Next time you walk into your local Mega Lo Mart take a look around and try to think about the sheer volume of data potentially created. Shoppers have rewards cards, items have barcodes, cash registers keep track of money, and countless other things that could be recorded. In thousands of stores like this companies place small data centers to manage and analyze all that data, but for the average enterprise remote offices as much smaller.   These enterprise IT remote offices typically have a very specific need: file shares. File shares don’t have the scale that warrants spending much money building a cluster or a small virtualization farms, but they are critical to the remote users. They depend on them as part of their daily work lives, so building a remote office solution can be more complicated than plugging in Windows server. The solution needs to think about disaster recovery, traveling employees, network bandwidth, data protection, dataRead More →

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In: Converged, Infrastructure, Tech Field Day, Virtualization
Maxta Logo

Earlier this year I attended Storage Field Day 7 and a hot topic was, of course, hyperconvergence. The simplicity of all-in-one convergence is helping lead a transformation in the datacenter market – no wonder that we had three sessions on the topic. The session from Maxta was interesting because their offering helps overcome a preconception many in the enterprise space have about hyperconvergence. The issue is that of linear scaling whereby when you need storage you must add compute and vice versa. By eliminating the need to add compute power and storage simultaneously Maxta provides huge benefits when compared to others.   A Maxta solution consists of a minimum of three nodes. All virtual machines are protected in a RAID-1 style by keeping a second copy of the VM on another host. The 3nd node serves as a witness to ensure data integrity. Each node consists of compute, storage, and a hypervisor. The storage is designed asRead More →

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In: Converged, Tech Field Day

A few years ago while attending EMC World, I had the chance to meet with Chuck Hollis and several other VMware employees to talk about an idea they had. They wanted to make use of untapped local storage resources inside an ESX host. Rather than simply holding the ESX boot image, they wanted to make the resource usable for virtual machines inside the entire ESX cluster. We talked over what seemed like a clustered file system that could protect data across ESX hosts. I pointed out that spinning disks are slow and they talked about using SSD drives to accelerate I/O operations. It was an interesting idea and I was curious if anything would ever come of it. As you might have guessed something did come of it: Virtual SAN. With the initial release of VSAN I was interested but, admittedly, a bit underwhelmed. Here we are, a year after general availability, and VSAN has taken aRead More →

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In: Converged
VSPEX BLUE

The modern IT infrastructure is has become far more demanding that ever before. To meet that rising demand we have learned to be experts at “knob turning” to ensure peek performance.  We have implemented high performance, but rigid, systems in our attempt to keep up with the growing demand for great efficiency and agility.  All this effort we have exerted to turn complex rigid silos of compute and storage appear as a single optimized solution comes as a cost – lost time that could be spent in IT transformation.  The lack of simplicity can be countered by the use of Converged Infrastructure.   Until now EMC has been walking the edge of the infrastructure convergences market with its VSPEX reference architectures and it’s partnership with VCE. It has not, until now, offered it’s own converged infrastructure solution. Today EMC has announced its EVO:RAIL offering dubbed VXPEX BLUE.  With this all-in-one Hyper-Converged Infrastructure Appliance EMC is hoping toRead More →

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In: Converged, EMCWorld

Today at VMworld in San Francisco VMware announced a new product to help with the Software Defined Datacenter called EVO:RAIL. The goal of EVO:RAIL is to simplify how you buy, deploy, and operate your SDDC. EVO:RAIL is a scale out elastic hyper-converged infrastructure appliance. Sold by a qualified hardware partner and enabled by VMware, EVO:RAIL is built using vSphere, vCenter Server, and vSAN. Hardware wise the appliance is a 2U 4 node platform. Each node has dual processors and 192GB of memory. For vSAN it uses three 10k 1.2TB SAS drives and a single 400GB MLC SSD for IO acceleration. The first version of EVO: RAIL can scale out to four appliances for a total of 16 ESXi hosts with a single Virtual SAN datastore backed by a single vCenter Server. New appliances are automatically discovered and easily added to an EVO: RAIL cluster. EVO: RAIL Deployment, Configuration, and Management is the slick new HTML5 interface thatRead More →

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In: Converged