It is incredible that it already more than a year since my last post here at VDIcloud, and it’s even worse that I promised more content but never delivered. So let’s give it another try, and where better to start than with the Tech Field Days I’ve been to in the past. Let’s start with the last I’ve been to (also almost a year ago) at the NetApp Insight event in Las Vegas in 2018. As the next event will be this month, I thought it would be a good idea to see what they showcased last year, and then after the event this year compare and see what NetApp brings to the table.
How to give HCI power to the customer
We live in a world where data is worth more than oil, and companies are constantly looking for better and faster ways to utilize their data to the fullest. A lot of times we here about cloud, and instantly we think about Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services and the Google Cloud Platform, but a lot of companies are still working on their own on-premises infrastructures albeit that more and more companies are trying to replicate the public cloud providers by utilizing Converged and Hyper Converged solutions. Bridging the gap between On-premises solutions and Public Cloud Providers is something that a lot companies are struggling with and for this they are looking at the HCI providers for help. NetApp is relatively late with their HCI solution, but that doesn’t mean that they’re providing the right solution for their customers.
NetApp’s view on HCI
During this presentation Gabriel goes deeper into what the focus is for NetApp HCI and provides answers on some of the important questions NetApp’s view on HCI. The presentation was focussed on what defines HCI, what types of HCI exist, and what are the benefits for customer. As always with the Field Day events there are some awesome delegates that have great questions an remarks on what the presenter is telling, and this presentation has some great remarks on HCI, CI and what the difference really is. I really loved the conversation on what the difference is between CI and HCI and what that means for the customer, but I do agree with Gabe that the biggest difference between CI and HCI is that CI comes by the rack and the stack is controlled by the vendor, where as with HCI you can start small and grow big. Both have their advantages, but if convergence started with the hyperscalers, HCI is much more in line than CI. NetApp offers a solutions that exists of Compute nodes and Storage Nodes that can be scaled independently of each other. This provides customers the ability to really disaggregate compute and storage, while still having the power of a single scalable and easy to maintain platform.
Arjan’s view
I’ve always looked at the HCI solution as a great step towards building on-premises cloud solutions (private cloud if that is a better name for you to use). The problem I’ve always seen with these solution is that the focus often seemed to be on the bringing the vendors solution to the customer and in doing so it is not always bringing the best solution to them. Hyper Converged Infrastructure for me is much more about bridging the private and public Cloud and for me the solutions that NetApp provide to its customers seems to meet these standards. So calling in Hybrid Cloud Infrastructure instead of Hyper Converged is a great one. Sure there is work that needs to be done by NetApp, but who knows what they will announce in a couple of weeks. Just watch the video and read the blogs below to have the best insights on the NetApp HCI solution. And don’t forget to visit the Tech Field Day Xtra site for this event here: https://techfieldday.com/event/netappinsight18/
I just wanted to shout out to my fellow TFDx delegates at this event that wrote some great insights to this preasentation:
I’ve been way to quite for the last year or so. Not that I didn’t want to write stuff down and share with the community, but I just didn’t have any time left to do so. Let me explain why.
When I started my working life I started in construction, and when my IT hobby my career I always dreamed of building our own house sometime. Two years ago this dream was realized when a peace of land came up for sell in our hometown.
Just some pictures of the process:
We (our family) put all the time and effort into this, but the outcome is amazing. I’ll put the final pictures online as soon as everything is finished, but we moved in to the house 2 weeks ago, and are just finishing with the final projects.
In the mean while we are working (Thanks Max!!) hard on the TECHunplugged website, and expect a lot of new stuff on there very soon!
It is time to start blogging again, and there couldn’t possibly be better way then by starting on my invite to Storage Field Day 15 in Silicon Valley. Truth be told, not blogging was mainly due to building our own house, and we’re still very busy with building our dream house here in the Netherlands, but no more excuses for me and let’s start doing the previews for next week.
Second timer: Starwind
Last year at Storage Field Day 12 we had the first presentation from Starwind at a Tech Field Day, and I was really impressed by the technology they offer and more importantly the level detail they put in to their presentation as well as the knowledge they showed during the presentation. Most of the VMware techies will know Starwind for their ISCSI target technology they offered, which was used in many homelab environments. I know I’ve used it on multiple occassions in my lab at least. But they are moving on an during the SFD15 presentation we got more information on their HCI solution, AcloudA, Veeam VTL and Cloud replication and Starwind Scale Out and Log Structured File Systems.
