Image: Gartner Inc Gartner recently released their Magic Quadrant (MQ)for x86 Server Virtualization Infrastructure. Both The Register and ZDnet have questioned the logic in the research. Many of the subject matter experts I follow on Twitter have questioned if the MQ is little more than marketing for those vendors that spend money with Gartner. I tackle the question and make some suggestions for Gartner which includes following the lead of Big 4 consulting practices that have to deal with similar issues. Read More →

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In: Infrastructure
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

My wife’s legacy PDA may be the perfect metaphor for the advantages and disadvantages of hyperconverged infrastructure. I discuss why convergence may benefit the majority of data centers while not being a universal solution for every enterprise.Read More →

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In: Infrastructure

I recently attended Storage Field Day 7 and spent some time talking about the concept of data virtualization.  Data virtualization seeks to add a layer of        abstraction between the storage type and the client. Data virtualization, similar to what server virtualization did for compute resource, seeks to free the data from the underlying physical resources. Primary Data seeks to make data virtualization the cornerstone of software-defined storage. In November of last year Primary Data came out of stealth to address the problem of data mobility using data virtualization.  Today data is locked up in storage arrays, public cloud providers, and local server storage.  Each of these types of data repositories had different data service offerings ranging from rich to extremely limited. The metadata and data are locked away of the silo of the repository. A few solutions exist in the market today for data virtualization, but they rely on the data capabilities of theRead More →

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In: Storage, 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

In 2012, at VMworld, we first saw the “technology preview” for Virtual Volumes or VVOLs for short.  Here we are, nearly three years later, and VVOLs are part of vSphere 6.0 release!  So, what the heck is a Virtual Volume anyways? To answer that question we really need to understand how the storage and virtualization areas interact in today’s IT organization.   Today we have a pretty clear delineation between the roles of storage and VMware admin.  The storage administrator creates a LUN on a tradition storage array and presents it to the VMware environment for consumption.  The storage administrator is tasked with ensuring the array is working and the storage assigned meets the requirements given. Once the LUN has been assigned to the VMware environment, the allocation portion of the storage administrator’s job is done.  Now the VMware admin will create the datastore, assign virtual machines to reside on it, and managed its capacity. When theRead More →

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In: Storage

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

It wasn’t that long ago when the mainstream technology world was all abuzz with this whole virtualization thing. It didn’t take long before every enterprise was developing a virtualization strategy. In fact virtualization is a requirement for most enterprise IT shops seeking to enable automation and standardization of infrastructure. Containers are quickly becoming mainstream due, in part, to Docker. What is a container? It’s another form of virtualization, but rather than emulating hardware like a virtual machine, it’s provided an isolated software environment on top of an existing operating system. Certain system resources, such as operating system binaries, are shared amongst the containers on an operation system. Other resources can be dedicates to ensure performance of a container. This containerization allows for the standardization of application deployment and delivery. This is a change in how we build and delivery software services. As more and more businesses move to cloud infrastructures services they are faces with the challengeRead More →

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In: Cloud

At Mega Launch this year EMC announce a product called ProtectPoint which stands ready to change the way we think about backups in the datacenter.  With modern data protection solutions we struggle to maintain a delicate balance between backup performance, data protection, and recoverability. This balance has left us with host intrusive and backend intensive data protection processes on complex and costly backup infrastructure.  Many companies have looked to snapshots technologies to help improve the speed at which they meet stringent protection requirements, but snapshots are not backups unless the data is copied to a secondary media.  A snapshot depends on the original data existing and being functional. That means if the primary storage were to become unavailable so does the snapshot.  That is a huge gap in recoverability. EMC ProtectPoint will help you bridge the gap between snapshot technologies and backup storage media by combining the performance of snapshots with the functionality of backups.  ProtectPoint accomplishedRead More →

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In: Backup