SimpliVity: The all inclusive HCI solution gets even better!

Its been a while since I’ve wrote about SimpliVity, and while I may not be there anymore, I still like to stay up to date.  Today, SimpliVity announces some great enhancements that really build in the areas that really count.

SimpliVity RapidDR

When i was doing demo’s of the OmniStack software, there were 4 aspects of the built in data protection that i would always show off: Backup, Restore, Clone, and Move.  While these make up the basic components of a disaster recovery plan, what was lacking was the automation piece.  Enter RapidDR.

RapidDR provides the automation and work flows that tie all the data protection functionality together and deliver a truly comprehensive solution.  Now users can schedule power on order, network and resource changes, as well as external scripts to run as part of a simple wizard.  RapidDR will utilize Simplivity’s built in rapid restore technology to get customers up and running with a useable VM and thus reducing the amount of time it takes to recover from an incident.

SimpliVity RapidDR

This enhancement also improves compliance as well.  All the scripts and recovery steps are self documenting to help improve compliance and understanding, and cut down on the time and complexity of manually building run books.

MS SQL specific backups

While application aware backups had been a part of SimpliVity since the initial version, i noticed often that customers would stack it with another SQL specific backup product to get all the functionality they needed.  Now, with additional enhancements, those are a thing of the past.  Now, when you backup a SQL server, you can do things like log truncation.  And when you restore the VM, it will run through the entire restore and bring SQL server back to a running configuration, rather than having to restore the database from within.

SimpliVity All Flash Node

Saving the best for last, this has been something I’ve been waiting for since day 1 at SimpliVity.  If you thought OmniStack was fast before, wait till it’s loaded up with flash.  This update replaces the spinning disk with 1.6TB Intel SSDs.  These nodes will come in equivalent specs to the larger nodes as far as CPU, RAM, and storage, while delivering up to 5x increased performance.  As already validated by the AFA market, adding flash is a great way to keep up with the demands of an ever expanding environment and deliver predictable performance.  Combine that with the rest of the enhancements already offered and you have a very robust datacenter in a box.

SimpliVity All Flash Node

Conclusion

As a presales engineer, its clear that product management has been listening to feedback as these 3 were highly requested features and I’m glad to see them being brought to market as early as Q4 2016 (aka next quarter).  If you are attending VMworld, be sure to stop by the booth and check this out.  And if you are attending the show, drop me a line in the comments and lets meet up!

Turning VDI up to 11!

11It’s an exciting time in the world of HCI.  More and more people are starting to realize the benefits of consolidating their environments down to a smaller footprint.  Today, SimpliVity is taking that a step further and cranking up VDI density to 11!  Building on the momentum of the OmniStack 3.0 release, a new software update greatly improves the time to deployment and performance of VDI workloads while maintaining predictable results as you scale.  While you can read the full announcement here, I want to highlight a few of the results:

  • 1000 linked clones in 4 nodes
  • 1000 desktops in 70 minutes
  • 1000 logins in 1000 seconds

These are some pretty bold claims, and to back that up, they are all validated by LoginVSI benchmarks!

1000 linked clones in 4 nodes

So before I dive into these claims, a little background information about the environment.  These tests were performed on the all new OmniCube CN-2400 platform.  This platform give a 15%-20% boost over the CN-2200 and brings the Intel Haswell chipset to a lower cost solution.  As with all the OmniCube offerings, RAM and CPU are adjustable to fit your needs.  CN-24004 of the CN-2400s were placed in a cluster and each were given 384 gigs of ram.  As for the different type of VMs used, they were based on the industry standards for Task Worker, Office Worker, and Knowledge Worker.  Using Windows 7 64 bit, they were given 1 gig of ram, 1.5, and 2 gigs respectively.  So lets take a look at the first claim.  Loading 1000 desktops into this size of an environment delivers unheard of density in the HCI space.

1000 desktops in 70 minutes

One of the major stresses on a VDI environment is the amount of time it takes to provision desktops.  Whether you are deploying a new OS, refreshing the existing image after an update, or bringing up your environment after a disaster, users don’t want to have to wait around to get access to their work, and likewise administrators don’t want to spend all night doing maintenance (IT admins need sleep too!).

1000 linked clones in 70 minutes

As you can see from the graph above, the number of linked clone desktops scaled up linearly as they registered a desktop check-in in the Horizon View logs.  Performance of the virtual desktops did not take a hit either as the number of instances increase as seen in the graph below.

1000 linked clones performance

1000 logins in 1000 seconds

Login storms, love them or hate them, it’s a part of doing business.  Every morning, users all login around the same time, and infrastructure needs to be able to handle that.  For this test, SimpliVity wanted to see just how much load could be put on the system during a scenario such as this, so the login time was adjusted to occur every second (a 2.8x increase over the industry standard for testing) which means that by 1000 seconds, all 1000 desktops will have performed a login.

1000 logins 1000 secondsI think the results here speak for themselves.  As the number of active sessions increases, performance remains steady and well below the threshold where users would see problems.

The full results of all the testing is posted here.  I’m really excited by this development and can’t wait to see what can be achieved in the future.

Introducing OmniStack 3.0 from SimpliVity

new-and-improvedToday I’m pleased to announce some exciting new features that i’ve been looking forward to since I joined SimpliVity 3 months ago.  Today we announced version 3.0 of our OmniStack Data Virtualization Platform.  This new version provides improvements across the board as well as additional features.  There’s something for everyone!

