I have been lucky to have worked on some of the coolest bleeding edge products in compute and storage technology today.
In 2001, when I joined Cisco Systems, my first project was to be one of the lead sys admins responsible for building, and managing the datacenter for Andiamo, which was the first spin out company by Cisco.
Andiamo was responsible to bring to the industry the 1st intelligent SAN switch i.e MDS. The OS running on the switch was based on Montevista Linux and was called iSAN or Intelligent SAN. The features that were introduced in this product eclipsed product offerings from the other storage switch vendors in the market.
MDS brought to market features like VSANs,iSCSI,FCIP,IVR and LUN Zoning in the fabric. These features were received in the industry with mixed reactions. The early adopters started tweaking and implementing most of these features into production and were thrilled and happy with the product which was way ahead of its times and blew away the Brocade and McData switches in terms of functionality and ease of use. I know this for a fact, since I left being a sys admin for Andiamo after the product was launched in 2002 and became a member of Cisco TAC team, and became a customer support engineer to support the MDS product for a period of 6 years.
After Cisco TAC, I got involved with Nuova Systems, the 2nd spin out Cisco did, and started working on Project California. This was the code name for the blade server's Nuova was building to enter the server market.
This was one of the most disruptive technologies introduced into the market with the concepts like Service Profiles, WWN and MAC pools,end host switching and Cisco Virtual Adapters, and in a short amount of time became a billion dollar business for Cisco.
As a Solutions Architect for Cisco Advanced Services, I designed and implemented the UCS and MDS storage platforms for Vmworld 2009. UCS was the compute platform to host all of the Hands on Labs for Vmworld 2009.
In summary, the topology consisted of 64 UCS chassis, 512 blades, booting off the SANs thru the 2xMDS 9506 switches, with 7340 zones each fabric. eMC VMAX's and Clariion Arrays were used for storage along with Netapp FCP/NFS.
Due to the features both these products had, I was able to provision Service Profiles,WWN Pools, MAC Address Pools and zone the MDS switches ahead and provide WWPN information to the storage admins to present LUNs to the hosts.
The ease of creating a huge environment like this was simplified by the design and vision of the engineer's who developed both these products.
Fast forward to today, I'm lucky again to be working on another amazing piece of storage technology which just like MDS and UCS is way ahead of its times, and brings to table the next generation approach of how storage is going to be viewed in the future i.e compute and storage, true convergence.
From where I am, I see that in ten years, the industry has come a full circle.
Please see my earlier blog, Back to Basics.
This time, the company which brings this next generation vision of simplifying storage solution is not Cisco, but Nutanix.
With an amazing vision and brilliance, this small team of ex-google architects have created the storage solution for the future i.e cloud.
It's no secret that the performance of storage would be at its peak when it has direct access to flash/disk without any extra hops or equipment to add latency to the round trip of a storage IO.
In 2001, when I joined Cisco Systems, my first project was to be one of the lead sys admins responsible for building, and managing the datacenter for Andiamo, which was the first spin out company by Cisco.
Andiamo was responsible to bring to the industry the 1st intelligent SAN switch i.e MDS. The OS running on the switch was based on Montevista Linux and was called iSAN or Intelligent SAN. The features that were introduced in this product eclipsed product offerings from the other storage switch vendors in the market.
MDS brought to market features like VSANs,iSCSI,FCIP,IVR and LUN Zoning in the fabric. These features were received in the industry with mixed reactions. The early adopters started tweaking and implementing most of these features into production and were thrilled and happy with the product which was way ahead of its times and blew away the Brocade and McData switches in terms of functionality and ease of use. I know this for a fact, since I left being a sys admin for Andiamo after the product was launched in 2002 and became a member of Cisco TAC team, and became a customer support engineer to support the MDS product for a period of 6 years.
After Cisco TAC, I got involved with Nuova Systems, the 2nd spin out Cisco did, and started working on Project California. This was the code name for the blade server's Nuova was building to enter the server market.
This was one of the most disruptive technologies introduced into the market with the concepts like Service Profiles, WWN and MAC pools,end host switching and Cisco Virtual Adapters, and in a short amount of time became a billion dollar business for Cisco.
As a Solutions Architect for Cisco Advanced Services, I designed and implemented the UCS and MDS storage platforms for Vmworld 2009. UCS was the compute platform to host all of the Hands on Labs for Vmworld 2009.
In summary, the topology consisted of 64 UCS chassis, 512 blades, booting off the SANs thru the 2xMDS 9506 switches, with 7340 zones each fabric. eMC VMAX's and Clariion Arrays were used for storage along with Netapp FCP/NFS.
Due to the features both these products had, I was able to provision Service Profiles,WWN Pools, MAC Address Pools and zone the MDS switches ahead and provide WWPN information to the storage admins to present LUNs to the hosts.
The ease of creating a huge environment like this was simplified by the design and vision of the engineer's who developed both these products.
Fast forward to today, I'm lucky again to be working on another amazing piece of storage technology which just like MDS and UCS is way ahead of its times, and brings to table the next generation approach of how storage is going to be viewed in the future i.e compute and storage, true convergence.
From where I am, I see that in ten years, the industry has come a full circle.
Please see my earlier blog, Back to Basics.
This time, the company which brings this next generation vision of simplifying storage solution is not Cisco, but Nutanix.
With an amazing vision and brilliance, this small team of ex-google architects have created the storage solution for the future i.e cloud.
It's no secret that the performance of storage would be at its peak when it has direct access to flash/disk without any extra hops or equipment to add latency to the round trip of a storage IO.
This is the basis of Nutanix technology.
The product enables you to virtualize the datacenter without requiring a SAN and the extra equipment with goes along with creating a complex network storage topology.
It eliminates the need to manage 3-5 different pieces of equipment to achieve the simple read/write to disk. The convergence of compute and storage delivers a building block which can be scaled out as the needs for storage grow. Its a perfect solution to build any type of cloud platform with clear management capabilities and a command line interface for scripting which makes the administration simple.
The elimination of the extra SAN equipment reduces the CAPEX from 40-60%.
The storage+compute converged out of the box capabilities saves hours if not days or weeks of implementation time, even if you were using advanced MDS and UCS features of pre-provisioning and pre-zoning.
Every way I look at it, I can see value in what Nutanix brings to the table and hope the journey to the clouds is an enjoyable one..