Nordic blogsite http://www.ervik.as highlights new features of Melio5, which simplifies and enhances desktop and application virtualization with Citrix XenDesktop 7: http://www.ervik.as/news/storage-virtualization/sanbolic/4077-citrix-xendesktop-7-and-sanbolic-melio5
Melio5 offers new features to simplify and enhance Desktop and Application Virtualization with Citrix XenDesktop 7
Citrix XenDesktop 7 and Sanbolic Melio5 Accelerate VDI Adoption!
With the upcoming releases of Citrix XenDesktop 7 and Sanbolic Melio5, the two companies are on course to continue leading the charge in the adoption of VDI in the enterprise. By combining the advanced technologies found at the core of both products, customers of all sizes will be able to deploy desktop and application virtualization faster, easier and with lower cost than ever before!
Built on the new FlexCast architecture, Citrix XenDesktop 7 enables automated delivery of desktops and applications from a unified management platform for a seamless user experience. Offering various tools designed to speed up application migration and mobilization as well as enhanced security to protect intellectual property and private data in hosted-shared (RDS) Windows Server and Windows desktop OS-based VDI environments, XenDesktop 7 allows Windows desktops and applications to be delivered as a service easily and securely to any device over any network in order to maximize productivity in today’s mobile world.
A Citrix-Ready partner and industry leader in software-enabled storage and distributed data management, Sanbolic’s Melio5 data management platform adds new enterprise-class features and capabilities including RAID 0, 1, 10, 5, 50, 6 and 60, storage live migration, QoS, synchronous and asynchronous replication (for DR across geographically distributed sites), snapshots, optimized data placement in mixed (hybrid) storage infrastructures and support for on-premise and public cloud VDI deployments.
Also new to Melio is the ability for customers to use commodity server and storage hardware to create server-side, scale-out storage architectures that provide comprehensive application, data and storage management capabilities, enhanced fault-tolerance and performance levels reaching 650,000 IOPs+ per server, with performance scaling linearly as additional nodes are incorporated into the system. The resulting architecture offers a highly scalable and available storage solution for XenDesktop 7 deployments at a fraction of the cost of external storage arrays.
As with previous versions of Melio, Melio5 continues to enable and extend the capabilities of XenDesktop by enabling server and desktop OS image high availability and load-balancing, simplifying image management and maintenance, and significantly reducing storage capacity requirements. Built-in support for application clustering offers Citrix administrators a simple, cost-effective solution for protecting XenDesktop databases during SQL Server failures without the costs or complexities associated with failover clustering, SQL replication or SQL mirroring. And Melio’s new Latency Targeted Allocator™ (LTA™) feature lets customers mix their legacy storage devices with newer, faster storage devices such as SSD and Flash to maximize virtual desktop performance for a rich user desktop experience while enhancing capacity utilization.
Using Melio5, customers can start XenDesktop 7 pilots quickly and easily with lower cost and transition into production seamlessly with the flexibility to scale deployments dynamically without downtime! The result – Citrix customers realize the fastest and greatest ROI on their desktop and application virtualization projects.
Together, Citrix XenDesktop 7 and Sanbolic Melio5 make it easier than ever for customers to realize all the benefits of desktop and application virtualization to ensure the highest levels of productivity in an increasingly mobile world.
To learn more, visit Sanbolic at booth #515 during Citrix Summit/Synergy (May 21st – May 24th) in Los Angeles, CA. While you’re there, be sure to register for an opportunity to win a new iPad Mini.
See you at the show!
See VDI at its Best at Citrix Synergy 2013!
Event: Citrix Synergy 2013
Date: May 22nd – 24th
Place: Los Angeles, CA
Highlights: VDI with Citrix XenDesktop and Sanbolic Melio5
What you’ll see: The most scalable, available, performance-oriented VDI solution on the market!
What you’ll learn: How Sanbolic Melio5 enables and enhances Citrix VDI deployments
What you want to do: Visit booth #515 during the show to see and learn how easy it is to deploy a Citrix VDI solution with Sanbolic Melio5 to significantly reduce the burden of desktop and application administration while assuring your users a high-quality desktop experience.
Synopsis: Addressing all three tiers of IT infrastructure (application, data, storage), Sanbolic’s Melio5 data management software enables organizations of all sizes to realize the benefits of desktop virtualization faster, easier and with lower upfront and on-going cost than ever before using commodity server and storage hardware to avoid vendor lock-in and the high cost of external storage arrays.
See you at the show!
