Tag Archives: REST

The Emprise 9000- Scaleout SAN Architecture

Posted on July 20, 2010 | 2 comments

If you look up Emprise in the Merriam-Webster dictionary you will see that it means “an adventurous or daring enterprise.”   That pretty much describes the Emprise product family’s launch 2 years ago.  We did something that no one else was, or is doing today.  Imagine being able to start from scratch on a storage solution, and I’m not talking about controller software.  I’m talking a complete re-engineering/architecting a solution that is built with enough resiliencies to offer the only zero-cost 5-year hardware warranty in the storage industry.  Not only is it super reliable, but it’s ridiculously fast and predictable.  When you can support 600+ Virtual Desktop (Performance VDI) “bootstorm” instances at a whopping 20 IOPS per bootup in 3U of space, I would classify that as wicked fast!!!  

 

In those 2 years we have not sat around on our laurels.  Steve Sicola’s team, headed up by our VP of Technology David “Gus” Gustavsson, has really outdone themselves with our latest Emprise product launch.  Not only did we move our entire user interface from “Web Services” to a RESTful API (ISE-Manager (blog about this later) and our iPhone/iPad App), he also released our 20(ea) 2.5” disk drive DataPac which has 40(ea) 2.5” drives in 3U of space for about 19.2TB’s space and a TON of performance.  His team also released our ISE Analyzer (advanced reporting solution built on our CoreteX/RESTful API (www.CorteXdeveloper.com )– I’ll blog about that soon) and our next release of our Emprise product family, the Emprise 9000.  I swear his team doesn’t sleep!!!

 

 So, the Emprise 9000 is a pretty unique solution in the market.  Today, when you think “scale out” architecture the first thing you might think about is NAS.  Hopefully our ISE NAS !!  We hope moving forward you will also think of our Emprise 9000.  The Emprise 9000’s ability to scale to 12 controllers puts it way above the 8 controllers the 3PAR solution scales to and above the 2-controllers the rest of the storage world produces (EMC Clariion, Compellent, HP EVA, IBM XIV etc).  When married with our Intelligent Storage Element (ISE) it truly gives our customers the most robust, scalable solution in the storage market today.  

 

Let’s be clear, the Emprise 9000 is not just a controller update.  It’s a combination of better, faster controllers, RESTful API and our ISE technology combined to solve performance starved applications issues like Virtual Desktops, Exchange, OLTP, Data Warehouse, Virtual Servers as well as various other types of applications found in datacenters today.  The ability to give predictable performance whether the solution is 10% utilized, or 97% utilized is a very unique feature.  Did I mention it comes with our free zero-cost hardware maintenance?  24x7x365 !!!

So for those keeping a tally at home, and for those competitors that want a little more information on what the Emprise 9000 can do, here is a quick list: (this is not all the features)

  • Each controller has a Dual quad-core Nehalem CPU’s!!
  • Scale-out to 12 Controller pairs
  • 8Gb Fibre Channel ports
    • N-Port Virtualization (NPIV)
  • 1Gb or 10Gb iSCSI ports                (10GB later this quarter)
    • You can run both FC and iSCSI in the same solution.
  • Scalable from 1 to 96(ea) ISE’s of any size
    • Max capacity would be 1.8PB with 96(ea) 19.2 TB ISE’s
  • Support for greater then 2TB LUNS
    • Up to 256TB size LUN
  • Thin Provisioned Volumes
  • Snapshots
    • READ only Snapshots
    • Writeable Snapshots as well. Think “smart-clone” technology of VDI
  • Heterogeneous Migration
    • You want to migrate off that EMC, HP, 3PAR, HDS, etc – we can do it natively in our storage controllers.
  • Sync/Async native IP or FC replication

 

So, as you can see it’s a pretty impressive list!!  And as with all new products, we will be adding new features pretty quickly so stay tuned to announcements from us around the 9000.  BUT there’s more!!  But I can’t really go into it today 🙂  Just stick around a couple of months for some even cooler stuff Gus’s team will be rolling out.   I just got back from a week in Vegas getting feed by a firehose about all the stuff we will be rolling out by the end of the year.  WOW !!  Impressive to say the least !!! 🙂

@StorageTexan <-Follow me on Twitter

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Cool things Commvault is doing with REST

Posted on February 2, 2010 | 2 comments

Cool things Commvault is doing with REST 

I’ve always been a HUGE fan of Commvault.  They just rock.  When I was a Systems Engineer back in Austin in the early 2000’s, I don’t think we had an account that I didn’t take Commvault into to try and solve a customer’s backup issues.  AND WE DIDN’T EVEN SELL COMMVAULT !!!   They had such cool technology that was clearly leaps and bounds above everyone else. Not to mention, they had some really cool people that worked for them as well (Shout out to Jeanna, Joelle, RobK and of course Mr Cowgil).  

Fast forward a few years and the release of Simpana as well as the addition of native DeDuplication clearly gave Data Domain and various other deduplication solutions a run for their money.  You would think that would be enough for one company!!   I was pretty excited about their recent press release around adding cloud data storage as a tier option in Simpana.  Dave Raffo over at SearchDataBackup.Com did a really nice job of summarizing the announcement.  It’s a clear sign that Commvault is still very much an engineering driven organization.  Which is just AWESOME!! 

 I think the biggest nugget that I pulled out of the press release is Commvault’s ability to integrate native REST capabilities.  The more and more I hear about REST’s potential, the more I get excited about some of the endless possibilities it can offer.  In this case, it allowed Commvault to easily integrate their backup architecture to include 3rd party cloud solutions like Amazon S3, EMC Atmos and a slew of others.   They didn’t need to build an API for each vendor; they just relied on REST’s open API to do that for them. 

If you haven’t had a chance you should check out Brian Reagan’s blog posting that mentions something we are calling CorteX.  Essentially CorteX is our RESTful based ecosystem on which developers can gain access to our Emprise solutions.  This is the next evolutionary step in our ongoing open architecture capabilities.  As some of you are aware, we’ve been touting our WebService’s Software Development Kit for some time.  It’s allowed us to do things like VMWare Virtual View which ties directly into Virtual Center to give VMWare Admin’s unprecedented abilities, as well as Microsoft developers creating a provisioning application called SANMAN that integrates some of their processes directly to our storage.  RESTful API will take this to a greater level.  Just like Commvault was able to tie directly into public cloud storage providers, CorteX will give unprecedented abilities to do really cool things. 

I’ve probably said more then I should 🙂 So I’ll leave it with “more to come on CorteX as we get ready to release”.  I’ve probably stolen enough of Brian’s thunder to get an e-mail from him!!  It’s always good to hear from a Sr VP right!! 

So, keep an eye on Xiotech over the next couple of months and start paying attention to vendors that support RESTful API’s !!!

Thanks,

@StorageTexan

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