Compute,
Network and Storage are the 3 pillars of a data center. Storage had been my weakest point in terms of
knowledge and experience.
Today
I had a great chat with Brian Knudtson (@bknudtson) who is very knowledgeable
in different aspects of the technology field and had opened my mind in the area
of “Hyper-convergence”. In this post, I
am stepping out of my comfort zone again and try to venture into this area and
take a look at this emerging and expanding market. In VMworld 2014, VMware announced a new
product EVO:RAIL which reinforce the
idea that this “Hyperconvergence” market has huge potential in the coming
years.
In its simplest term, Hyper-Convergence is the integration
of compute, storage and network resource on a box in which virtualization
technologies and X86 hardware platform is use.
For a converged system, compute and storage are put
together into a single device/appliance.
As for Hyper-convergence, the hypervisor is added thus making the device
as a mini Data Center.
SimpliVity sees Hyper-Convergence as "Data Center in a Box" and this is how they build their Hyper-Convergence product - OmniCube.
image source: https://www.simplivity.com/wp-content/uploads/Converged_Infrastructure_Evolution_1_2_3-1024x499.jpg
SimpliVity
SimpliVity is formed in 2009 with it headquarter based off Massachusetts U.S.A. It mission statement is “Simplify IT”.
To make IT simple, SimpliVity creates its hyperconverged
infrastructure platform, OmniCube, by packaging OmniStack on an x86 platform
that provides hypervisor, compute, storage services and network
switching. OmniCube is a 2U rack mounted appliance. The hypervisor is an integral part of hyperconverged infrastructure and the hypervisor in OmniCube is the VMware's ESXi.
OmniCube
OmniCube is to provide high availability and no single point
of failure with the goal of making IT operations SIMPLE. Besides putting compute, storage, networking
and hypervisor onto a single appliance it is also to deliver enterprise
features such as data protection and performance as well as cloud like
scalability capability with its global federation with other OmniCubes managed
via VMware’s vCenter.
OmniCube has the following versions:
- OmniCube CN-2000 series
- OmniCube CN-3000
- OmniCube CN-5000
image source: https://www.simplivity.com/wp-content/uploads/SIM_DS_FINAL_4.pdf
For a complete description of SimpliVity, you can
visit their product page. Recently SimpliVity announced partnership with
Cisco to ship the “OmniStack Integrated
Solution with Cisco UCS”.
OmniStack Integrated Solution with Cisco UCS
In August 25 2014, SimpliVity and Cisco had a press
release announcing this OmniStack and UCS integration. The title of the press release is “New SimpliVity Integrated Solution
with Cisco UCS Delivers The Best of Both Worlds: Cloud Economics With
Enterprise Performance, Protection and Functionality”.
Cloud economics means
enterprise customer can enjoy the pooling of X86 resources and at the same time
enjoy the enterprise level performance, protection and functionality such as
high availability of the data center, data backup and restoration and the
efficient handling of data offered by the SimpliVity OmniStack product.
The initial
integration is to put the OmniStack controller and OmniStack Accelerator Card
on the Cisco UCS C240 M3 Series Rack mount server. Here is the reference architecture of this offering.
In Eric Wright’s
blog post this integration is to be a win-win opportunity for SimpliVity and Cisco
in which SimpliVity can reach into new market segments and Cisco can have more
product offering to existing and/or new customers.
Image source: http://www.virtualizationsoftware.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/Cisco-OmniStack-Node-View.jpg
Image source :
https://www.simplivity.com/wp-content/uploads/SimpliVity_OmniStack_Data_Sheet.pdf
SimpliVity
Innovations
SimpliVity brings to the table 3 technology innovations:- Accelerated Global Deduplication
- Global Unified Management
- HyperConvergence
OmniStack
This is the software that runs as a controller on the VMware
ESXi in which it is named as OVC
(OmniStack Virtual Controller).
According to the SimpliVity official website this OmniStack
has 10 patent pending. The function of
OmniStack is to:
- Combining the functions of up to 12 different products.
- Abstracts data from its underlying hardware, shifting the management paradigm from hardware resources to workloads/applications and providing unparalleled data mobility
- Work with the OmniStack Accelerator to perform inline data deduplication and compression
- Provide data protection
- Provide WAN Optimization
- Act as a cloud gateway
OmniStack
Accelerator
This is the hardware module in every OmniCube appliance that
is used to perform the actual inline compression, deduplication of the
data. This hardware module works
closely with OmniStack Virtual Controller.
The OmniStack Accelerator card is to off load the compute resources so that the CPU cycle can be dedicated to the application and to use this dedicated hardware to dedupe, compress and optimize the data. With this accomplished for the data, OmniStack (controller portion) can take advantage of the optimized data to provide global fabric thus allowing VM and data to be moved from one geographic location to another in a efficient and seamless manner.
The OmniStack Accelerator card is to off load the compute resources so that the CPU cycle can be dedicated to the application and to use this dedicated hardware to dedupe, compress and optimize the data. With this accomplished for the data, OmniStack (controller portion) can take advantage of the optimized data to provide global fabric thus allowing VM and data to be moved from one geographic location to another in a efficient and seamless manner.
According to SimpliVity website, OmniStack Accelerator
handles data in 4K to 8K blocks for any tier of storage media of a system as
well as across different data center or even Amazon Web Services. The main idea is in-line deduplication,
compression and optimization of the data.
This is done before the data is written to storage thus reducing IOPS
which translates to better performance.
The term “Once and forever”
is used in various places at SimpliVity website to describe the inline data
operation.
This is a screen shot taken from the SimpliVity vCenter
plugin and the deduplication ratio is 123.2:1 and the efficiency ratio is
183:1.
This is an important feature for more efficient operation to
remote office branch office (ROBO), VDI and data protection. The about screen shot is from the SimpliVity
vCenter plugin, it show how the user deduplication and compress ration as well
as how much storage usage in an easy to read user interface.
Global Unified
Management
This innovation is to manage multiple instances of OmniCube
as a single pool of resources.
Besides integrating the ESXi in OmniCube, SimpliVity has a
plugin to VMware’s vCenter providing VM-centric
management and reporting capability.
While having a plugin to vCenter, provides user an easy and familiar user interface to manage the Hyper-convergence infrastructure there are additional features that SimpliVity had build on top of this vCenter interface.
Federation
On the right side of the SimpliVity vCenter console is the
company logo. On the left there is a
button – Federation. OmniCube has built
in technology to “connect” to other OmniCube in the network. This is very use for connecting remote
office, data protection and most of all the ability to scale out.
Policy-based Data Protection
Another feature is the policy-based data protection in which
user can configure the time and interval for data or even VM level backup at remote or DR sites. Due to the in-line data deduplication,
compression and optimization the backup and restoration of data and VM is made
very efficient.
Connection to the cloud
SimpliVity has build-in support to interface with Amazon Web
Service so that data or VM can be backup to the AWS storage. Again since the
data are efficiently deduplicated, compressed and optimized this process is
quite fast which helps user to meet better RPO and RTO.
This picture gives us a good view on Global Unified
Management:
Image source: http://www.esg-global.com/default/assets/Image/SimpliVityf7.png
Reference:
"About SimpliVity - Simplivity." Simplivity About SimpliVity Comments.
N.p., n.d. Web. 28 Nov. 2014.
"OmniCube Hyperconverged Infrastructure |
OmniCube Differentiation." Simplivity
Differentiation Comments. N.p., n.d. Web. 03 Dec. 2014.