Software-Defined Storage: Focus on Benefits, Not Buzzwords
“Software-Defined Storage” is the flavor of the month for vendors hawking storage gear. While it can be a useful way of thinking about storage, it’s not something you can buy, but a set of capabilities. We recommend not getting hung up on formal definitions of “software-defined storage.” Instead, evaluate products on whether they can deliver the key benefits it promises. Those include cost savings, scalability, flexibility, and insuring agility by eliminating single points of failure.
Birth of a Buzzword
VMware popularized “Software-defined Storage” as part of their Software-Defined Data Center vision, which is the next step in their product evolution and still far from reaching the market. Over the past decade VMware has, of course, built a leadership position in server virtualization, providing a software layer to abstract the logical server from the physical hardware it runs on. This makes it much easier to deploy servers when needed, to share hardware with other applications, and to move workloads for load balancing or availability. The economics are compelling and well over half of x86 servers are now virtualized.
However, the expensive storage and networking gear attached to these virtual servers is typically still allocated to individual as if they were physical devices. To make matters worse these storage arrays typically lack flexibility, portability, or scalability, and remain one of the most costly aspects for corporate datacenters.
Customers found that these inflexible resources stood in the way of continued cost savings and the ability to dynamically provision IT resources. Several years ago VMware started publicly musing about extending the abstraction layer from servers to networking and storage, calling it their Software Defined Data Center vision. Through product announcements and acquisition they’ve begun fleshing out this strategy. Many competitors have jumped on the bandwagon, rebranding their point solutions as “Software-Defined Storage.”
The Public Cloud: Already There
Public cloud players like Google and Facebook have already built many of these “Software-Defined Storage” capabilities but only for their own use. The formula is familiar: Proprietary software aggregates commodity hardware into a storage pool and provides some level of data protection and resiliency. Google, for example, developed its Google File System a decade ago. Facebook recently replaced NetApp storage with commodity hardware and its own Haystack file system for its image library. This architecture also efficiently uses flash storage devices to accelerate metadata reads and writes, while using low cost SATA drives for longer-term storage. The bad news is that most customers lack the engineering talent to build and maintain this virtual infrastructure for themselves, and it is limited to very specific workload profiles.
That’s unfortunate because this model can bring similar, or greater, benefits on the storage front than on the server front. They include:
1) Cost reduction through more efficient use of storage and lower cost hardware
2) A “fluid” architecture that increases flexibility and reduces deployment time. By abstracting application data from storage hardware, it becomes much easier to scale out workloads, move them among physical devices, and ensure high availability.
Everyday customers need the scalability and performance benefits of these “public-cloud like” storage infrastructures, along with storage services such as data protection and service level management. Whether or not they’re called “Software-Defined Storage,” these solutions will also need to be agnostic across hardware and hypervisor platforms, and be compatible with legacy storage infrastructure.
The Public Cloud for the Rest of Us
Sanbolic has been working on the challenge of distributed computing and storage since 2000. Our Melio clustered file system and volume management technology delivers the benefits of “Software-Defined Storage” to hundreds of enterprise and government customers globally. We are also working with the leading Flash vendors to enable high availability and scale out utilizing flash within in servers and storage arrays, while also enabling the performance of Flash storage across all application workloads.
Sanbolic’s Melio5 is the only software-enabling platform to provide storage and data management capability across legacy SAN as well as DAS and server side flash storage. Hardware and hypervisor agnostic, Melio unifies customers infrastructure and can run on on-premise and in the Amazon and Rackspace cloud infrastructure and provide SAN/NAS scalability for thousands of servers and storage devices and Exabytes of data.
When you hear “Software-Defined Storage” we encourage you to think beyond the jargon and focus on the benefits it claims to provide. We then invite you to consider Melio5 to deliver the public-cloud levels of cost reduction and scalability – not to mention the data protection – you need in an enterprise-proven solution that is shipping today
Follow me on twitter @mvmsan
Related posts:
Getting Pitched on Storage? Ask ‘Em These Questions
SSD and Server-side Flash Scale Out: What to Look For
Solving Capacity Challenges with SSD and Server Side Flash
Web 2.0 infrastructures ready to move to the corporate data center
Why SSD and Flash Need More Brains to Reach the Corporate Data Center
Webinar OnDemand: Change the way you look at server-side SSD and Flash Storage with Sanbolic and Fusion IO
Experience for yourself why OVER 700 customers globally have chosen Sanbolic over more costly and complex alternatives. Melio for FREE
Getting Pitched on Storage? Ask ‘Em These Questions
Five Tough Questions for Your Storage Vendor
Just about every storage professional is in a vise these days. They need to manage more and more data and make it available more and more quickly for less and less money.
