Ben explains that it is his first time onstage for VMware, prior to VMware he worked at MIPs technologies were he was a Unix kernel engineer and worked on supercomputers. Ben went on to work at Microsoft and managed server, storage clustering etc. After that Ben managed the security of Microsoft as well as the management of Windows 7 and Hyper-V. Ben left Microsoft and went to CISCO and ran all their protocol teams. At VMware he has been managing vSphere development and now finds himself the CTO. The change to him is that rather than building OSes for servers he is now leading the building of OSes for the datacenter.
There are 3 imperatives for the IT infrastructure:
1) Virtualization needs to extend to ALL of it; including networking and storage
2) IT management needs to give way to automation
3) Compatible hybrid cloud becomes ubiquitous
Two years ago VMware announced the software defined datacenter sending the industry in a new direction. Ben believes that in 2014 SDDC will hit the tipping point. VMware is seeing really strong customer momentum; Symantec, Subaru, Dow Jones is listed among the early adopters of SDDC.
But what does SDDC mean? It is made up of compute, network and storage. Ben mentions that even though 85% of applications are running virtualized their are still some that are not. Compute continues to evolve to reduce latency and additional extensions for Hadoop. Telcos and the Hadoop communities are investing in virtualization to run applications that are have traditionally been physical.
Last year VMware announced NSX the network virtualization platform. NSX is built to run on any hypervisor, run with any application and any cloud providers toolset. VMware believes NSX will revolutionize networkings as vSphere has done for operating systems.
The current challenges to networking is that provisioning is slow, hardware dependent and operationally intensive. NSX takes advantage of virtual switches in hypervisors and creates a flat layer 2 network and programs it. This allows you to set policies that control the network programatically.
In 2012 the number of virtual ports in the datacenter exceeded the physical ports. Ben explains 3 of the top 5 investment banks are deploying NSX as well as the leading global telcos.
Ben switches gears to storage. As you know storage is one of the biggest capex and opex cost in the datacenter. The storage market is in the midst of disruption. Server flash and storage prices are falling. You have an abundance of CPU cycles in servers making new approaches possible.
VMware has been delivering storage innovation for years through vMotion, VAAI, Storage DRS and now vSAN. So what is software defined storage? In the new model there is really three different types of storage; Hypervisor Converged (vSAN), a SAN/NAS pool (traditional storage) and an Object Storage Pool or Cloud Storage.
vSAN is a distributed object store implemented directly in the hypervisor kernel. It allows you to apply policy based management to storage. It is flash accelerated with great performance and lower TCO. Ben says it is also brain dead simple to use, you simply turn it on in vCenter.
Ben explains that they have tested 915k IOPs in a 16 node cluster with less than 10% CPU overhead. VMware had 10,800 participants in there public beta. VMware is ready to release in Q1 with a 16 node configuration. In addition beta participants get 20% off on your first purchase of the product.
Ben moves to opportunities in Hybrid Cloud market. Gartner estimates that the Infrastructure as a Service market was 9 billion in 2013 and will grow to 31 billion in 2017. Ben thinks that the most important thing with a Hybrid Cloud is that it is compatible with the enterprise toolset. Ben explains that on vSphere they have over 120 different types of operating systems as well as enterprise applications which are difficult to run in a public cloud.
The challenges with public cloud is that they are proprietary platforms, do not support enterprise applications and have potential security and compliance issues. VMware's value proposition with their Hybrid Cloud services is that they have the same core components and management tools as the enterprise. In 2014 VMware is going to add Desktop as a Service and Disaster Recovery Services, Database as a Service as well as Mobile Services through AirWatch.
There are really 5 starting points for customers moving to the cloud:
1) Development and testing
2) Prepackaged software; i.e. Exchange, SharePoint etc.
3) Disaster Recovery
4) New Applications using services like Cloud Foundry
Ben challenges the crowd to embrace the new reality.
- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad
Tuesday, February 11, 2014
Partner Exchange, General Session: Dave O'Callaghan and Carl Eschenbach
The new world makes it difficult to understand what drives IT decisions. People want to use their own devices without compromise; how does enterprise IT fit into this new world? How do we evolve in a world that is changing so fast? Its time to make history again and rethink and master the new reality is the challenge to the partner community from VMware.
Dave O'Callaghan the Sr. Vice President of the partner community takes the stage and welcomes the crowd to PEX 2014. Dave talks about VMware's total revenue from 2007 to 2013 moving from 1 to 5 billion dollars. 85% of that revenue has come through the partner network.
Dave explains that success is about constantly aligning to the new reality. Dave draws the conclusion that the new reality is aligning our businesses to delivering a software defined datacenter. This will require practise, focus and training to meet the challenges of the new reality.
Dave introduces Carl Eschenbach, President and Chief Operating Officer at VMware. Carl explains that their are 4000 partners in attendance this year. Carl explains our challenge is to become masters of the new software defined enterprise. VMware will provide the tools to partners to assist them to do so. VMware made 5.21 Billion dollars in revenue in 2013 delivering 17% growth.
Carl reaffirms VMware's commitment to the channel as it has been key to their success. VMware has invested in $300 million in partner programs to provide incentives to the partner community. VMware's renewals business is at an all time high.
