Second day at VMworld was as much intensive as day first. That day I covered second most important topic on my list – compute. I went through booths of all main players in compute market:
Converge:
- HP
- VCE – Cisco + EMC
- NetApp Flexpod – compute and fabric from Cisco + NetApp storage
- Hitachi – Hitachi compute + storage and Brocade fabrics- dunno if I can called them main player but for sure they have strong position on Japan market.
NoSAN are All in a box (compute, storage and networking) – don’t know how to called them
- Nutanix and Simplivity – yes I know, second time – but they have fantastic solutions, more I think more a like it. Main difference between both is software stack and hardware architecture Simplivity is like 2U rack server with two tier storage whereas Nutanix depends on model is from 2 to 4 servers with two Tier storage in a 2U – in next weeks I will write more about both because both are deserve an attention
Solution from big players are very similar to each other – what make difference is a software piece. In my opinion the the best integration (among converge solutions) between software and hardware has VCE. Quite easy and clear interface to manage piece of iron as well as strong support from Cisco, VMware and EMC. Unfortunately I had no chance to see Hitachi software in action but hardware is quite interesting. Hitachi has its own servers which you can group them in logical unit. Of course Hitachi use their HDS storage with 3.2 TB flash drives !!!, made by Hitach of course – I think no one on the market can offer such a big SSD drives. NetAPP with their FlexPod is a young product so they couldn’t show much more then what they have already available in regards of integration with VMware platform. Who seen them vSphere plugin than you know what I’m writing about – however big plus is that NetApp work very close with Cisco Director development team.
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