In response, everyone from the smallest angel-funded startup to the industry giants claim they can help. They’re all talking scaling to hundreds of thousands of IOPS and thousand of nodes with their own twist on caching data in server-side flash memory to boost performance.
And, of course, no press release is cool unless it makes a reference to software-defined storage, whatever that is.
It is true that we’re on the brink of massive, structural changes as intelligent software running on low-cost commodity servers and storage replaces proprietary, high-priced offerings. This will bring the kind of incredibly low-cost, highly reliable systems Google and Amazon have built to the corporate data center. But as with any massive industry shift, there’s also a massive amount of hype.
While the marketing fluff settles down, here are five tough questions to ask the next sales rep who clogs your voice mail.
- Is your product shipping? We’re seeing a lot of breathless “announcements” that, when you get to the last paragraph, admit their “solution” won’t ship for weeks, months or even a year or more. Promises are great, but you have problems to solve now. Until you can get your hands on something and test it, much less buy it, it’s irrelevant.
- Is it enterprise proven? The commodity hard drives, flash storage and servers underlying most of this “new-age” storage are fairly well proven. Not so the intelligent software that runs atop them. Can a vendor provide reference examples of how their software is actually working at enterprise levels of users, data, applications, and transactions?
- Is there a single point of failure? These days, if only takes a little bit of downtime for your impatient customers or business partners to look elsewhere. Especially when you’re using commodity hardware, the question isn’t whether something will fail, but when. Can this cool new technology instantly balance loads among servers to maintain performance if one goes down? Can it instantly rebuild data if one or more arrays fail, without trashing performance?
- Is the hardware truly commodity? Some vendors “bake” some of their software into their hardware in the form of custom ASICs. They may claim this improves performance. But it also forces you to buy that vendor’s pricey hardware every time you need more capacity. It also requires replacing all that gear if you ever want to change vendors. Ask if you can choose your own server and storage hardware without sacrificing performance, scalability, redundancy or other important features.
- Does it deliver a lower total cost of ownership? Even if you’re trying to shift spending from capital to operational budgets, the lowest hardware sticker won’t mean much if you get eaten up with long-term management costs.
As you can guess, we think we have some good answers to these questions and encourage you to call and grill us on them. But we’re also curious to hear what outrageous claims you’re hearing from storage vendors, and the tough questions you’d like to ask them.
Follow me on twitter @mvmsan
Related posts:
SSD and Server-side Flash Scale Out: What to Look For
Solving Capacity Challenges with SSD and Server Side Flash
Web 2.0 infrastructures ready to move to the corporate data center
Why SSD and Flash Need More Brains to Reach the Corporate Data Center
Webinar OnDemand: Change the way you look at server-side SSD and Flash Storage with Sanbolic and Fusion IO
Experience for yourself why OVER 700 customers globally have chosen Sanbolic over more costly and complex alternatives. Melio for FREE
How to upload files (i.e., event logs, Procmon logs, Perfmon logs, memory dumps, etc.) to Sanbolic’s FTP Site
Topic: How to upload files to Sanbolic’s ftp site at ftp.sanbolic.com.
Overview: This tech brief explains how to create a user account on Sanbolic’s ftp site to upload files that require analysis by Sanbolic.
Briefing: Prior to uploading files such as event logs, Procmon logs, Perfmong logs or memory dumps to Sanbolic’s FTP site, you must create an account on our FTP site. This tech brief walks through the process of creating a new account on Sanbolic’s FTP site.
To create a new account on Sanbolic’s FTP site, perform the following steps:
1. Log into Sanbolic’s clients system at http://clients.sanbolic.com using the account you used when you first registered on Sanbolic’s website. If you do not have an account, you’ll need to register an account with Sanbolic before uploading files to Sanbolic’s FTP site.
2. At the top of the page, click the “File Manager” tab
3. In the “File Manager” page, enter a username and password, along with the CAPTCHA prompt and click “OK” to create your account.
4. Once your account is created, use the FTP client within Windows or within File Explorer or a third-party FTP client such as FileZilla to FTP to ftp.sanbolic.com.