Carl explains that they have invested heavily in bringing the right executive team: Sanjay Poonen (End User Computing), Ben Fathi (Chief Technology Officer), Robin Matlock (Chief Marketing Officer), Tony Scott (Chief Information Officer), and Sanjay Mirchandani the GM of Asia Pacific and Japan.
VMware had 234 new software releases last year including major launches of VMware Horizon Suite and vCHS, NSX and vSAN beta among others. In addition VMware acquired desktone (Desktop as a Service) and virsto the storage hypervisor (vSAN) and announced the acquisition of AirWatch.
VMware's three priorities for 2014 are End-User Computing, Software Defined Datacenter and Hybrid Cloud. This potential software product market is estimated to be 50 billion dollars before services.
So what's next? The Software-Defined Enterprise is next. Carl takes us back in history from mainframe, client-server to mobile-cloud. The fundamental challenge in all these transformations has been relatively flat IT budgets. VMware sees more friction as the consumer demands more while budgets continue to remain flat. VMware believes that they are in unique position to address this. Why? because they have done this already with virtualization. By saving money, they have liberated a percentage of spending that can be spent on innovation.
The way VMware will deliver on this is to deliver the software defined enterprise. What are the foundations of the software defined enterprise:
1) Applications, however they are only as reliable as the infrastructure they run on. This stability is provided by introducing virtualization across all traditional physical datacenter infrastructure; server, network and software defined storage. However it also must extend to the Hybrid Cloud through interfaces like vCloud Automation Center (vCAC). This is the software defined datacenter.
2) End User Computing, in addition we need to give users access to the software defined datacenter though innovations in the virtual workspace while ensuring security compliance and control. The icing on the cake is AirWatch for mobility management.
VMware's mandate is Any App, Any Place, Any Time with No Compromise. VMware expects that the services revenue around these opportunities is 50 billion dollars for a combined total of software, licensing and services of 100 billion dollars.
- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad
Dave O'Callaghan the Sr. Vice President of the partner community takes the stage and welcomes the crowd to PEX 2014. Dave talks about VMware's total revenue from 2007 to 2013 moving from 1 to 5 billion dollars. 85% of that revenue has come through the partner network.
Dave explains that success is about constantly aligning to the new reality. Dave draws the conclusion that the new reality is aligning our businesses to delivering a software defined datacenter. This will require practise, focus and training to meet the challenges of the new reality.
Dave introduces Carl Eschenbach, President and Chief Operating Officer at VMware. Carl explains that their are 4000 partners in attendance this year. Carl explains our challenge is to become masters of the new software defined enterprise. VMware will provide the tools to partners to assist them to do so. VMware made 5.21 Billion dollars in revenue in 2013 delivering 17% growth.
Carl reaffirms VMware's commitment to the channel as it has been key to their success. VMware has invested in $300 million in partner programs to provide incentives to the partner community. VMware's renewals business is at an all time high.
Carl explains that they have invested heavily in bringing the right executive team: Sanjay Poonen (End User Computing), Ben Fathi (Chief Technology Officer), Robin Matlock (Chief Marketing Officer), Tony Scott (Chief Information Officer), and Sanjay Mirchandani the GM of Asia Pacific and Japan.
VMware had 234 new software releases last year including major launches of VMware Horizon Suite and vCHS, NSX and vSAN beta among others. In addition VMware acquired desktone (Desktop as a Service) and virsto the storage hypervisor (vSAN) and announced the acquisition of AirWatch.
VMware's three priorities for 2014 are End-User Computing, Software Defined Datacenter and Hybrid Cloud. This potential software product market is estimated to be 50 billion dollars before services.
So what's next? The Software-Defined Enterprise is next. Carl takes us back in history from mainframe, client-server to mobile-cloud. The fundamental challenge in all these transformations has been relatively flat IT budgets. VMware sees more friction as the consumer demands more while budgets continue to remain flat. VMware believes that they are in unique position to address this. Why? because they have done this already with virtualization. By saving money, they have liberated a percentage of spending that can be spent on innovation.
The way VMware will deliver on this is to deliver the software defined enterprise. What are the foundations of the software defined enterprise:
1) Applications, however they are only as reliable as the infrastructure they run on. This stability is provided by introducing virtualization across all traditional physical datacenter infrastructure; server, network and software defined storage. However it also must extend to the Hybrid Cloud through interfaces like vCloud Automation Center (vCAC). This is the software defined datacenter.
2) End User Computing, in addition we need to give users access to the software defined datacenter though innovations in the virtual workspace while ensuring security compliance and control. The icing on the cake is AirWatch for mobility management.
VMware's mandate is Any App, Any Place, Any Time with No Compromise. VMware expects that the services revenue around these opportunities is 50 billion dollars for a combined total of software, licensing and services of 100 billion dollars.
- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad
Monday, February 10, 2014
The value of vSAN
VMware believes vSAN is a very disruptive technology that does not require you to re-architect the environment to integrate it. There are several trends that necessitate virtual storage adoption:
1) The amount of data we are storing
2) The complexity of storage today
vSAN is a very simple product to deploy. Installation involves answering a few questions to get it up and running but does not require zoning or LUN creation. VMware sees three strong use cases for vSAN: Virtual Desktop, Test and Development and Disaster Recovery.