There are a couple of great resources on the products they’ve talked about last time that I’ll provide a link to here:
When companies already presented at a Tech Field Day, I try to watch all the videos before we go in to a new one, although with some companies this really seems impossible because of the number of times they were at a Tech Field Day. With Starwind this is (now) still easy, and that is why I’ll also include the SFD12 Vimeo videos here as well.
Starwind Simple, Flexible, Scalable Storage
Starwind Fault-Tolerant Storage Demo
StarWind Scale Out and Log Structured File System
StarWind and AcloudA: Stairway to Cloud
StarWind and Veeam VTL and Cloud Replication
I’m really looking forward to meeting the Kolomyeytsev brothers again, and i hope you will follow us during the livestream at the Tech Field Day site:
Disclaimer: I was invited to this meeting by TechFieldDay to attend SFD15 and they paid for travel and accommodation, I have not been compensated for my time and am not obliged to blog. Furthermore, the content is not reviewed, approved or edited by any other person than the me.
Tuesday 18 april 2017, Patrick van Helden, Director of Solution Architecture at Elastifile was at Metis IT to tell about Elastifile. We had the chance to try a real-life deployment of the Elastifile software.
Elastifile is a relative new name in the storage area. Since this month, the company is out of stealth and has presented its Elastifile Cloud File System. The company is founded in 2013 in Israel by three founders with a strong background in the virtualization and storage industry. In three funding rounds the product raised $58 Million. In the last round $15M came directly from Cisco. Other investors in Elastifile are leading flash Storage vendors and Enterprise Cloud Vendors.
What is Elastifile?
The goal of the founders is to have a storage platform that is able to run any application, on any environment, at any location. Whereby any location means really any location: Cloud or on premise. The product is developed to run with the same characteristics in these environments. Therefor Elastifile wrote from scratch a POSIX compliant filesystem that supports file, block and object oriented workloads and is optimized for flash devices. You can store your documents, user shares, VMware VMDK files, but also use it for big data applications, all stored on the same Elastifile Cloud File System.
But what is the difference with a NetApp storage for example? A NetApp system can also provide you the same capabilities and is already doing this for years. The first thing in which Elastifile’s approach is different than NetApp, is the way the product is written. It’s written for high performance and low latency. Elastifile only supports flash devices and the software knows how to handle the different types of flash devices to get the best performance and extend the lifetime of flash devices. Furthermore, ElastiFile is linearly scalable and can be combined with compute (Hyperconverged Solutions).
Another difference is that the Elastifile Cloud File System can run inside a (public) cloud environment and connect this to your own on premise environment. The problem with (public) cloud environment is that it gives you not the same predictable performance as in your on-premise environment. The Elastifile Cloud File System have a dynamic data path to handle noisy and fluctuating environments like the cloud. Due to this dynamic path Elastifile can run with high-performance and most important with low latency in cloud-like environments.
Deployment models
Elastifile’s Cloud File System can be deployed in three different deployment models:
HCI
Dedicated Storage mode
In-Cloud
The first deployment model is HCI, where the Elastifile software runs on top of a hypervisor. Now, Elastifile supports only VMware, additional hypervisors will be added in future releases. You can compare this deployment with many other HCI vendors, but when connecting and combining the HCI deployment model with one of the other deployment options it gives you more flexibility and capabilities. Most other HCI vendors only support a small set of certified hardware configurations, wherein Elastifile supports a broad range of hardware configurations.
The second and in my opinion the most interesting deployment model is the dedicated storage mode deployment. In this model, the Elastifile software is directly installed on servers with flash devices. Together they create the Elastifile distributed storage. With this deployment model, it is possible to connect hypervisors directly to these storage nodes using NFS (and in the future SMB3), but also connect bare-metal servers with Linux, Oracle or even container based workloads to this same storage pool.
As we already discussed earlier the latest deployment is the In-Cloud deployment. Elastifile can run In-Cloud in one of the big public cloud providers but is not limited to public clouds. Elastifile can also run in other clouds as long it delivers flash based storage as infrastructure. The Elastifile can use the storage to build its distributed low-latency cloud file system.
When combining these three models you get a Cloud ready file system with high performance, low latency and a lot of flexibility and possible use-cases.
Use-cases
HCI file services
A great use-case for the Elastifile Cloud File System is that you can decouple the operating system and application from the actual data of the application in a HCI deployment. You can use the Elastifile Cloud File System to mount a VM directly to the storage and bypass the hypervisor. And because the Elastifile Cloud File System is a POSIX filesystem it can store millions of files with deep file structures.
