For a long time, VVols have appeared to be a solution looking for a problem. For the uninitiated, we will first give a brief outline of what VVols are and identify the problem that they purport to solve. On the face of it, it is nothing more than the ability to do one VM to …
Continue reading “Pure Storage Doubles Down on VVols and a Few Other Things”
Infinio is a Boston-based company that has a very interesting play on flash acceleration. Having recently sat through a briefing with its representatives, I can say that Infinio’s vision and future are bright.
Tintri is now shipping version 2.0 of their array software, Tintri OS, which further automates administration of their arrays and adds ReplicateVM remote replication features. ReplicateVM is an incredibly flexible asynchronous, IP-based replication technology that operates per-VM, allowing each VM to have custom RPOs.
One of the biggest things I took away from the VMworld 2011 in Las Vegas was the all advancements within the storage part of virtualization. For me, this was the year for storage. One product that really got my attention was the new NAS appliance, VMstore from Tintri. This 3U appliance, well 5U if you count the UPC, is a single datastore with 8.5TB of usable storage. This appliance was a collaboration of some very smart individuals from different companies like VMware, Datadomain, NetApp and Sun. They put their minds together and built this NFS appliance from the ground up with specially engineered file system to work with virtualization. What makes this VM-aware appliance different from other typical storage designs is VMstore uses VM’s and virtual disks as the abstractions instead of the conventional storage abstractions, volumes, LUN’s and files that we have all been accustomed to. Each I/O request will map directly to a virtual disk all while VMstore monitors, controls the I/O and presents disk performance statistics per VM or per VMDK.
