flash

NOS: The CIA of Storage

The Nutanix Operating System(NOS) is what helps to form the Zen state of compute and storage that runs the Nutanix Distributed File System. NOS is radically different than any other solution on the market today because it does something that no one has figured out, it keeps the intelligence of the OS local to both the compute and storage. The ability of NOS to make decisions on the same wire as the compute and storage is what gives Nutanix the ability to scale without limits and with linear performance.

Beautiful state when you are one with everything

Other companies are “trying” to use local flash but I haven’t seen anything really compelling. All of the traditional legacy storage companies end up like the first 1:30 of the below video. Hightower being a monolithic storage array trying to fit into today’s servers.

Compute along with local IO are a reality today but it doesn’t make any sense if the intelligence of the system is sitting in the back seat. Telling a customer that they can only use PCI-e for reads doesn’t seem like a compelling solution. Its like letting the CIA to do surveillance and then not letting them take action(writes). The other one I like is telling a customer to install an agent in all of there 10,000 VM’s so they can use flash that lives over a wire. It leaves you asking why bother?

NOS also makes the best use of your budget, commodity hardware. Commodity hardware beats in price and performance, its simple economies of scale. Companies that turn profit on how well their data centers are ran, don’t use expensive, overpriced specialized parts. Go ask Google and Facebook what is sitting in their servers. I bet you could easily go buy the same parts. The catch is having the software to scale it and to monitor it. Once you have these to things, commodity hardware allows you focus on features and value instead of getting into a hardware arms race. Nutanix has had three major releases in the span of 1 and half years. That is something that is unheard of in the industry.

While Nutanix parts have a very high MTBF(Mean Time Between Failure) NOS was built to expect failure. All the components are replaceable and data is protected with utmost importance. Check out my article here for more details.

Item MTBF (hrs)
Memory 1,100,000
Motherboard 200,986
Fans 236,703
HDD 1,400,000
CPU 2,100,000
PSU 546,694
SSD 1,200,000
Intel 910 PCIe SSD card 1,100,000
10Gb I/O module 3,784,399
Riser Card 36,495,482

Like any good business, the ability to react and adapt quickly will give the best chance of survival in this dog eat dog world.

Violin Snags Another Top Notch Exec – Victim VMware

Narayan Venkat, former VP of VMware Cloud Business is the newest person to come over to Violin Memory. Narayan joins a notable list including Garry Veale, HP’s former VP of EMEA’s StorageWorks Division and Jonathan Goldick, former CTO of OnStor. These new individuals plus the talent from Fusion IO that came when Donald Basile, CEO of Violin Memory took over in 2009 are forming a Mercenary Team of Flash Performance.

Narayan, as the New VP of Product Management mission at Violin will be to bring feature rich parity to the Hypervisor world. It’s obvious that vSphere is on the top of the list for Violin but when I asked about Hyper-V both Narayan and Matt Barletta, VP of Product Marketing where quick to answer with a yes. Both Matt and Narayan were very excited when they where talking about Violin’s grass roots in database performance and their plans to tackle Tier I applications that were left off sitting on physical hardware.

Toshiba was the inventor of NAND flash and has made a significant investment in Violin Memory. This gives Violin access to a supply chain and tools to make sure that their flash can work at scale. Adding additional size to your arrays to handle wear levelling will not work at this scale. It’s also worth noting Toshiba hasn’t invested in an American company in 8 years, I think that says a lot about what Violin is accomplishing.

Violin is leaving two empty X86 sockets on thier storage arrays that allow for features to be added to the arrays without affecting performance. Today you only get raw speed but snapshots, VAAI, replication will be coming down the pipe. It also brings opportunity to bring the application to the data. Lately all efforts have been bringing the IO to the compute, I like the change in direction. The empty sockets will also allow for dedupe to happen, not sure if it will be inline or not. All said it will be interesting to see what develops.

Violin isn’t the only one doing Flash today but strong leadership and finalical backing can go along way. If Violin can deliver on the hypervisor, they might have a change to unseat the old boys club on top of the storage stack. I look forward to seeing what Narayan can deliver at his new post. Narayan had VMware’s EUC vision all but memorised when we talked so I am hoping that Project Horizon and Octopus have a small home on some flash array somewhere.