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VMware Vannounces Vlots Vof Very Vnew Vstuff Vat VMworld

Plus more juicy snippets from EMC, Panzura and QLogic

VMworld saw EMC making a series of supportive announcements related to VMware. Panzura added cloud storage gateway facilities to all-flash arrays and hyper-converged products while QLogic focussed on links to NVMe drives and NVME over Fabrics technology.

Storage is getting easier for VMware admins and users to use while also getting faster to access on the shared array front, the company said.

EMC and XtremIO

EMC added shiny polish and gloss to improve how XtremIO works with VMware and Hyper-V. It announced XtremIO XIOS updates, with VMware integrations via SMI-S and VMware vRealize Orchestrator plus some Hyper-V integrations as well. The idea is to make it easier for application and infrastructure teams to handle XtremIO resource provisioning and management workflows, automation and orchestration in virtualised environments.

  • With XTremIO, AppSync, VSI and the vCentre Web UI integrated, vCenter administrators can locally recover and restore virtual machines and datastores, and perform file-level restores from within the virtual machine.
  • XtremIO Integrated Copy Data Management (iCDM) functionality reduces the need to buy additional HW and SW for copy data sprawl. It uses XtremIO virtual copy technlogy.
  • A vRealize Orchestrator plug-in allows infrastructure teams to build a self-service catalog of automated, end-to-end, infrastructure workflows for virtualisation administrators, DBAs, and application owners.
  • There is native support for Microsoft PowerShell version 4.0 and 5.0 via the XtremIO Management Server. Admin staff get a fully supported scripting environment.
  • XtremIO now supports the Storage Management Initiative Specification (SMI-S), so users can manage and provision XtremIO storage natively in their SMI-S user-interface of choice.
  • XtremIO includes support for Hyper-V virtualised environments via the System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) SMI-S profile.
  • A beta version of XtremIO’s web-based HTML5 graphical user interface has been released.

The new features in the latest release of the XtremIO operating system (XIOS) are available as a free software update for supported customers. The XtremIO vRealize Orchestrator plugin will be available later this year.

EMC Enterprise Hybrid Cloud

EMC also announced general availability of its Enterprise Hybrid Cloud v4.0 with expanded multi-site support, enhanced data protection and VM encryption. There is a Native Hybrid Cloud offering (a turnkey Pivotal Cloud Foundry platform) built on hyper-converged VxRail 200 and 200F appliances.

New capabilities in Enterprise Hybrid Cloud v4.0 include:

  • Multi-Site Support – extends Enterprise Hybrid Cloud from two to up to four data centre sites with up to four instances of vCenter. EMC customers with physically distributed data centres can centrally manage their multi-site cloud using a self-service catalogue.
  • Enhanced Data Protection – data protection can span multiple sites and new options enable recovery to any point-in-time from outages, corruption or disasters for individual or groups of Virtual Machines via the self-service catalogue.
  • Modifications to backup service levels can be performed at any time in a workload lifecycle from the self-service catalogue.
  • Anytime VM Encryption – adds ability to add or remove encryption for VMs via the self-service catalogue at any time in the lifecycle of a VM.

General availability of Native Hybrid Cloud on VCE VxRail Appliances 200 and 200F is planned for the end of the third quarter of 2016.

EMC data protection and VMware

EMC has updated its Data Protection Suite for VMware and this, together with Data Domain Virtual Edition, provides enhanced support for VMware Virtual SAN and vSphere. VMware admins can provision, monitor and manage VM protection through the standard VMware interface. In addition, support of RecoverPoint for VMs for vSphere APIs for IO filtering means vAdmins can manage replication through vSphere Storage Policy-Based Management, using the common VMware framework.

As part of this VxRail Appliance customers are getting better data protection facilities too. These appliances are built with Virtual SAN and can be deployed with EMC’s Data Protection Suite for VMs and Data Domain Virtual Edition. The users get application consistency for backups, monitoring, reporting and backup file search capabilities.

EMC says they get backup, recovery and continuous data protection for mission-critical apps like Oracle, SAP, DB2, and others.

EMC is telling us that VxRail users can get:

  • Backup times reduced by up to 50 per cent
  • Recovery times up to 30x faster than traditional image-level restores
  • Data protection for VMs on VxRail Appliances can be up-and-running in minutes
  • Protection storage requirements can be reduced by up to 30x
  • Up to 1,000 virtual machines can be continually protected for zero RPO

EMC Data Protection Suite for VMware, Data Domain Virtual Edition, and RecoverPoint for VMs supporting VMware vSphere APIs for IO filtering integration are available now

Panzura

This cloud storage gateway company, launched Panzura Inside; a virtual controller which combines Panzura’s hybrid cloud NAS software with flash arrays and hyper-converged systems to deliver high performance storage for block and file workloads. A Panzura virtual controller is deployed beside a flash array or on a hyper-converged system using SSD capacity from the array or system for caching active unstructured data.

All unstructured data is moved to public or private cloud storage while active data is cached on the virtual controller. Active data is cached automatically. The inactive data in the cloud storage is protected by 11 nines of durability and redundant copies in multiple data centres.

Panzura CEO Patrick Harr claims: “With Panzura Inside … customers can seamlessly replace their ageing NetApp and EMC environments with a modern, high performance cloud-based architecture for all their workloads.” The Panzura Inside virtual controller is currently tested with Nimble, Nutanix, Tegile, and Simplivity.

QLogic

Cavium subsidiary QLogic is demo'ing aspects of NVMe at VMworld.

  1. NVMe over Fabrics with Fibre Channel – running on QLogic Gen 6 (32Gbit/s) FC adapters to reduce overall latency on FC networks.
  2. NVMe over Fabrics with Ethernet – on QLogic’s FastLinQ 25Gbit Ethernet Adapters with RDMA over Converged Ethernet (RoCE) and the Cavium XPliant 3.2Tbit Protocol Independent Ethernet Switch to extend NVMe over a large-scale Ethernet network and lowering overall latency.
  3. NVMe Direct – using QLogic FastLinQ 45000 Series Controllers, QLogic 25GbE RDMA NICs and NVMe flash storage, lowering CPU utilisation and increasing IOPS.

QLogic is also showing StorFusion VMID technology in collaboration with Brocade. It tags individual Fibre Channel frames with Virtual Machine IDs enabling the delivery of application level services to virtual workloads in a QLogic Gen 6 Fibre Channel infrastructure. That sounds useful for VM-level QoS. ®

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