Under the hood, improvements have been made that have generated, on average, a 30% performance gain in high IO workloads such as exchange and SQL.  Improvements have also been made to dramatically increase the number of cubes you can have in  single datacenter and a federation, allowing for greater datacenter consolidation.

 

Unified Protected ROBO Solution

The first new change to OmniStack revolves around a new Unified Protected ROBO Solution with 2 goals in mind: (A) Unified management of all remote sites and (B) Ease of data protection for all remote sites.  With that in mind, a new Hub-and-Spoke topology was designed into the product.

ROBO_Hub_Spoke

This new design will cut down on the amount of cross chatter from remote sites by only communicating directly with the central cluster, freeing up bandwidth for essential traffic.  During deployment of the federation, the hub-and-spoke architecture will automatically detect its configuration and add remote sites to the federation without the need for user interaction.

 

OmniCube CN-1200

With a new solution, comes a new product, and this is a perfect opportunity to showcase the new CN-1200!

CN-1200

As you can guess from the model number, this is our smallest offering yet, perfect for ROBO sites that need to run only a handful of critical apps.  This new, smaller OmniCube gives you all the same data protection features you get with its bigger brethren.  I will have a single 8 core CPU, a fixed amount of hard drives, and 2 options for available ram.

 

File Level Restore

While the VM centric approach to backups allows users to backup and restore the entire VM at a time, there are instances where that becomes more work than is really needed.  As a power user, there have been plenty of opportunities where i have needed to restore just a single file, but rolling back an entire system just wasn’t an option.

File_Level_Restore

With the click of a button, administrators can take a single file in windows operating system backups and present them to any VM in the system.  This was a huge feature request from our customers and I’m glad we were able to deliver on it!

Backup Policy ImpactIn addition to the new backup and restore option, a range of changes have been made to administering backups.  Administrators can now do the following to help accommodate changes to business needs:

 

  • Edit existing Backup Policies Rules
  • Edit retention time for existing backups
  • Set retention time for manual backups at creation
  • Create new policy and assign to VMs in bulk
  • Resume/suspend backup policies for maintenance
  • Predicted Total Backup Reporting
  • CLI improvements for enhanced scripting capabilities

 

New Top Workload Viewer

For the user who wants to get more metrics and reporting out of their solution, SimpliVity has added a new top workload viewer to the datacenter overview tab.

Top Workload Viewer

Users can now click on on the performance chart and get a detailed report of what contributed to that metric!  For users trying to figure out what is sucking down all the available resources, you no longer have to turn to an add on solution like vROps.

 

New Deployment Manager

Not every enhancement we worked in was for the end user, this one is for the partners doing deployments.

Deployment ManagerThis new deployment manager will speed up installs by allowing partners to deploy multiple nodes in parallel!

A New Partnership

Last week SimpliVity announced a new partnership to deliver even more choice to customers.  The OmniStack Data Virtualization Platform has been extended onto Lenovo hardware in 3 offerings for small, medium, and large depending on customers needs.

Lenovo PartnershipThis new offering builds on the concept of being hardware agnostic.  We now have 3 different offerings at each size.

Vendor Agnostic

As you can see, SimpliVity has made enhancements to all aspects of the hyperconverged solution.  If you’d like to see these in action, hit me up and i’d be happy to give you a live demo of the new features.  If you’ll be at VMworld, be sure to check out our booth and for those of you who won’t be able to attend, we have a virtual experience where you can see everything SimpliVity has to offer.

Be sure to check back here often as I have more to share in the future!

 

 

Want to go to VMworld 2015? Win a trip from SimpliVity!

VMworld is a great gathering of all things VMware and I think that everyone should have the chance to go.  Unfortunately, it can also be an expensive gathering, which might be cost prohibitive for some potential attendees.  Good news though, because my employer, SimpliVity, is giving away 3 sets of tickets that include hotel and airfare.  All you have to do is click below and enter for a chance to win.

VMworld Social Contest

Winners will be announced on July 17th, 24th, and 31st.  Good luck to everyone!

I’ve found that next great job!

New JobA month ago I blogged about my social search for that next great job for me.  The outpouring of support from the community was fantastic I want to thank everyone that reached out to wish me luck and offer me advice.  Along this journey I had some great conversations.  I appreciate those who were in a similar position sharing their experience and helping reach out to recruiters and hiring managers they spoke with as well as friends who went above and beyond to advocate for me internally.  I had some great options before me that could take me to a customer role, working for a partner, or stay in the vendor space.

A few of you might have seen this tweet, and while I wasn’t about share the exact details at that time, I had in fact received an offer letter that I was more than excited to sign and return.  So without any further delay, on Monday I will start my new job as a Solutions Architect for SimpliVity!

SimpliVity Logo

As I understand it, SimpliVity combines the responsibilities of SEs and SAs into one role and I couldn’t be more excited!  I have been following the hyper converged industry for the past year and I have been really impressed with SimpliVity’s approach to the topic.  While this is going to be a bit different for me since I haven’t formally done this kind of work before, I believe my time in Technical Support and Marketing will allow me to bring a unique perspective to this role.  Look for future blog posts as I learn more about the technology and the industry.