A Winning Partnership – Pure Storage and Catalogic ECX

The team here at Catalogic Software we won’t settle for second place, winning is part of our DNA.

However winning is something that isn’t done by simply putting the fastest engine on the grid or fastest storage device in your datacentre. You need to ensure you have the complete package. In Formula One there are 3 core components to a championship winning car:

1. The Engine

2. The Aerodynamics &

3. Reliability 

All 3 of these areas are critical to the success or failure of a team. You could have the fastest engine in the world but with poor aerodynamics or reliability you will never win a race or championship. Something the Arrows A22 driven via Jos Verstappen pictured below definitely never managed! 

The third aero wing was quickly banned by the FIA after Arrows attempting to use in practice around Monaco.

If you look deeper into the history of F1 you will find a whole host of banned aerodynamic developments as the designers always try to bend the boundaries and rules to deliver a competitive advantage and ultimately reduce lap times. 

In the current day and age aerodynamics are arguably the most important factor in Formula One car performance. It has become the key to performance gain due to the often very marginal gains that can currently be made by engine changes or other mechanic component development.

Switching lanes back into the datacentre in here you again have 3 core components for a winning storage setup:

1. The Storage a.k.a the Engine

2. The Management, Orchestration and Automation a.k.a the Aerodynamics

3. Reliability

Here the management, orchestration and automation a.k.a the aerodynamics are in my opinion the most important factor in having a winning storage setup. 

This is because most storage vendors can deliver the speeds, feeds and data functions needed to run data as quickly as possible. However, lightening fast storage doesn’t mean optimal performance and utilisation. The management, orchestration and automation tools are what enable IT teams to deliver optimal data performance and utilisation.

This is the exact reason all Pure Storage customers need Catalogic ECX to enable a winning storage setup. Pure storage is a leader in the Gartner magic quadrant, and therefore undoubtedly have the engine capabilities. With Catalogic ECX you can enable optimal utilisation of Pure Storage environments. We deliver an efficient architecture to enable effective management, orchestration and automation within the Storage environment. Some of the key game changing benefits we deliver are:

Destination Unknown

2021 is going to be a key year for many businesses attempting to recover from the tremendous impact COVID-19, political shifts and more had last year.
I don’t think many of us will look back on 2020 fondly and hopefully humanity can rise up and work together to get us back to normality.... or even better than before.

One of the key realisations of 2020 was that businesses that quickly shift to accommodate unexpected changes can continue to operate and even excel despite the unexpected and often challenging circumstances.

A lot of organisations had previously feared a negative productivity impact if most, or all of their employees worked from home, and had therefore never tried it. However, for most organisations this shift proved to be a success, with employees not spending unnecessary time, money and energy travelling. This has often resulted in employees having more time to focus in the comfort of their own home and for many a better work/life balance.
I still do miss a trip out at the moment though just for the comradery, face-to-face interaction and knowledge sharing.

Looking back on 2020, we had a very successful year here at Catalogic. One of the key reasons for this success is that we have the ability to quickly pivot and work in an agile manner, meaning we discuss customers’ requirements and develop solutions to deliver against them – solutions which are often specific and complex.

A key talking point many customers came to us with in 2020 was around how we can improve data visibility, management and orchestration.

Sound interesting? Let me talk to you about how we can enable you to have visibility in your environment via Catalogic ECX.

In every active environment data continues to grow. Data growth often causes a major data headache for IT administrators. The reason for this is growth results in more and more information and often it gets to a point where understanding what data sits where is a nearly impossible task.

Step forward Catalogic ECX.

With Catalogic ECX we can provide data visibility, management control and orchestration of NetApp, IBM Storage, Pure Storage, HPE Nimble, VMware vSphere, Microsoft SQL, Oracle, SAP HANA and InterSystems Caché environments.

