Right off the bat, we saw CommVault offering a Dropbox for enterprise sort of solution. That already exists in places like OneDrive, but the difference here is that you can utilize the other features of CommVault with it, like the content indexing or backup/versioning. I do see this as being something that would satisfy both end users’ needs an IT’s needs from a manageability, compliance, and security standpoint.

We talked at length about the steps CommVault takes to make application-consistent backups efficient and fast. Then we got into the “searchability” of the content store, as well as immediately doing file-level restores from VMs. It sounds like the way it works is similar to the way vPower NFS works with Veeam. It will essentially stage the VM to be restored in a temporary location, mount a temporary NFS volume and power on the VM. We can then reach in and pull out the file we’re looking for. There’s other ways of getting the data out, like mounting an entire VMDK back to the VM in question. This may be a better method for large file recovery, like a database for instance.

Lastly, they showed us a “cloud provisioning portal” and I can’t quite figure out why I’d want to use that as opposed to something mature and well-known like OpenStack of vCAC. Maybe it’s easier? Maybe it’s because I’m already a CommVault shop and it’s an addition to something I already own? I wish we had more time to talk about this, because I’d like to be more clear on the direction here. Overall, great job by CommVault and as suspected, it was great to have them back!

That’s it for today! Back tomorrow for the last sessions of VFD4, with Dell and Scale Computing! We’ll start at 8 AM Central. Here’s the full schedule.

January 15, 2015 by jdg 1 Comment

#VFD4 Live – Solarwinds

This post is live-blogged from the Solarwinds presentation at #VFD4. The structure and organization will undoubtedly be poor, since this is all captured on the fly from our chat.

Overview

The Solarwinds presentation focused on AppStack, which intends to provide insight all the way through the stack from the application to the storage. The Solarwinds software portfolio in general is massive, and they do an exceptional job of exposing data from all pieces to all the other pieces. Orion is the foundation, and all the other products basically extend Orion. Products can operate without each other, but they work best in tandem.

Deep-Dive/Demo

So AppStack is a common interface to tie together the different extensions like NPM, SAM, etc. AppStack is built into Orion, which means that it already has access to all the good stuff. Because AppStack has access to all the data, we can easily identify issues down the stack that may be impacting upstream components. They were very careful about the phrasing surrounding correlation/root cause analysis. Obviously, accurate root cause analysis is very hard, even for people, much less in software. The good news is the massive amount of data provided, so even though automated root cause analysis isn’t possible, the tool can absolutely highlight some places to start looking. Of course, another part of this picture is identifying anomalies, which via baselines (both automatic and manual, as I understand it) this tool is able to do.

Honestly, the demo moved quickly and we were very engaged, so I didn’t have time to capture much of it here. Oops 🙂 Kudos to Solarwinds for being the first presenter at this TFD to do a whole session with no slides. We used only a whiteboard and a live UI to get through this two hour session, and although that’s not as easy, it’s what we want as delegates. Well done!!

Last session of the day coming up in a bit with CommVault! Looking forward to this one!

January 15, 2015 by jdg 1 Comment

#VFD4 Live – StorMagic

This post is live-blogged from the StorMagic presentation at #VFD4. The structure and organization will undoubtedly be poor, since this is all captured on the fly from our chat.

Overview

The founders of StorMagic have been developing storage solutions for literally decades, and this isn’t their first rodeo. The StorMagic story is simple storage targeted at ROBO applications (which doesn’t mean small, just remote). Central management is critical, but they see many challenges with centralized infrastructure. Their goal is to enable SAN at ROBO sites, but retain the ease of management associated with centralized infrastructure. Traditional shared storage requires far too much CAPEX and OPEX for the remote office, which is the real problem the StorMagic VSA aims to solve. Reduce both Cap/Opex for storage in ROBO situations. For me, one of the greatest things about StorMagic is their level of focus. From an organizational perspective, they have really zeroed in on their target market and aren’t trying to be all things to all people. I really appreciate this.

SvSAN Deep-dive/demo

The VSA consumes any sort of storage – internal, DAS, etc, and is capable of tiering and SSD caching. We had a (too long) discussion about the way you can deploy with as little as 2 nodes, using a third remote or local node as the witness. Delegates were really unsettled by the idea of the witness being “optional” and/or remote, but eventually we had to move on. They do this using what they call a “neutral storage host,” and it can tolerate up to 3000ms of latency, up to 20% packet loss, and only needs 9 kbps of bandwidth per mirror! Locally, 10g links are not required, although it would obviously be nice. It should work fine on 1g. The product is available currently for VMware and Hyper-V. KVM and Xen run in the lab but they aren’t implementing this for customers yet.

We walked through deploying a new VSA, which was straightforward and simple. Creating a new datastore was equally simple. All the configuration on the back end as far as adding storage to ESXi hosts, etc, is done automatically by the wizard. The only prerequisite is to create a software iSCSI initiator ahead of time on the hosts. Volume snapshots are not an integrated feature at this point, although they do have the technology built and are working on clarifying use case and how to lay out the management of this. It is possible to create a stretched cluster, but you’re then bound by stricter latency and bandwidth requirements.

Great work from StorMagic during this presentation – I think we’re all happy with their focus on their target market, and the way they drive down the expense to put storage in ROBO sites. Join us again shortly for Solarwinds!