Scale Computing, the market leader in hyperconverged storage, server and virtualization solutions for midsized companies, today announced an SSD-enabled entry to its HC1000 line of hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) solutions for less than $25,000, designed to meet the critical needs in the SMB market for simplicity, scalability and affordability.
The HC1150 combines virtualization with servers and high performance flash storage to provide a complete, highly available datacenter infrastructure solution at the lowest price possible. Offering the full line of features found in the HC2000 and HC4000 family clusters, the entry level HC1150 provides the most efficient use of system resources – particularly RAM – to manage storage and compute resources, allowing more resources for use in running additional virtual machines. The sub-$25,000 price point also includes a year of an industry-leading premium support at no additional cost.
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Scale Computing’s HC3 platform brings storage, servers, virtualization, and high availability together in a single, comprehensive system. With no virtualization software to license and no external storage to buy, HC3 solutions lower out-of-pocket costs and radically simplify the infrastructure needed to keep applications optimized and running. The integration of flash-enabled automated storage tiering into
Scale’s converged HC3 system adds hybrid storage including SSD and spinning disk with HyperCore Enhanced Automated Tiering (HEAT). Scale’s HEAT technology uses a combination of built-in intelligence, data access patterns, and workload priority to automatically optimize data across disparate storage tiers within the cluster.
The HC1150 was not the only new addition to the HC1000 family. The new HC1100 which replaces the previous HC1000 model, provides a big increase in compute and performance. Improvements include an increase in RAM per node from 32GB to 64GB; an increase in base CPU per node from 4 cores to 6 cores; and a change from SATA to 7200 RPM, higher capacity NL-SAS drives. With the introduction of the HC1100 comes the first use of Broadwell Intel CPUs into the HC1000 family. All of the improvements in the HC1100 over the HC1000 model come with no increase in cost over the HC1000. Additionally, the HC1150 scales with all other members of the HC3 family for the ultimate in flexibility and to accommodate future growth.
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Scale Computing’s HC1150, as with its entire line of hyperconverged solutions, is currently available through the company’s channel with end user pricing starting at $24,500. For additional information or to purchase, interested parties can contact Scale Computing representatives at www.scalecomputing.com/scale-computing-pricing-and-quotes.
Tintri’s recent announcement includes nine new Tintri VMstore T5000 all flash models with capacity expansion capabilities, VM Scale-out software, Tintri Analytics for predictive capacity and performance planning, and two new Tintri Cloud offerings.
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The simplicity of VAS enables organizations to scale from 17 TB to 10 PB with a common platform and less than one full time employee dedicated to storage management.
Tintri Scale-out Storage Platform: Built on a VAS foundation for modern storage scale-out with the following features:
Tintri VMstore T5000 All-Flash With Expansion Capabilities: New configuration options for customers:
Tintri first introduced the Tintri VMstore T5000 all-flash series in August 2015. Today, all three models, the T5040, T5060 and T5080, are updated with new capacity options ranging from 17 TB to 308 TB. These systems leverage the latest in 3D NAND technology and high density drives to offer organizations both higher capacity and lower $/GB. In the future, Tintri will also enable capacity upgrades with some of these models to allow customers to scale up their individual VMstores. Combined with VAS VM-level capabilities and VM Scale-out software, customers can scale with complete flexibility, growing from one Tintri T5040 all flash system to 32 fully populated T5080s.
Tintri has always offered real-time, VM-level analytics as part of its Tintri Operating System and Tintri Global Center management system. Today, this foundation expands to include a SaaS offering of predictive analytics that provides organizations the ability to model both capacity and performance requirements. Powered by big data engines such as Apache Spark and Elasticsearch, Tintri Analytics is capable of analyzing stats from 500,000 VMs over several years in one second. By mining the rich VM-level metadata, Tintri Analytics provides customers with information about their environment to help them make better decisions about applications’ behaviors and storage needs.
Tintri Cloud combines the power of the Tintri Scale-out platform and the performance of all-flash VMstores, with the simplicity of its extensive VAS software portfolio to enable organizations to build their own private cloud.
Customers can start with a single Tintri VMstore T5040 with 17 TB of effective capacity and scale out to the Tintri Foundation Cloud with 1.2 PB in as few as eight rack units. Or they can grow all the way to the Tintri Ultimate Cloud, which delivers a 10 PB cloud-ready storage infrastructure for up to 160,000 VMs, delivering over 6.4 million IOPS in 64 RU for less than $1/GB effective. And Tintri’s VM-aware storage is so easy to manage that organizations need less than one full time employee to manage their Tintri footprint as they scale from 17 TB to 10 PB.