Because we inventorise all key data within these types of storage, hypervisors, virtual machines, physical servers and databases we can provide the ability for IT administrators to better navigate their environment. Think of it like a Sat-Nav that tells us where we would like to go (ECX tells us what resources you want to see to show the associated applications, servers and storage)

*Yes that is my sat nav!!

vStor – The beating heart of our data protection solution

At the heart of every data protection solution is the repository where the data the data protection solution is protecting resides. The beating heart of Catalogic's data protection solution DPX is the vStor.

Our vStor backup repository is a flexible and scalable backup target that frees you from expensive backup appliances and vendor lock-in, unlike many of the current market players. 

Built on open source components, vStor can use any block based storage without restrictions. It supports data reduction in the form of both deduplication and compression for efficiency and provides point-to-point replication for DR or remote office support. 
vStor can be architected to meet your needs. We support physical severs and virtual servers and any form of block storage. 
If you are interested in a dedicated appliance we also offer 3 pre-built vStor appliances – 24TB, 48TB and 100TB. See more details on those here

The Future of Spectrum Scale

In this blogpost I'm going to discuss some of the unique features of Spectrum Scale and also review some of the key enhancements in Spectrum Scale 5.0.

So what is Spectrum Scale? It's a high performance clustered file system developed via IBM that can be deployed in 3 models:

• As a software on your choice of industry standard x86, POWER or IBM Z systems.
• As pre-built systems these are known as Elastic Storage Server (ESS) that run Spectrum Scale RAID.
• As Cloud service via IBM Cloud or Amazon Web Services (AWS)

Enterprises and organisations are creating, analysing and keeping more data than ever before. 2.5 billion gigabytes of data is currently being created per day and 90% of data was created in the last 2 years!
Organisations that can deliver insights faster while managing rapid infrastructure growth have a commercial advantage over competitors and typically become leaders within their industry.
To deliver those insights an organisations underlying storage must support both new-era big data and traditional applications with security, reliability and high-performance. IBM Spectrum Scale meets these challenges as a high-performance solution for managing data at scale with the distinctive ability to perform archive and analytics in place.

Some of the unique features of Spectrum Scale that enable it to manage data at scale are:

• Extreme Scalability
  Leverage no-bottleneck architecture to scale performance for extreme throughput and low-latency access not expected from network-attached storage. This enables the delivery of phenomenal performance and scalability utilising commodity-based hardware.
• The enablement of global collaboration 
  You can enable data-anywhere access that spans storage and locations to accelerate applications across the data centre or around the world.
• Data-aware intelligence via policy-driven data placement 
  Policy-driven data placement enables you to achieve data-aware intelligence and information lifecycle management (ILM) efficiencies through powerful policy-driven automated tiered storage management. Using the capabilities within Spectrum Scale you can automatically determine where to physically store your data regardless of its placement in the logical directory structure.
  This is brilliant as it provides the ability to match the cost of your storage resources to the value of your data and ensure file and object data is sat on the optimal tier within your environment.

If you have any of the following workloads running and are experiencing issues with scalability, feel you should be delivering faster insights from your data or have a planned refresh coming up then have a look at Spectrum Scale and get in contact with us at Tectrade

1. High-Performance Back-up / Restore
2. Archive of data - across disk and tape
3. Information Life Cycle Management
4. “Data Ocean” Unified Storage
5. Data-intensive (HPC) Technical Computing
6. Big Data and Analytics
7. ISV Solutions – SAS Grid, SAP HANA
8. Healthcare, Genomics
9. Video, streaming media, media & entertainment

The overall goal of the product from my perspective is to provide a single scale-out data plane for the entire data centre. Which it has certainly enabled in all the deployments we have completed. 

Welcome to the new VirtualVizion Blog

Hello everyone, thanks for checking out my blog. Over the coming months I will be adding posts regarding anything & everything within the world of virtualization. I am hoping to include information that everybody can benefit from. If you have any queries regarding any of the posts feel free to contact me via wbush@virtualvizion.com