With VMworld starting next week, there’s lots of virtualization-related storage news. Here’s a quick summary of the main items for today:
EMC: new FC and iSCSI adapters, software
EMC announced some new features and options for their CLARiiON CX4 systems; this included 8Gb/s Fibre Channel and 10 Gb/s iSCSI interfaces, and improvements to their Navisphere Manager software. The new UltraFlex adapters can be mixed with 1 Gb/s iSCSI and 4 Gb/s FC adapters, and customers can upgrade to the new modules without taking their systems down. All new options are either available immediately or within a couple of months:
EMC offers 8Gb/s FC today, and will offer 10Gb/s iSCSI on CLARiiON networked storage systems in the third quarter of 2009 (this is in addition to the current offering of 8Gb/s FC and 10Gb/s iSCSI on Celerra® unified storage systems). Virtualization-aware Navisphere Manager and the new version of RecoverPoint are currently available worldwide. Replication Manager will be available in the third quarter of 2009. All solutions are available through EMC, its Velocity2 Program Partners and Velocity2 Authorized Services Network (ASN) Partners. It is also being offered by Dell.
EMC CLARiiON CX4-960
Isilon: no news here…
Isilon decided it might be a good day to publish a press release that doesn’t mention new products, partnerships or other announcements. They just want the world to know that they are taking advantage of their recently gained VMware Ready status by teaming up with several of their channel partners to aggressively market their scale-out NAS systems for use in virtualized environments. They recently released two product bundles specifically for their partner channel:
The first bundle combines Isilon’s highest performance 5400S nodes with its SnapshotIQ, SmartConnect and SmartQuotas software applications to deliver industry-leading IOPS and robust data management for the most performance-intensive virtualized applications. The second bundle combines Isilon’s 12000 nodes with SnapshotIQ, SmartConnect and SmartQuotas, providing the ideal balance of performance and capacity for mixed workloads in virtual environments.
NetEx: vMotion over WAN links
NetEx wants the world to know that their HyperIP for VMware product makes it possible to do migration of virtual machines between VMware servers over WAN links. This had been demonstrated earlier by Cisco and VMware, but NetEx claims to be the first to offer a commercially available solution for VMotion over longer distances.
“Cisco is looking for a solution to a problem that NetEx solved 10 years ago by overcoming the latency issues that are inherent in long-distance data transport,” said Robert MacIntyre, Vice President, Business Development and Marketing at NetEx. “We have now virtualized the HyperIP application for VMware infrastructures and are delivering VMotion migration solutions today that Cisco and VMware are promising at some unspecified future date. For VMware customers who need to perform live VMotion migrations today, including the storage, HyperIP is the only choice.”
There are no actual distances listed in the press release, but with a starting price of $2.000 it must be good… Free trials are available for those who are interested.
Storwize: don’t forget us at VMworld!
Storwize will be showcasing their STN-6000 data compression product at VMworld. They are in booth 1932, so stop by if you are interested. Basically, the STN-6000 sits between a traditional filer and the clients, providing transparent data compression.
Storwize savings calculator
They have a nice tool to calculate potential savings in both capacity and power usage; have a look here if you’re interested. I’m always wary of vendors claiming >50% compression without using de-duplication, but YMMV.
VKernel: optimizing VM resource allocations
Finally, VKernel Corporation announces a new VKernel Optimization Pack that bundles three of their software products: Wastefinder, Rightsizer and Inventory. The bundle includes Capacity Analyzer 4.1, and costs $399 per CPU socket.
Wastefinder — quickly finds where resource capacity (CPU, memory, and storage) are being wasted in the virtual infrastructure. By identifying zombie VMs, expired snapshots, and other wasteful consumers, users can reclaim expensive capacity to optimize virtual environments and achieve a better, faster ROI.
VM Rightsizer — a simple tool for tuning your VMs with the right amount of resources (CPU, memory, and storage) to drive maximum VM densities without impacting performance. Rightsizer is unique in its ability to make recommendations and automatically implement changes to find improperly allocated resources and optimally configure VMs.
Inventory — automatically collects important information about all VMs in the virtual infrastructure and creates a detailed inventory report showing VM name, created by and when, resource allocations, and much more. The inventory is continually updated to match the dynamic environment and is searchable by different criteria to quickly find specific information.
NetEx sample report
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[...] a report by DeepStorage Labs that provides some details about the performance improvements their HyperIP technology provides when migrating VMware virtual machines over WAN links. NetEx previously mentioned a [...]