Both the Foundation Cloud and Ultimate Cloud include Tintri’s complete set of software offerings for storage management, VM-level analytics, VM Scale-out, replication, QoS, and lifecycle management.
The Tintri VMstore T5000 All-Flash Series with new capacity options is available later this month through Tintri and authorized Tintri resellers. Tintri Analytics is available immediately to customers with current Tintri VMstore support contracts.
VM Scale-out will be available through Tintri Global Center Advanced (Tintri budgetary pricing and cost info is available here), which will be available in June 2016 as both a separate software license and a part of the Tintri Software Suite, which consists of Tintri Global Center Advanced, ReplicateVM, SecureVM and SyncVM. Existing Tintri Global Center Standard customers may also purchase upgrades to Tintri Global Center Advanced.
Tintri Foundation Cloud and Tintri Ultimate Cloud will be available for purchase in June 2016 through Tintri and authorized Tintri resellers.
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infinite io recently announced the NSC-055s, a Network-based Metadata Accelerator. The NSC-055s adds a controller dedicated to the acceleration of metadata requests to infinite io’s award-winning Network-based Storage Controller product line. With the NSC-055s, enterprises will be able to transparently accelerate existing applications and extend the life of NAS systems.
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The NSC-055s installs transparently in front of existing storage and seamlessly intercepts and responds to metadata requests without forcing applications to be re-provisioned or storage to be virtualized.
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The NSC-055s can serve up to 1,500,000 metadata requests per second with an average latency of 20 microseconds. Unlike a cache, it collects all file metadata and is always hot.
The NSC-055s is available for immediate shipment and is priced at $50,000.
Excerpt and images from a terrific enterprise IT blogger JoseLuisGomez.com Nutanix Xpress, the new HCI product line for SMB
Nutanix announced on Tuesday its new Xpress cloud platform, priced and architected for small and midsize businesses.
Nutanix Xpress is a pre-assembled private cloud stack, available only through the VAR channel, that bundles storage, compute and a hypervisor along with management software. Prebuilt Cloud Connect integrations allow for data backup to public cloud services, including AWS and Microsoft Azure.
For small and medium-sized businesses, purchasing, installing, and managing IT infrastructure poses significant challenges. Existing solutions may be too complicated and require specialized skills that overstretch IT budgets. The Nutanix Xpress family addresses the IT needs of smaller organizations through ease of management, lower TCO, and simple, risk-free deployment, with world-class support for the entire infrastructure stack just a phone call or email away.
Nutanix is targeting the “Global 200,000” small and medium sized businesses, defined as follows:
Nutanix Xpress is a complete hyperconverged offering that natively integrates server,
storage and virtualization in a single, space-saving platform and radically simplifies the
infrastructure stack.
• Plug and Play: All software factory pre-installed and ready to run nearly any virtualized application for small and medium businesses
• Built-in virtualization: Built-in Nutanix AHV hypervisor and powerful VM management eliminates expensive virtualization licensing costs – no additional software components to install and manage
• Future-proof: Easy data backup to public cloud services, such as Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure, to deliver a practical cloud strategy
• Support: Award-winning support from Nutanix technical teams and the Nutanix NEXT community of IT experts designed for SMBs
Nutanix Xpress makes on-premises infrastructure as simple to consume as public cloud
services. The infrastructure can be installed, configured, and ready to run virtualized
applications in 60 minutes or less.
• Eliminate the need for specialized skills. Xpress greatly simplifies the entire IT environment, including storage and virtualization
• Reduce purchasing costs. Total cost of ownership is up to 60% less than comparable traditional infrastructure.
• Consolidate all applications. Everything runs on a single system—with no specialized or dedicated hardware
• Streamline management. With consumer-grade design, Nutanix Prism makes it easy to keep infrastructure up and running
As expected, to achieve a reduction in cost, Nutanix had to cut the costs somewhere. The easy way is reduce hardware resources, but it’s not enough to be cost-attractive. Many vendors achieve to be competitive because they release different editions of their software with different features on each one. The picture below shows Xpress vs. Extreme (Enterprise) product lines:
There are a variety of SX-1065 configurations available. Here are 3 basic models from Small to Large.
* Source: Nutanix
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Scale Computing, a hyper-convergence leader, has modified its HC3 hyper-converged system, adding a pair of hybrid arrays that allocate NAND flash as a tunable tier of primary storage.
The Scale flash HC2150 and HC4150 node hardware is similar to the vendor’s HC3 2000 and HC3 4000 models, except with additional RAM and increased processor cores (from four to eight).