Linear scalable in cloud-like environments
A second use-case for the Elastifile Cloud File system is that the performance with any deployment of Elastifile delivers a predictable low-latency performance. When expanding the Elastifile nodes each node will add the same performance as any other node. When adding additional storage, you’re also adding additional storage controllers to the cluster. This result in a linear scalable solution even in cloud-like environments.
Flash tiering
The last use-case of the Elastifile is that it could automatically move files on the filesystem to another tier of flash storage. This could be a cheaper type of flash or a less performing type of flash storage, for example consumer grade SSD’s. Movement will be based on policies. The Elastifile software can further offload cold data to a cheaper type of storage, like a S3 storage. This can be a cloud based S3 storage, but can also be an on premise S3 storage.
The future
How the future will look like is always difficult to say, but from all what I already tried is this a very promising first version of the Elastifile Cross-Cloud Data Fabric. In the session with Patrick, I deployed the software myself and Patrick showed us the performance on these deployed nodes without any problems. The idea’s around the product are great and on the roadmap, you find the most important capabilities which are needed to make it a real mature storage product.
This post is cross-posted on the Metis IT website: find it here
Last week I attended VMworld 2016 in las Vegas. The VMware CEO, Pat Gelsinger, opened VMworld 2016, with the statement that “a new era of cloud freedom and control is here.” During the presentation Pat introduced VMware Cloud Foundation and the Cross-Cloud Architecture. According to them, this will be game-changing and “will enable customers to run, manage, connect, and secure applications across clouds and devices in a common operating environment”.
So let’s jump into what Cloud Foundation is. The way VMware explains Cloud foundation is as glue between vSphere, Virtual SAN and NSX which enables companies using it to create a unified Software Defined Data Center platform. In other words: it is a native stack that delivers enterprise-ready cloud infrastructure for the private and public cloud.
As VMware Cloud Foundation is their unified SDDC platform for the hybrid cloud, it is based on VMware’s compute, storage and network virtualization, it delivers a natively integrated software stack that can be used on-premise for private cloud deployment or run as a service from the public cloud with consistent and simple operations.
The core components are VMware vSphere, Virtual SAN and NSX. Another component of VMware Cloud Foundation is VMware SDDC Manager which automates the entire system lifecycle and simplifies software operations. In addition, it can be further integrated with VMware vRealize Suite, VMware Horizon and VMware Integrated OpenStack (where another announcement was made on during VMworld).
The launching partner of VMware is IBM that will provide coverage around the world, when it comes to datacenter locations:
select VMware vCloud Air Network (vCAN) partners in the near future to enable consumption of the full SDDC stack through a subscription model. The partners will deliver a SDDC infrastructure in the public cloud by leveraging Cloud Foundation.
Conclusion
The road ahead for VMware can be no else than the path of Cloud Foundation and the Cross Cloud architecture. We need to see if the path chosen is enough to get VMware back on track again. In my opinion VMware is late to the party and they should have kept their good relationships with partners at the first place. But truth be said, it seems a very solid foundation for companies to build the next generation datacenters, with VMware’s unified SDDC platform. With some changes in course and a solid development of products VMware might be able to keep their stake in the datacenters.
If you are interested on these kind of topics, join us at the next TECHunplugged conference in Amsterdam on 6/10/16 and in Chicago on 27/10/16. TECHunplugged is a one day event focused on cloud computing and IT infrastructure with a formula that combines a group of independent, insightful bloggers with disruptive technology vendors and end users who manage the next generation technology environments. Join us!
During Storage Field Day 10 we had a very interesting presentation by Datera on their Elastic Data Fabric. They say its the first storage solution for enterprises as well as service provider clouds that is designed with DevOps style operations in mind. The Elastic Data Fabric provides scale-out storage software capable of turning standard commodity hardware into a RESTful API-driven, policy-based storage fabric, for the enterprise environments.
The Datera EBF solution gives your environment the flexibility of hyperscale environments through a clever and innovate software solution. In a fast changing application landscape being fast, flexible, agile and software defined is key. Cloud native is the new kid on the block and more and enterprises are adapting to these kinds application development.
Datera seems to be able to provide enterprises as well as cloud providers the storage that is needed to build these applications. The way this is accomplished by Datera is be defined in four main solutions:
Intent defined
What is Intent defined? I had a bit of a struggle on that question myself, so just lets stick to the explanation Datera provides:
Intent defined is a ochestrated play between storage and application. An application developer will know what he would like from storage, and can define these to the storage application programming interface. This is DevOps at its best. When storage is able to be scriptable from a developer perspective and manageable from a storage adminstrator perspective you know you hit the jackpot.