5. When prompted for your user credentials, enter the credentials for the account you created in step #3.
6. In the root directory, create a new folder labeled with your name or company name.
7. Upload your file(s) to the new folder you created in step #6.
8. Notify Sanbolic technical support once the file(s) have been successfully uploaded to the FTP site.
Disrupting IT Infrastructure Business Models
Disrupting IT Infrastructure Business Models
Overall IT infrastructure spending has slowed over the past year, and EMC is projecting only 3% annual market growth going forward-see EMC and VMware Strategic Forum 2013. But underneath this overall trend there are several segments of the infrastructure that are experiencing strong secular growth, in part by disrupting existing technology business models. These segments include:
1. Public Cloud Computing
2. Flash Storage
3. Software defined storage.
There is an interesting connection between these segments which is worth exploring. The common link is distributed computing and storage architectures. And distributed compute and storage systems are likely to be very disruptive to legacy infrastructure going forward, not just in the cloud, but in the enterprise.
Public Cloud Computing
The growth of advertising supported web services businesses such as Google and Facebook, and SaaS offerings like Salesforce, is not news to anyone, and the three of them alone have created $350 Billion is market value over the past decade. Bain & Company estimates that the cloud computing market will grow by 20-30% over the next five years.
The Amazon Web Services Infrastructure as a Service story is less well known since Amazon doesn’t break out financials. But a recent Bernstein Research report estimates that they have been growing on the order of 100% per year, are 5 or 10 times as large as their nearest competitor, and have an implied market capitalization of $24 billion. Right now AWS runs a lot of small businesses and small corporate projects together with some big customers like Netflix. It allows them to rent infrastructure by the hour to run their existing applications without rewriting them, and frequently lowers its price. The question is: how quickly can AWS solve the issues of application availability and easy portability of applications and data between legacy on-premise infrastructure and the Amazon Cloud, in order to allow it to capture more of the enterprise market? They are a very agile organization. VMware and Microsoft, the on-premise virtualization and server application incumbents, are VERY concerned about their customers moving to Amazon.
The hardware vendor incumbents in the on-premise data center are very concerned as well. Look around a public cloud data center. You may see a lot of servers from Quanta. A lot of Fusion-io cards. Not a lot of NetApp or EMC storage arrays. When workloads shift from on-premise to cloud data centers, the total available market for the branded server and storage vendors declines. Public cloud datacenters typically have better utilization rates than on-premise deployments, reducing the amount of hardware required. And the hardware that is used is less likely to be from a branded vendor.
Software Defined Storage and Flash
But the branded IT hardware vendors face an even bigger problem. The cloud data centers use a different architecture than on-premise infrastructure. And that architecture is starting to find its way back to the enterprise.
Since they buy a LOT of hardware each year, the public cloud companies pay a lot of attention to pricing and supplier cost position. Facebook standardizes around 5 server architectures so they can put large volumes of each out to bid. Quanta sold 1.2 million servers in 2012, and expects to grow 50% this year. 85% of those sales will be direct to a handful of public cloud companies. These companies have also noticed that server vendors operate on margins of less than 20%, disk drive makers operate at 30%, while storage vendors operate at 60%. There is a lot of expensive software and services packaged with the hardware in a storage array. And…their hardware is not very flexible and doesn’t scale well.
So the public cloud data centers build their own massive storage systems out of commodity servers and storage drives with proprietary storage software to provide storage services. They learned to incorporate high performance, but expensive, Flash storage to handle workloads like file system metadata, while putting sequential content data on cheap SATA drives. Fusion-io, the PCIe flash leader, has grown from nothing to more than $1.5 billion in market capitalization, and Facebook alone accounted for more than a third of their revenue in 2012. The public cloud storage systems have to be big, they have to be fast, and they have the flexibility to occasionally present old data or lose it entirely (would you miss the last million results on your search?) But they work really well. And they cost a lot less than enterprise infrastructure.
These distributed compute and storage systems run on commodity hardware, abstract the data from the hardware, and provide availability, resiliency, and storage services in software. Most of the public cloud companies have a lot of really smart engineers and PhDs to write and maintain these systems. But what if this type of distributed storage solution was available in an integrated off-the-shelf software package for the enterprise and could use both legacy SAN and commodity storage? Software that not just abstracted and pooled data, and provided a basic level or resiliency, but one that provide enterprise storage services like multiple RAID levels, snapshots, remote replication, and granular quality of service? Software that incorporated flash storage into a highly available primary storage tier in hybrid flash/HDD volumes, while intelligently placing data within the volome based on file system access profile? Software that scales out to thousands of nodes in shared data clusters, to Exabytes of storage, and to more than 500,000 IOPS per node? What if the software data abstraction layer made it easy to distribute workloads across large virtual server clusters running on any on-premise hypervisor, or to cloud platforms like AWS or Rackspace?
