Interesting storage stuff from VMware Partner Exchange 2012

Original Blog: http://blogs.vmware.com/vsphere/2012/02/interesting-storage-stuff-from-vmware-partner-exchange-2012.html

I had the pleasure of attending the VMware Partner Exchange this year. I delivered a deep dive presentation on VMware's Storage Appliance (the pdf can be found here), as well as an overview of the features going into the next version of the VSA. I can't discuss these features with you just yet, but rest assured I will be doing a number of posts on the new features as soon as I have permission to do so.

Like other conferences that I get invited to, I always try to take a look around the Solutions Exchange and see what cool things are going on in the storage space. This post simply discusses some of the new and interesting products/features that I've seen from our partners at PEX. It is no way all-encompassing, as I didn't get to see everyone. Hopefully you'll find it interesting all the same.

 

Disclaimer - Once again, (I am sure that you are fed up with me repeating this message at this stage) the vSphere storage blog has to remain storage vendor neutral to retain any credibility. VMware doesn't favour any one storage partner over another. I'm not personally endorsing any of these vendor's products either. What I'm posting here is what I learnt about the products and features at the sessions & something which I hope you find interesting too.

 

My first stop off was to the Atlantis Computing stand to find out more about their new VDI Performance Accelerator product called ILIO. I'm taking a bit of poetic license by including it in 'storage', but it addresses an area that is of concern right now in the VDI space. This is a product that VDI folks have been getting very excited about. I spoke to Joshua Petty, Director of Systems Engineering at Atlantis. He told me that the ILIO software appliance (virtual machine), which sits in the I/O path between your hypervisor and storage, will increase your VDI performance 10 fold, allowing up to 4-7 times more desktops per host.The ILIO also does inline deduplication, reducing storage capacity for each desktop by up to 99%. This is all very impressive. Since the appliance sits in the I/O path, it presents an iSCSI or NFS datastore at the front-end to the hypervisor, and at the backend, it is presented with NFS, iSCSI or Fibre Channel storage from the storage array.The appliance then sits in the middle, doing its dedupe & acceleration bit.

The one concern I did have is what happens to I/O in flight should this appliance fail. It would appear that Atlantis offer the ILIO in both fault tolerant and high availability configurations. They can also create a synchronous FT cluster of Atlantis ILIO virtual machines on separate physical hosts. There certainly seems to be a lot of interest brewing in this technology. More here at http://www.atlantiscomputing.com/products/


During this trip, I also managed to meet up with Martin Lister, who heads up the Rapid Desktop Program at VMware. I did a previous post about this program where I describe how Pivot3 on boarded very quickly, and appeared to have gained a lot of traction as a result of their participation in this program. It was great to again meet with Lee, Olivier, Mike and the rest of the Pivot3 guys at PEX and hear how well things are going for them in the VDI space.

Martin also told me that a number of other VMware storage partners are readying themselves to certify very soon in this program. Certified partners then get listed in the VMware HCL under the category VMware View POC Solutions.

Note however that the program is not directed at storage vendors, but is aimed at solution providers. The partner becomes the one-stop-shop for a complete VDI solution that has been fully tested & then certified by VMware. This includes the hypervisor, storage & VDI. The RDP certified partner will have to follow strict criteria for ease of roll-out/deployment of the VDI solution, as well as provide a solution that can host a defined number of View desktops. Pivot3 also did a presentation at PEX around their VDI solution which was very well received. Unfortunately I missed it myself, but I've since heard that there was a lot of interest in their solution.

I'm hoping to do a follow up post shortly detailing some of the new partners that are certifying on this program. Its definitely going from strenght to strength.

My final update is around a new partner called Starboard Storage Systems. These were the new kids on the block at PEX 2012, and after chatting with Tony Lagera, one of Starboard's Regional Sales Managers, it would appear that these guys have just recently come out of stealth mode. It looks like their play is to make the management of mixed workload environments much simpler, and allow a vSphere admin who may not have in-depth storage knowledge to easily manage their storage infrastructure on a per application basis. If I understood correctly, their array implements tiering to achieve this - what Starboard are calling their Mixed-workload, Application-Crafted Storage Tiering (MAST) architecture. This replaces a RAID configuration found in traditional arrays. Starboard state that this reduces a lot of complexity involved in setting up the correct type of storage for your application. Their AC72 storage system also comes with an SSD tier for improved performance, and supports connectivity across multiple storage protocols including NFS, iSCSI, and Fibre Channel.

Not sure about VAAI support, or if there is a vCenter plugin for management at this time. I'll have to keep an eye out for these guys at future conferences. More about them here - http://www.starboardstorage.com/

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