Breqwatr breqs hyper-converged mould with all-flash box

Breqwatr? What on Earth is a Breqwatr? It looks like someone is trying too hard to get attention with bad spelling.^* In fact, it's a company making the Breqwatr Cloud Appliance, a turnkey, all-flash, scale-out, hyper-converged appliance for private cloud deployments.

This BCA v2.0 product is built on OpenStack's Juno release, Solidfire all-flash storage and Arista software-driven cloud networking. It features:

• 2U rack enclosure
• 8-core Xeon E5-2660 v2 CPU with 1,024GB of system memory
• Windows and Linux OS support
• 24TB all-flash array with quality-of-service features
• Object storage software
• Arista networking: 8 x 10GbitE plus 4 x 1GbitE for management
• Two hot-plug redundant power supplies and hardware component redundancy

The Arista networking is described as having four main attributes:

• Universal Cloud Network
• • Scalable standards-based MLAG for L2: ECMP for Layer 3
  • Non-blocking Spline/Leaf-Spine for 50,000-100,000 hosts
• Cloud Control
• • Standards-based EOS with AEM, ZTP/ZTR, LANZ, DANZ, RAIL etc.
  • Automated monitoring
• Network-wide virtualisation
• • Multi-vendor API support with eAPI
• Network applications and automated management
  • Network Applications for workload mobility, smart systems upgrade and telemetry
  • Single point of management with no proprietary lock in CloudVision
  • Open – OpenFlow, OpenStack, OpenVirtual Switch, OVSDB and others

The BCA is RAID-less, and has a shared-nothing controller architecture. Appliances are added to scale out performance and capacity in a linear fashion. Performance virtualisation allows the control of performance and capacity independently.

The system includes deduplication, compression and thin-provisioning.

We're told: "Each incremental appliance is self-discoverable, making resources available in a matter of minutes with zero disruptions."

Breqwatr says the BCA has native integration with Active Directory via LDAP, and NetApp and Solidfire storage solutions. Users consume Infrastructure-as-a-Service with components for virtual machine management, chargeback and resource-based quota models.

The system has resource leasing, automated VM retirement and resource reclamation.

There is a "self-service UI [which] provides users with on-demand access to the compute and storage resources". We're told there is instance-level high availability.

Breqwatr’s GUI lets users provision a new instance in 4 clicks and displays budgeting metrics and usage summaries

There is support for external enterprise storage, meaning, we think, Solidfire and NetApp. The company says it will typically be one release behind OpenStack because of OpenStack's rapid 6-monthly pace of development.

We think this is an intetresting variation on the hyper-converged appliance idea, setting Breqwatr apart from mainstream hyper-converged suppliers such as Nutanix, SimpliVity, Maxta, the VMware EVO: RAIL group and others. It will clearly be of most interest to OpenStack adoptees and the hardware promises a high level of performance.

The Breqwatr Cloud Appliance is available now from Toronto-based Breqwatr, which provides a single point of support. No pricing details were provided. Find out more here. ®

Bootnote

^*It could be worse. Be grateful it isn't called Mekwnd.