VMware expects people to adopt vSAN organically. For example customers will buy vSAN for a development cluster initially but as it proves itself it will evolve for use in other environments. VMware is targeting vSAN for the mid-tier storage performance requirements as apposed to applicable for all workloads. vSAN will coexist with physical SAN environments in the enterprise.
VMware sees storage as the final piece of the complete Software Defined Datacenter. The challenge for VMware is will their customers see them as a storage vendor? VMware sees a large shift in the performance power of the server platform, from server flash, to multi-core CPUs delivering an enterprise grade hardware platform. In addition storage is becoming less specialized as VMs aggregate workloads on common storage platforms.
VMware believes the hypervisor is in a unique position to understand both workload performance and storage requirements as it is directly in the IO path. Although most people understand the virtualization story with VMware, the company has been innovative in storage technology and management; i.e. VMotion, Storage DRS, Storage IO control for example.
VMware sees three critical areas in Software Defined Storage; the virtual data plane or the aggregating of storage pools, virtual data services such as data protection and performance and finally the policy-driven control plane which allows policy based automation and orchestration. All these layers are necessary to make up Software Defined Storage.
vSAN will ship in as a Virtual SAN Ready node which will come direct from the hardware vendors as well as a Do it Yourself "DiY" option in which you deploy the hardware and apply the software. In a very small 16 node cluster VMware has bench marked 1 million IOPs as part of there testing.
vSAN provides enterprise grade storage performance from server based storage. vSAN makes use of Host based Hard Drives (HHDs) and Solid State Drives (SSDs) installed on the server which are presented as the vSAN datastore. This means that technology such as VMotion are fully supported on vSAN. It does not present LUNs however so Raw Disk Mapping (RDMs) are not supported on the architecture.
vSAN will work with any servers and RAID controllers on the Hardware Compatibly List (HCL) and can make use of SAS, SATA and SSD drives. VMware recommends 10 GBe connections between servers although it will run on 1 GBe.
vSAN writes to cache and then destages to disk. You can scale out vSAN by adding additional servers with additional HHDs and SSDs. It requires VMware vSphere 5.5 and VMware recommends that all servers in the cluster are configured identically.
The ability to assess use cases for vSAN and been built into the VMware Infrastructure Planner (VIP). VMware has announced that the GA release of vSAN will be in Q1 of this year.
- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad
1) The amount of data we are storing
2) The complexity of storage today
vSAN is a very simple product to deploy. Installation involves answering a few questions to get it up and running but does not require zoning or LUN creation. VMware sees three strong use cases for vSAN: Virtual Desktop, Test and Development and Disaster Recovery.
VMware expects people to adopt vSAN organically. For example customers will buy vSAN for a development cluster initially but as it proves itself it will evolve for use in other environments. VMware is targeting vSAN for the mid-tier storage performance requirements as apposed to applicable for all workloads. vSAN will coexist with physical SAN environments in the enterprise.
VMware sees storage as the final piece of the complete Software Defined Datacenter. The challenge for VMware is will their customers see them as a storage vendor? VMware sees a large shift in the performance power of the server platform, from server flash, to multi-core CPUs delivering an enterprise grade hardware platform. In addition storage is becoming less specialized as VMs aggregate workloads on common storage platforms.
VMware believes the hypervisor is in a unique position to understand both workload performance and storage requirements as it is directly in the IO path. Although most people understand the virtualization story with VMware, the company has been innovative in storage technology and management; i.e. VMotion, Storage DRS, Storage IO control for example.
VMware sees three critical areas in Software Defined Storage; the virtual data plane or the aggregating of storage pools, virtual data services such as data protection and performance and finally the policy-driven control plane which allows policy based automation and orchestration. All these layers are necessary to make up Software Defined Storage.
vSAN will ship in as a Virtual SAN Ready node which will come direct from the hardware vendors as well as a Do it Yourself "DiY" option in which you deploy the hardware and apply the software. In a very small 16 node cluster VMware has bench marked 1 million IOPs as part of there testing.
vSAN provides enterprise grade storage performance from server based storage. vSAN makes use of Host based Hard Drives (HHDs) and Solid State Drives (SSDs) installed on the server which are presented as the vSAN datastore. This means that technology such as VMotion are fully supported on vSAN. It does not present LUNs however so Raw Disk Mapping (RDMs) are not supported on the architecture.
vSAN will work with any servers and RAID controllers on the Hardware Compatibly List (HCL) and can make use of SAS, SATA and SSD drives. VMware recommends 10 GBe connections between servers although it will run on 1 GBe.
vSAN writes to cache and then destages to disk. You can scale out vSAN by adding additional servers with additional HHDs and SSDs. It requires VMware vSphere 5.5 and VMware recommends that all servers in the cluster are configured identically.
The ability to assess use cases for vSAN and been built into the VMware Infrastructure Planner (VIP). VMware has announced that the GA release of vSAN will be in Q1 of this year.
- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad
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