In my 16 years of being an sysadmin /storage engineer, I have been lucky to always have worked on the bleeding edge technologies way before they became GA products. Each of these products were MVPs (minimum viable products) and after launch became the leaders in their own domains.
The reason I work with early technologies is because I love working with some of the most brilliant people in Silicon Valley and am amazed by the amount of thought and research that goes into developing an enterprise ready product.
The first MVP product I worked on was Cisco MDS SAN switches back in 2001 (almost one plus year before GA), then Cisco UCS servers in 2008 (almost 1 year before GA), recently Nutanix in 2012 (almost right at GA). Working with the core engineers developing the product and being able to provide feedback and define direction of the product is what motivates and excites me.
One thing which was common with each of these products was that they had at-least one mind blowing feature which was way ahead of its time in the industry at that time of launch, and based on that one feature customers gave these products a *chance* and made them successful.
One thing which was common with each of these products was that they had at-least one mind blowing feature which was way ahead of its time in the industry at that time of launch, and based on that one feature customers gave these products a *chance* and made them successful.
For example Cisco MDS 1.0 was released with a feature called VSAN.
Just this one feature now enabled customers to converge their workflows of production and test/dev onto the same switch isolated by VSANs simplified the architecture and design.
UCS, was quite a way ahead of its times and brought the concept of stateless computing to the world. This again was so revolutionary a concept that customers and early adopters were able to see the amazing benefits and adopted this technology in droves.
Nutanix brought the concept of distributed storage and computing hence created a completely new category of infrastructure and now is a leader in the converged infrastructure category.
Even Nutanix did not have non-disruptive upgrades in the product till after version 3.5.x.
Even Nutanix did not have non-disruptive upgrades in the product till after version 3.5.x.
Fast forward to today, I have yet again started working with another generation one product in a startup company called Cohesity.
At GA, Cohesity will bring to market the most mature and most enterprise ready generation one product I've ever had the chance to work on. I have been working on the product for the last 6 months now, and I am amazed by the innovation, design and effort a team of just 30 engineers and product managers have put in to make this product stand apart from any other data protection product out there.
Cohesity as a data protection platform is solving one of the biggest problem of data growth and management in the world today. This product will make all the other data protection solutions in the industry today look quite obsolete.
In my mind the Cohesity platform starts at where the most mature data protection are with entirety of their portfolio.
The product at GA will have non-disruptive code upgrade, which even the most mature data protection platforms of the industry don't have. Just as an example, one of the early adopters who we worked with to install Cohesity told us that it takes him about 3 months of planning and co-ordination with various different teams before he can actually take a downtime to upgrade his data protection platform. Due to the amount of work that needs to go in just for planning, this enterprise customer is forced to do upgrades to this platform once a year, which leaves them vulnerable to bugs and performance problems.
With Cohesity, as it stands today has this revolutionary feature built into its GA code. Here is what this particular customer had to say when he experienced this feature in action.
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Here is how it works.
Here is how it works.
When the code on the system needs to be upgraded, all the admin has to do is download the code, and initiate a 1 click upgrade. Now the admin can sit back and wait for an entire 8, 16 or n number or node cluster to be upgraded automatically. Gone are the days where now 3 months of planning need to be done, and gone are the days when applications need to shutdown for the upgrade of a data protection platform. Cohesity's upgrade process is completely non disruptive for all inflight data IO and management operations. The concept of VIPs handle ingress and egress storage IO traffic without being affected by node reboots or binary upgrades. Virtual IPs are used for application facing ingress and egress traffic and if the node they are bound to reboots during code upgrade, the VIP is moved to another active node to handle all storage IO.
A distributed lockmgr in the platform is responsible to make sure that the upgrade of each and every node in the cluster completes.When the upgrade is triggered the distributed lockmgr issues a token to all the nodes in the cluster and forces the nodes to participate in a race condition.
All the nodes race to the lockmgr with the tokens that were issued, the lockmgr then allows the winner of this race condition to go thru the upgrade process, and waits for the node to come back and reports its new version. While the node is upgrading the VIP for this node floats over to another node in the cluster, and hence the storage IO and other services are not affected. Once this node has upgraded to the new version, the lockmgr allows serially each and every other node in sequence to upgrade.
Here is a video which shows the concept in action. I can't share the UI just yet, remember the product is still not GA. :)
The crux of the matter is, non-disruptive upgrades is a very difficult feature to deliver. The inclusion of a feature such as this for GA gives an idea of how focussed Cohesity Engineering and Product Management are to deliver the next generation data protection platform.
The crux of the matter is, non-disruptive upgrades is a very difficult feature to deliver. The inclusion of a feature such as this for GA gives an idea of how focussed Cohesity Engineering and Product Management are to deliver the next generation data protection platform.