hyperconverged infrastructure: the leading edge of virtualization

Hyper-convergence: The leading edge of virtualization

Toronto VMUG February 2015

Daemon Behr

Solution Engineer

© 2015 Scalar Decisions Inc. 1

Agenda

•  Introductions

•  Converged Infrastructure Landscape

•  Nutanix vs EVO:RAIL


Introductions


Canada’s top IT infrastructure specialists.


Top tier technical talent.


•  Engineers average 15 years of experience

•  World-class experts from some of the leading organizations in the industry

•  Dedicated PMO, finance, sales and operations teams


180


100% BC Alberta

Ontario

Quebec

Canadian


#51 #1 #15

ICT Security Company

Top 250 ICT Companies

© 2015 Scalar Decisions Inc.

An integrator of emerging technologies.

9

We are not…


•  Traditional infrastructure usually is a result of building a network in isolation, a storage environment in isolation, and then bolting a virtualization environment

•  Converged infrastructure is created when all are designed or specified with close ties

What is converged infrastructure?



Converged Infrastructure

Converged Infrastructure Landscape

•  Storage led options from EMC (VSPEX) and NetApp (FlexPod)

•  Single Vendor offerings, like Cisco UCS + Invicta

•  Integrated block offerings, like VCE vBlocks

•  SAN-free environments like VSAN

•  Converged VMware offerings, like EVO:RAIL, Nutanix

•  Reducing risk by providing combined architectures


•  Build from scratch

•  Reference designs vs validated designs

•  Validated designs are huge – hundreds of steps to implement

•  How do you scale?

•  How do you scale and stay within supported bounds of the reference design?

Storage-led Convergence


•  Dell Storage and Dell Compute

•  Dell VRTX

•  Cisco UCS + Cisco Invicta Storage

•  HP Servers + Lefthand Storage

Single vendor offerings


•  EMC vBlock

•  VSAN Ready Nodes

•  EVO:RAIL Offerings

•  Dell XC

•  Nutanix

Converged Offerings



Simplicity does not precede complexity, but follows it.

-  Alan Perlis [first recipient of the Turing award]

•  Single company doesn’t mean single product

•  Circular dependencies of firmware, drivers, OS

•  How do you expand?

•  How do you lifecycle components?

•  How do you maintain it all?

Complexity


Maintenance and Upgrades


It took

30 years to

repaint the Golden Gate

Bridge..

Now, it never Stops being

painted

•  We show value through experience, not through being the people who do tedious stuff

•  Quick infrastructure implementation means we can more quickly move on to business infrastructure transformation, moving your workloads onto the platform

Our view of convergence


•  Linear scale-out compute and storage

•  Not just VMware (like EVO:RAIL)

•  Hyper-V, KVM

•  Strong support organization, through Nutanix Pulse

Market leader in Hyperconvergence


•  “We only run VMware”

•  .. Well, except for those few Hyper-V boxes

•  .. And the KVM ones

Diversity is important


What is Nutanix?


•  Managed virtualization infrastructure

•  Tight integration with VMware

•  Clustered file system across all nodes

•  SSD/HDD tiering

•  Now partnered with Dell, to run on servers with an enterprise class heritage

•  Build clusters of Nutanix systems as large as your vSphere clusters, or larger

•  Start with 3 nodes, grow to up to 48, one node at a time

•  Scale out storage at the same time you scale out compute

Start small, grow big


•  Options for “Compute heavy” and “Storage Heavy” nodes

•  Start small, grow big

•  Node types can be mixed in a cluster

•  Grow as you need – capacity on demand

•  No need to size compute, no need to size SAN

Scale out with Nutanix


•  VMware VSAN has come leaps and bounds since its original try as the VSA

•  Nutanix has always been miles ahead of VSA’s functionality

•  Nutanix NDFS includes many enterprise level SAN features, such as ILM tiering, scale out to eliminate controller IO bottlenecks, phone home for disk replacement

•  No need to architect SAN separately from compute – as you grow compute with Nutanix, the SAN grows too

No SAN?


•  Early days for EVO:RAIL, this will change

•  Nutanix is Tier 1 ready. EVO:RAIL right now is Tier 2 only

•  Nutanix can grow one node at a time, vs 4 right now for EVO:RAIL

•  Nutanix supports every VMware license, EVO:RAIL requires Enterprise Plus

•  Nutanix supports 48 nodes, EVO:RAIL supports 16

Nutanix vs EVO:RAIL


•  Validated designs are all they sell

•  Simple management and support

•  One-click, non-disruptive upgrades

•  Single source of documentation

•  No need to worry about VMware HCL – if it isn’t on there, Nutanix doesn’t have it

Why Nutanix for converged?



What is right for you?

•  There is no slam-dunk solution that works for every company

•  The right solution depends on size, desire to change, historic growth, growth plans, and features desired (which leads to budget)

It depends..


•  You know your business requirements best, but how many virtualization environments do you implement per month?

•  Look for the “V” in Value Added Reseller – our engineering team, over 80 staff, work with sales, and validate every solution sold. We make it work the way we said it was going to work

•  A “V” VAR’s technical resources can quickly translate your business requirements into technical specifications, saving you time, and reducing risk

Working with a VAR vs DIY


Read our blog post about using Uses, Considerations, and Recommendations for VMware vSAN by Dan Sylvester, Manager,

Technical Pre-Sales, Western Canada.

http://blog.scalar.ca/Blog/bid/102964/Uses-Considerations-and-Recommendations-for-VMware-vSAN

What’s Next?


Connect with us!


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@scalardecisions

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hyperconverged infrastructure: the leading edge of virtualization

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