API first approach
Already mention the API a couple of times, but this is one of the key features of the Datera EBF, and therefor very important. Datera aims to set a new standard with the elegance and simplicity of their API. They intend to make the API as easy usable as possible to make sure it used and not forsaken because it so hard to understand.
The API is a well though and extremely hard peace to do right creating something as difficult as a storage platform for the customers Datera is aiming for. The API first approach and the approach Datera took developing the API seems to be a real seldom seen piece of art in this space.
Hyper-composable
Things always need to come together creating something like a storage platform. One of these things is that the companies buying your solution want the opportunity to mix and match. They want to buy what they need now and if they need more (capacity or performance or both) they want to add just as easy. At Datera the you can mix and match different kind of nodes without impacting the overall performance of the solution, making it one of these rare solutions that is truely hyper-composable.
Multi-Tenant
This is where a lot of software solutions say they are, but…. When you start using their products you find out the hard way that the definition of Multi-tenant is used in many ways, and true multi-tenancy is hard to get.
Is this different with Datera? They say it is, but to be honest I’m nit really sure of it. I’ll try to figure this out and reach out to the Datera people. And although they do not have a lot of official customers, a couple of them are well known for their multi-tenant environment, so my best guess is that the multi-tenancy part is OK with Datera, if not I’ll let you know.
Conclusion
I was very impressed with the information provided by Datera during Storage Field Day 10. Due to a ton of work coming back after SFD10 and TFD11 I didn’t really have time to do a deep dive into the technology, but that is where my fellow SFD10 delegates are a big value to the community, so here are their blogposts:
If you are interested in these kinds of topics, please join us for the TECHunplugged conference in Amsterdam on 6/10/16 and in Chicago on 27/10/16. This is a one day event focused on cloud computing and IT infrastructure with an innovative formula, it combines a group of independent, insightful and well-recognized bloggers with disruptive technology vendors and end users who manage rich technology environments. Join us!
During Tech Field Day 11 we had presentations from a lot of awesome companies. Some of them I knew, but others were new to me, and that while some of these already exist for multiple years. The first of these “older”companies was Netwrix.
When writing a couple of VMware designs in which compliancy was a big deal, I learned that a good auditing tool is a must have as the auditors will not approve anything if they you didn’t provide them with the right answers and tooling needed to be compliant. A tool like Netwrix can help a lot with this.
Netwrix History
So during Tech Field Day 11 I was pleased to see Netwrix do a great job at explaining where they came from and what they do. A couple of points that were told in this first presentation:
• The company is founded in 2006 (that’s right the company celebrates it’s 10th anniversary this year)
• The founders Michael Fimin and Alex Vovk, who both worked at Quest software before starting Netwrix.
• The company has no venture funding.
• The company has over 200 employees across the globe, and;
• They have over 7000 customers worldwide
But it might be better if you just watch part 1 of the presentation first:
The Netwrix auditor platform can help you audit and monitor multiple systems and application, the following are usable by default:
Microsoft Active Directory
Microsoft Exchange Server
Microsoft Office 365
Microsoft Sharepoint
Microsoft SQL server
VMware vSphere
Windows File Server
EMC
NetApp
Windows Server
Some of these are on-premises only, but a couple of them are also hybrid cloud capable, meaning you can audit your applications both on- and off-premises. Through the use of RESTful API’s both in and out bound you can leverage even more, but that is for a later blogpost :D.
Other TFD11 delegates on Netwrix
As always a couple of my TFD11 delegates also wrote some articles on Netwrix. Here are the articles already in the open (I’ll try to keep it updated, but I can’t promise anything :D):
And as always, all Netwrix information and videos are available at the Tech Field Day site: Tech Field Day Netwrix
As already mentioned I’ll try to keep this post updated if people will write more on Netwrix, and I will also try to do a part two and three on Netwrix, but first I want to write a couple of post on other companies presenting at TFD11.
This week I’m at the SDDC consulting training at the VMware EMEA HQ in Staines. There is a really full program with presentations and labs about the VMware SDDC portfolio. Products that will be covered in the training are:
vRealize Automation
vRealize Orchestrator
VMware NSX
VMware SRM
But the most important focus this week is the integration between all VMware products and 3th party products like InfoBlox and Service Now.