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Scale isn’t going all-flash with the latest rollout. Each hybrid HC2150 node is equipped with a single 400 GB single-level cell NAND solid-state drive (SSD) and three 3 TB SAS hard disk drives (HDDs). Raw capacity per three-node HC2150 cluster is 12 TB, including 1.2 TB of flash storage. The HC2150 ships with 128 GB of RAM per node and can be upgraded to 256 GB of RAM per node.
Each HC4150 hyper-converged node supports two 400 GB NAND drives and 2.4 TB of flash per cluster, with up to six SATA drives. The 4150 ships with 384 GB of RAM and can be upgraded to 512 GB per node.
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List price for a baseline Scale flash HC2150 cluster is $61,500, and $106,625 for the HC4150 cluster. The prices include HyperCore data services for remote and local snapshots, multisite virtual machine replication and failover/failback capabilities.
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Rubrik has made data protection simple by combining its software with hardware into a single appliance and building in scale-out capacity, said Nathan Reynolds, executive vice president and co-founder of Clearpath Solutions Group, a Herndon, Va.-based solution provider and Rubrik channel partner.
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The Rubrik r300 comes in two models. The r330 is a 2U chassis with three hardware nodes built inside to support up to 200 virtual machines. The r340 is similar, but has four hardware nodes inside to support up to 300 virtual machines. Both have flash-optimized storage.
The software in the r300 is based on Rubrik’s own file system that uses both flash and disk-based storage to do globally compressed and deduplicated backups. List price starts at under $100,000 for the r330, including all the software capabilities.
Per Rubrik’s website it is being dubbed “The world’s first converged data management platform”. The site goes on to say “Rubrik eliminates backup software by integrating data protection, instant recovery, and replication into a single, scale-out fabric.”
Rubrik’s Converged Data Management platform is supposed to be the “industry’s first solution to eliminate backup software”, in fact the software-defined backup software being hidden into appliances forming a scale-out storage architecture for secondary storage, backup, not primary storage as many other companies.
The base 2U appliance is designed with commodity hardware, HDDs and SSDs and all the software (de-dupe, snapshots, replication, etc.). One to hundreds of boxes can be integrated, each with four nodes supporting several hundreds of VMs. When nodes are added, they are automatically identified and integrated. Data is stored in a single ‘data lake’ per se that can be searched by metadata and recovered based on a time-sliding mechanism.
Converged Data Management (CDM)
TOP FIVE THINGS TO KNOW ABOUT CDM (according to Rubrik)
Rubrik eliminates backup software by integrating data protection, instant recovery,
and replication into a single, scale-out fabric. This is possible since Rubrik delivers the
world’s first Converged Data Management platform, which provides five key benefits.
Pricing starts around $100,000.
Our take: Rubrik sounds like an interesting spin on traditional backup and we can’t wait to see where it goes.
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Austin-based infinite io, which develops data storage products, said it has launched a new product, the NSC-110. According to infinite io, the new network-based, storage controller helps in the migration of data to both private and public clouds.
Unlike all other enterprise cloud storage solutions, the NSC-110 does not require applications to be re-provisioned or storage to be virtualized with new file paths. The NSC-110 installs transparently in front of existing storage, migrating inactive data to the cloud in real-time based on policies that align with business objectives.
“Just when I thought I’d seen everything I was ever going to see in storage, something cool comes along!” said Steve Duplessie, Founder and Senior Analyst at the Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG). “infinite io has taken a completely different approach to cloud integration by essentially putting a big storage brain directly into the network – which opens up endless possibilities.”
Advanced analytics calculate expected savings
When installed in passive mode, the NSC-110 uses industry standard storage costs and information collected from the installed environment to calculate expected savings.
IT managers can simulate a cloud storage deployment and collect real-world usage analytics with no risk to their data and no systems downtime.
infinite io increases the performance of onsite storage
When operating in active mode, the NSC-110 makes onsite storage faster by serving it out of flash memory from a reduced local file storage footprint. IT managers get the best of both worlds: low-cost capacity and high-performance.
Availability and pricing
The NSC-110 is currently in beta testing and is planned to be released during Q3 2015. Please contact infinite io if you’d like a risk-free analysis of a real-world cloud storage deployment in your environment.
infinite io’s NSC starts at $50,000 for a 2U device with 250GB of DRAM, 6TB of solid state drives, 1 or 10 Gigabit Ethernet ports and fail-to-a-wire functionality. On the roadmapfor infinite io, is clustering for high availability, CIFS and Hadoop support, a software-only version of the NSC appliance and support for cloud snapshots.