It's the last day of VMworld 2013 in San Francisco and I'd like to show some of the highlights which took my attention by not being there by myself, but found bits and pieces around the internet. With so many new enhancements to VMware vSphere 5.5 (which got twice stronger, or twice more in config maximums than 5.1 release) and new upcoming products (vSAN and NSX) the things are mind blowing. All the VMworld 2013 buzz and news will take some time to digest with more news and videos coming in future posts.
Most impressions to me, besides all the new product and innovations from VMware, came from the HyperConverged solutions, which is the future of IT. Future, which is here already with several companies (Simplivity, Nutanix, Scale Computing….) Hyperconverged solutions means that in one box there is compute (CPU), memory and storage.
The hardware really doesn't matter, it's the software which does all the heavy lifting and which provides all the performance improvements, scalability (when you add another host to the cluster) and eases out the deployment and management!
Simplivity Demo – great to see the backups across the globe in few seconds – backing up only the bits and pieces that aren't on the other side!!:
Nutanix Demo – Nutanix isn't new to my readers. I blogged about their NOS in my articles:
- Nutanix Distributed File System – the key of the “No SAN” solution
- Why No SAN Solutions for Virtualization will be a success (updated with NOS 3.5 now)
Chad Sakac (EMC) interview by Eric Sloof talks about EMC solution called ScaleIO which is GA and which does the same thing as vSAN! Chad talks about all the storage solution, not only the distributed storage, as not everybody needs and uses distributed storage ….
You'll see the details in the second video done by Chad.
Here is a video presenting the ScaleIO from EMC – a distributed software storage stack. It runs on a series of hosts (commonly at scales of tens to thousands) and repurposes the internal storage in the host (SAS, SATA, SSD, PCIe Flash) as shared storage across the network.
Thoughts:
VMworld 2013 has made many announcements, but also many of those products are still in Beta, like VSAN or NSX. So before we see them in GA, we might need to wait several more months. But we can see that the industry is heading back again into converged solutions based on multi-tiered storage (SATA, SSD, PCIe SSD, RAM). Whether those solutions are destined to datacenters or SMBs, they are already here and if I would be an IT admin or the guy who decides what's the next evolution of datacenter in my company, I would definitely be looking for hyperconverged solution.
Without specifying particular vendor It's not difficult to find out that the smallest All-In-One boxes are destined to run about 50 desktops (To give you an idea only, because you can of course run server VMs). And you have everything – storage, compute, RAM… with easy to deploy package.
