Simplivity just announced Omnistack 3.5 release. For those of you who don't know Simplivity, you might want to check my other post about their hyper-converged architecture and how they are able to provide a performance guarantee, as well as capacity savings across all the storage (including backups) and restore times.
The previous Omnistack release brought significant performance gain (up to 30 %), but the 3.5 release brought more. Features like stretched cluster multi-node support, Rest API ++. You can read about the previous release here – Simplivity Omnistack 3.0 Announced With Up To 30% increase in IO performance.
Simplivity Omnistack has also built-in backup tools allowing to restore VMs, files/folders or, with a help of third party tools, databases. Their solution is quite unique in the industry as they are leveraging OmniStack Accelerator Card. It's a hardware based acceleration card. Imagine NVidia for graphics… This card performs all of the heavy infrastructure operations, like data deduplication, compression, and optimization. As a result, you have more CPU power for normal cluster operations and your VMs.
Simplivity Omnistack 3.5 – What's new?
Intelligent Workload Optimizer – Takes into account not only CPU, Memory, I/O performance, but also Data location. Ensure both peak and predictable performance for business-critical workloads with our intelligent workload optimizer. Enhanced integration with vSphere Distributed Resource Scheduler eliminates costly data thrash by intelligently moving VMs, not data.
Quote from Simplivity blog post:
The DRS integration is particularly interesting since it introduces awareness of the location of VMDKs within the OmniStack Data Virtualization Platform to DRS. This integration allows DRS to properly ensure VMs have access to the CPU and memory resources they need, while also keeping each VM local to its data.
The alternative would be to have the data “follow the VM” every time a VM migrates, but that operation would be heavy, requiring unnecessary CPU, storage I/O, and network bandwidth. Instead, Intelligent Workload Optimizer’s integration with DRS does not require any data to be transferred as the VM moves to where the data is, which is much quicker and less resource intensive.
REST API – Industry standard, Intuitive standards commands and integrated development environment empower DevOps staff and accelerate time to value. Simplify integration of custom and third-party applications using a REST API. So customers are able to write their own scripts or applications.
Presented as a web UI
Then you're able to explore further via clicks…. and you see something like that…
Multi-Node Stretched Clusters – can span multiple sites and balance workloads across those. Improves availability of a campus data centers which span multiple sites. By deploying stretched cluster configuration you also mitigate risks, because you can tolerate a failure of a whole site.
As with VMware VSAN stretched cluster designs, some limits in terms of RTT and distance are limiting factors otherwise everyone would like to run stretched clusters configs. Things like network round-trip latency which shall be within 5ms or distance (less than 100km) are the factors that has to be taken into consideration when designing solutions like this.
- RPO is zero and RTO few seconds.
- Simplified Failover and failback.
Updates and patches without a reboot – Simplivity update manager, which allows to mass-update hosts with the latest version of the Omnistack software. It's a web-based UI and it does not need to reboot the underlying host. The patching can be done within simple support call.
It's possible to upgrade single node, multiple nodes or several data centers, in once.
There are two phases:
1. download the update/upgrade package to the hosts
2. Launch the update/upgrade process.
Simplivity and Microsoft Windows Server 2016
Simplivity is also preparing Omnistack for Hyper-V. In fact, they working closely with Microsoft and their upcoming Windows Server 2016. Simplivity will be releasing a Hyper-V version of their Omnistack software, which will be in sync with the upcoming release of Windows Server 2016, which is planned to be released later this year.
Omniview Predictive Insight – It's a new offering, a SaaS. A deep dive dashboard where you can see a custom visualization of the entire Simplivity deployment, globally. It also has predictive analysis for trends and forecasts, rapid diagnostics for troubleshooting event. issues. It's possible to hook several vCenter servers and Simplivity data points. The OmniView offering is available only for customers which are on Mission-Critical level of support.
A video from Simplivity demonstrating Simplivity web-based analysis tool..
Simplivity is one of the very dynamic hyper-converged actors. They have a fast releasing cycle and in each release, they bring in significant enhancements. They can also interest SMB as they also have a smaller hardware for ROBO environments, where you can run lower count of VMs. You can check the details on their site or also in my post mentioned above – Simplivity Omnistack 3.0 Announced With Up To 30% increase in IO performance.
Source:
- Simplivity
- Simplivity Blog post