This type of software could dramatically reduce the cost of enterprise IT infrastructure by enabling commodity hardware, improving availability, and providing the flexibility to assign workloads to on-premise or cloud infrastructure based on both workload requirements and cost/capacity utilization. It would provide public cloud economics on commodity hardware with enterprise reliability.
Well, you can wait for EMC or NetApp to cannibalize their existing high margin business models to deliver this type of solution. And maybe they will. Or you can try Melio5 today.
How to Cluster SQL Servers for DB High Availability in the AWS™ Cloud
Topic: How to cluster SQL Servers for database high availability in the Amazon® AWS™ cloud.
Overview: This tech brief explains how to create a shared volume using Sanbolic Melio to enable SQL Server clustering for database high availability in the AWS public cloud.
Briefing: Since application clustering is not currently available in the public cloud, organizations interested in leveraging the economics of the cloud are finding it difficult, if not impossible, to achieve high availability and scale for their business-critical workloads. Sanbolic Melio allows AWS customers to overcome this challenge and cluster SQL Servers in the public cloud infrastructure for database high availability in order to maximize up-time for enterprise workloads dependent on SQL Server. » Read more…
SSD and Server-side Flash Scale Out: What to Look For
Server-side Flash Scale Out: What to Look For
Everyone and their brother seems to be promising “SSD and flash high availability and scale out” these days. But what exactly is it, why do you want it, and what features should you look for?
“Scale-out,” of course means expanding the amount of work your servers can do. The workload can be either block- or file-based, ranging from application serving to Web serving to database access. Such scale-out is only effective, of course, if it can be done as inexpensively as possible and as quickly as possible utilizing all the hardware and software platforms customers must support.
“Flash” refers to the high-speed solid-state memory deployed within servers, as opposed to the solid-state disks in storage arrays. Using this fast flash storage to create very low-cost, highly scalable and available server infrastructures is an attractive proposition for customers that need to quickly handle many more customers and much more data without extra cost or staff.
But not all the “solutions” that claim to deliver server-side flash are created equal. Some key questions to ask:
Does it create a single point of failure? High performance and scalability are not worth much if the failure of a single server can bring down an entire application or (in this virtualized era) multiple applications. Look for features such as dynamic and symmetrical clustering, load balancing, RAID and a shared file system that allows another server to instantly take over if one fails.
Does it create silos of applications or data? The same architectural constraints that make each server an island to itself can also make it harder for applications or users to share data. In today’s networked economy, such silos can cripple productivity and efficiency. The same shared file system, clustering and load balancing that eliminate single points of failure also allow any server or application to access vital data.
Does it span Flash, SSD and spinning disk? In addition to flash, most customers are also using SSDs as a storage cache layer, and low-cost high capacity JBOD (just a bunch of disks) with traditional HDD to store the vast majority of their data. To cost-effectively scale capacity across block and file storage while benefiting from the low latency and fast performance of SSD and Flash, look for solutions that support all those media types, and can intelligently route data to the most cost-effective media.
Does it provide appropriate data protection? If you’re going to run important applications on your agile infrastructure, you’ll need to protect the data. How well, and how easily, does your server-side scale out solution provide data protection if one of more drives fail? Look for solutions that support features such as snapshot and RAID.
How easy is it to manage? Using your existing server administrators to manage your storage can save you 40-50 percent on your staff costs. Look for centralized management capabilities that give server administrators the ability to monitor and manage your Flash, SSD and JBOD for maximum efficiency.
How efficiently does it use storage and server resources? The whole idea of virtualization and scale-out is to do more with less. Look for solutions that use a shared file system to allow all servers to access the same version of data without the performance and capacity hit of replication.
The flood of announcements about server-side caching and scale out won’t end anytime soon. Let us know what questions you have about what to look for, and if you want to stay informed about the intelligent software layer we’re adding to JBOD, SSDs and Flash.
Follow me on twitter @mvmsan
Related posts:
Solving Capacity Challenges with SSD and Server Side Flash
Web 2.0 infrastructures ready to move to the corporate data center
Why SSD and Flash Need More Brains to Reach the Corporate Data Center
Webinar OnDemand: Change the way you look at server-side SSD and Flash Storage with Sanbolic and Fusion IO
Experience for yourself why OVER 700 customers globally have chosen Sanbolic over more costly and complex alternatives. Melio for FREE