Solution Exchange at #VMworld 2013 Barcelona

Solution Exchange is an area at VMworld where you can spend endless time…

As every year, I visited a lot of vendors to take a look at the newest trends and products. Besides the well-known brands like EMC, NetApp, Veeam,… there were many other smaller vendors and start-ups, that were worth a visit.

Here you will find a small selection from vendors I visited:

simplivity

One year ago – 2012, SimpliVity announced OmniCube – a 2U box combining compute and storage, delivered in three different hardware models.

This year at VMworld I had the chance to take a closer look at the OmniCube products:

  • CN-2000 comes with 6-8 CPU cores|5-10 TB usable storage for small to medium environments
  • CN-3000 comes with 12-24 CPU cores|20-40 TB usable storage for running most data center applications
  • CN-5000 comes with 24 CPU cores|15-30 TB usable storage optimized for highest performance applications workload

All Omnicubes offer some great functionalities/features:

  • Global deduplication (inline) and compression
  • Snapshots
  • Instant Data Protection
  • Cloud Integration
  • Global Management

Another big advantage is the possibility to connect two or more OmniCube systems to an OmniCube Global Federation. A Federation is a scalable pool of shared resources within and across data centers and to the cloud. By the way, you can mix different hardware models within a federation!

pernixdata

I was really excited to take a look at their write back flash caching solution. Pernixdata announced the “Industry’s First Flash Hypervisor for Virtual Data Centers” in August 2013 – so the product is brand new to the market.

The software is not delivered as an appliance, it is installed within your ESXi host.

This single piece of software + local flash devices in your ESXi hosts should provide an incredible performance boost to your existing storage.

As I wrote before, the software supports write back caching. To guarantee IO consistency, it is possible to  create replicas of the IO. You can create this clustered write back cache with 0-2 replicas at the moment.

veeam

Veeam was proud to present their newest version of Veeam Backup & Replication at VMworld. V7 introduced a lot of new market-leading features and enhancements such as Built-in WAN Acceleration or Virtual Lab for VMware Replicas, which enables you to create a functional but isolated copy of your production environment.

Some other great features are:

  • Native tape support
  • Backup from Storage Snapshots
  • 1-click Restore for VMs
  • a vSphere Web Client plugin
  • Self-service recovery of VMs and guest files
  • … and much more

I have already tried Veeam Backup & Replication V7 in my homelab and there is one other thing worth to mention. It is the fast and easy installation of the product in your production environment. There are only few products, which are so self-explanatory and unproblematic.

By the way, at the Veeam booth it was possible to get your own digital caricature drawn by an artist:

veeam_vmworld

 

nutanix

Nutanix also offers a converged infrastructure solution which combines compute and storage to a single, integrated appliance.

The modular building blocks allow organizations to start with a small deployment and grow incementally.

tintri

Tintri has announced their new T600 storage systems some time ago. You can choose between two models – T620 or T650. T620 supports up to 500 VMs, the T650 up to 2000 VMs.

Both models come with the well known management interface which allows IO Monitoring from the VM the way down to the disks.

 

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