In my first post I talked about the Tech Field Day Roundtables where Asigra will take the lead in the first roundtable discussion. The second roundtable (on monday 26-08-2013) will be lead by the Infinio team. To be honest, I really don’t know that much about Infinio, other then the information that they gave during the presentation on Tech Field Day 9. I’ll put these video’s up for it is extremely valuable information if your like me a bit new to Infinio.
So three simple steps to seperate performance of capacity:
1. Download the setup file from the Infinio website
2. Discoever your virtual infrastructure
3. Deploy the accelerator engines and boost the performance
Infinio doesn’t use SSD (Flash) to boost performance, but the Infinio accelerator engine deploys a virtual appliance on each host that uses 2 vCPU’s ,8 GB of RAM and 15 GB of local storage to provide a pooled, deduplicated cache in memory to your vSphere environment.
I received an invitation of the TechFieldDay team to join them on their roundtables during VMworld 2013 in San Francisco. I attended these roundtables last year also, and it was awesome to do these deep dives with the companies presenting.
This year we have some vendors that I already met during previous Tech Field Days, but also some new ones.
The first roundtable being held will be on Asigra, a company providing companies a cloud model backup and recovery suite.
As the picture above shows, Asigra is an agentless backup and recovery suite. This is important as you want to protect your infrastructure the most easy but secure way. Installing an agent on every server can be time-consuming, it consumes resources (CPU, RAM) from the server and for agents to do it’s work you’ll probably have to open a firewall port on which communication to take place posing a security risk. Using the Asigra agentless approach you’ll bypass these problems.
Deduplication
As most modern backup and recovery vendors, Asigra offers deduplication. With Deduplication and Compression Asigra provides you as a customer, as well as the ISP the best possible solution for Cloud Backup.
I’m looking forward too seeing the Asigra guys again, as we already met them during Storage Field 2.
Today Nutanix released Nutanix Operating System (NOS) 3.5, as well with a technology preview for Microsoft Hyper-V support . This release introduces us to some interesting new developments like the Nutanix Elastic Deduplication Engine for RAM and Flash and dedupe for the capacity tier coming in the near future, a REST-API (Prism API), the PRISM UI and a Site Recovery Adapter for VMware’s SRM.
Microsoft Hyper-V support (Tech Preview)
Nutanix started with support for VMware vSphere. As NOS is hypervisor agnostic, after some time KVM support was included. Now with NOS 3.5 will include Microsoft HyperV and will use SMB3 for the shared storage access between the nodes. With the new PRISM UI you can manage all hypervisors from one interface. A great thing but think about the potential of this new hypervisor support on the Nutanix Platform. Using VMware vCloud Automation Center a customer could use Nutanix and create clusters that are best suited for the job.
Nutanix Elastic Deduplication Engine
In the earlier releases of NOS, inline compression of data was already included. NOS 3.5 introduces the Nutanix Elastic Deduplication Engine. It provides a Real-time deduplication for RAM and Flash, and in the near future Nutanix will include dedupe on the capacity tier (HDD) too. Nutanix looks at data that comes into the Content Cache (RAM and SSD) and puts it all in a Single touch pool (no dedupe will take place here) when the data is accessed for the second time it will be moved to the multi touch pool (here Dedupe will take place) after the data isn’t accessed any more it will be moved to de Capacity tier (HDD). Things like indexing and virusscanning will be catched in the single touch pool, for optimal deduplication.
The New Prism UI
Nutanix Prism is build from the ground up in HTML5. It is a management framework that simplifies the user experience. Within the Prism UI a user can view information in organized manor on system and VM information. With a tile based interface a customer can drill down into information on server, storage and network operations. with the Prism API, Nutanix provides a customer an easy way to explore the scripts needed to maintain and monitor the Nutanix environment even further.
75 new and updatet features in NOS 3.5
In the NOS 3.5 release Nutanix included a Site Recovery Agent for VMware SRM. VMware VAAI support and and extension of compression for the native Nutanix Disaster Recovery feature and so on…
For more infromation visit the Nutanix website, and make sure to visit Nutanix at VMworld in San Francisco (Booth 1521)
