Pernixdata introduce new rays of light at VFD5

PernixLogoThey’ve only gone and done it again haven’t they !! I can’t say you were surprised but Pernixdata have a reputation for enchanting and mesmerising their audience when it comes to Tech Field Day presentations and this was not a disappointment.

This company are known for their innovative software called FVP which accelerates storage performance and decouples it from storage capacity all in the magic of software using either SSD or RAM in the Vsphere kernel but this presentation was about 2 new products. You can read more about FVP here.

CTO and Co-Founder – Satyam Vaghani – introduced us to 2 new products named Pernixdata Artchitect and Pernixdata Cloud plus a FREE product covered later on. His key message was about ‘Controlling the User Experience’ and this will be a top commitment in all products.

Pernixdata Architect aims to tackle the design principles in the datacenter and really focus on the areas on the datacenter that admins have less time to think about.

Pernix

The areas of Design, Operate and Optimize are in focus here as most of solutions are created and deployed and sometimes they are not architected correctly or reviewed as workload or apps change and evolve in the datacenter. This piece of software will dig into a VM fingerprint and look at its I/O profile over time. This is focused on the storage for the moment as this is where Pernixdata’s IP lies right now but it was evident that the analysis or reads and writes can enable a business to look at what storage is optimal for a set workload. The UI is HTML5 + Javascript and its fresh and clean look shows it has been thought about before coming towards a final release. Satyam was clear in his message that they want to move away from plugins and I like this approach in all the Pernixdata products. Can’t wait to see the final release.

 

Pernixdata Cloud is a tool to pull in metrics from that are collected where Pernixdata Architect has been deployed and apply some big data analytics to this to help benchmark and understand other industries running similar sized workloads. For example, you could be in retail and run 200 hosts and 5000 VMs and you may want to see what other similar sized customers are seeing in their workload pattern and also what storage arrays they run. The good thing here is the data is anonymous and company names are not used although I’d be keen to see what data is shown when the product is released as Satyam mentioned they would seed a dataset of some customers initially and then I’d expect the data to grow over time. Watch this space for when this product is unleashed to the masses.

 

A FREE version of Pernixdata !!!

 

Finally, Pernixdata Freedom, will be releasing in the final quarter of this year and will provide for a limited scoped edition of FVP. This will mean that Pernixdata’s vision of providing this software to all will be realised if not entice them into moving to the Standard/Enterprise edition. Brilliant move on their part. The limitations will be :

  • Can be run on 1 cluster only
  • DTFM-Z only so can only be run using RAM
  • Read Acceleration Only – 128GB Per Cluster write-through
  • Community support

The other caveat is that all data will be sent to the Pernixdata Cloud to be part of the big data algorithm which will feed the Cloud product. Not a bad thing in my opinion.

Of course for highly secure environments, Government & Defence etc., you can always opt out of sending data for any of the Pernixdata products but I like the idea of building up a large repository of information on storage workloads. As Satyam said, it could certainly mean less Gartner metrics and more realistic data.

If you’d like to pre-register for this free version then follow this link – > HERE

 

 

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