We started yesterday with the installation of a distributed vRealize Automation 6 environment. After clicking thru 281 pages of instruction the installation was finished. Some people in the class had problems with the lab base environment because of time out errors. The reason was a slow network connection not just slow but really really slow…
Dropped Packages
The lab environment consists of virtualized ESXi hosts and is using NSX for the networking part. In NSX there is some bug (or should I say undocumented feature ;-)) that cause lots of packet drops when using virtualized ESXi hosts and NSX. The solution to work around is to create DRS rules to keep some of the VMs (the ones you are working on) together on a virtualized ESXi host so all network traffic is kept locally. I think it’s also possible you experience the same slow connection if you are doing the VMware Hands On Labs because the setup is probably the same.
Strange names
Today when booting up my lab again I had the issue that the infrastructure tab had a strange name. The name was changed in: com.vmware.csp.component.iaas.proxy.provider@csp.places.iaas.label instead of just Infrastructure. All underlying tabs had the same problems. If you know where to click everything is still working, but it doesn’t feel good.
The solution to this problem is to just reboot some nodes of the vRA installation. But wait, which of the 10 servers do need a reboot? The answer is nearly all of them. The boot order for the complete stack is:
Microsoft SQL Database server
Identity appliance
vRealize appliance 1
vRealize appliance 2
IAAS webserver 1 & 2 (vRealize webportal and ModelManagerData services)
Application server 1 ( primary IAAS Manager and the DEM Orchestrator Server services)
Application server 2 (secondary IAAS Manager and the DEM Orchestrator Server services)
Proxy server 1 & 2 (DEM worker and Proxy Agent server services)
Rebooting from step 3 will resolve this issue. First shutdown all services in the reverse order and when you are at the vRealize appliance 1 just reboot this one. Wait till the VAMI is showing up in the console and then (and not earlier!) start the next one of the list. If the server is a Windows server give it some extra time to boot up all services.
If everything is restarted then you will see the normally names and tabs.
In half an hour we’ll go live with Storage Field Day 10. I do encourage you to watch live at the Tech Field Day site, but for those that really want to follow the livestream on vdicloud.nl, here you go:
Two weeks ago I attended the TechUnplugged in London. For whom doesn’t know what TechUnplugged is. TechUnplugged is a full day conference focused on cloud computing and IT infrastructure. The conference brings influencers, vendors and end users together so it is possible to create interaction between these people. If you want more information, look at techunplugged.io.
All speakers had a slot of 25 minutes to tell their story. First I thought it was very little time to tell a story, but after a day of presentation I think it’s sufficient to do the job. If the subject of the presentation is not in your area of interest, it will only cost you 25 minutes of your time. The presentations of the influencers are interspersed with the vendors so you have varied subjects and presentation styles.
The majority of the presentations were storage oriented. These presentations addressed subjects like: the history of storage, winners and losers in storage solutions, multiple vendors and secondary storage. Besides the storage presentations there was a session about OpenStack, Clouds and Containers and the presentation about the Software Defined Data Center from my colleague Arjan Timmerman with stroopwafels and chocolate. I gave, or it was the intention to give it live, a technical overview about vRealize Automation, but because of the bad Wi-Fi connection it was only a movie.
The last part was an ‘Ask Me Anything’ panel consisting of influencers and vendors. Everybody could ask any questions got their answers from different perspectives. It seemed as a nice concept, but it’s always difficult to create this kind of interaction. After the ‘Ask Me Anything’ panel it was time to start the social part of the conference (beer, wine and networking).
I’m looking back at a well-organized event with a broad pallet of interesting subjects and people involved. I think the combination of vendors and influencers and the presentations is perfect formula to be “updated” and involved in the last developments. For me some new products were introduced and I got some new insights in the fast changing world of cloud, storage and SDDC. I sincerely hope I meet you all at the next TechUnplugged in Amsterdam!
All speakers had a slot of 25 minutes to tell their story. First I thought it was very little time to tell a story, but after a day of presentation I think it’s sufficient to do the job. If the subject of the presentation is not in your area of interest, it will only cost you 25 minutes of your time. The presentations of the influencers are interspersed with the vendors so you have varied subjects and presentation styles.
The last part was an ‘Ask Me Anything’ panel consisting of influencers and vendors. Everybody could ask any questions got their answers from different perspectives. It seemed as a nice concept, but it’s always difficult to create this kind of interaction. After the ‘Ask Me Anything’ panel it was time to start the social part of the conference (beer, wine and networking).