Best posts made by Aconboy

@Breffni-Potter It is absolutely genuine. For example, Simplivity requires that a minimum of 48 GB RAM PER-Node be reserved for their VSA with an entry level, with the higher end nodes taking 100GB RAM for the VSA per node. In some of their older gear, the number was around 150GB per node. With Nutanix, the number with all features turned off starts at 16GB per node, but jumps up to 32 or somewhat more per node as features are turned on. Same story with all the other varietal VSA based vendors. Basically, a VSA is not free, it is a virtualized SAN, and they run an instance of it on every node in their architectures, with the associated resource consumption. - The VSA didn't eliminate the SAN, it virtualized it then replicated it over and over. That is just on the RAM side of things. Then there is cpu core usage associated with each VSA - cores and ram going to run the VSA's instead of the actual workloads. In HC3, we not only eliminated the SAN, we did so without using a VSA at all, so those "reserved" resources go directly into actually running VM's, all the while streamlining the IO path so that there is a dramatic reduction in the number of hops it takes to do things like change a period to a comma.

@DustinB3403 Yeah, I confess I have a minecraft server running as a VM on one of my clusters

Remembering that mangolassi.it is a thing and that I should likely check in as it has been a minute since dropping by

@hobbit666 - Sit tight for a product announcement in about a month - you will really like that if you liked this

@hobbit666 take a look at our new 1150 cluster - same feature set at a price point of $24,500 starting wednesday....

@scottalanmiller I gotta show up from time to time or people think I am a myth

@ntoxicator - As a non-sales guy from Scale (office of the CTO), I would be happy to set up a webex and go over what we do with HC3 and see if it a fit for you or not. We can dive to whatever level of technical depth you would like to go to.

@coliver said:

@scottalanmiller said:

@coliver said:

@ntoxicator said:

In my opinion. There would be more overhead

ISCSI LUN attached to Xen Hypervisor > VM > attached as local disk. Unless pass-through?

Slightly more overhead... probably an immeasurable amount. At the same time you are going against best practices and defeating many of the advantages of virtualization in one fell swoop by not attaching the storage to your hypervisor and presenting a virtual disk to the VM.

As I was writing out the downsides, I'm not actually sure that it is more overhead. Because the iSCSI has to be processed in software by the VM rather than in hardware by the host there is more network overhead in doing it to the guest.

Right, I agree with this I assumed that it would be slightly more processing overhead for the hypervisor but since it would be doing it anyway it wouldn't be anything additional.

Guys, this is largely the reason we architected HC3 the way we did - give you the flexibility and HA of SAN/NAS without the complexity or overhead of VSA's and storage protocols. This is also why we built it specifically for the SMB and Mid-Market - at a price that makes sense specifically for our target market (not trying to sound too "salesy" but this is exacly why we built the platform).

@ntoxicator said:

@Aconboy said:

HC3

How long has HC3 scale been avail? Today is my first time hearding and being introduced with the option

We began it in 2008, and first customer ship was in late 2011. we have north of 5000 units in the field across 1800 or so customer sites.Take a look at www.scalecomputing.com

@ntoxicator - On Friday the President signed into law a bill that allows small businesses to deduct up to $500,000 of computer/software solution purchases on their 2015 tax returns for purchases made before the end of the year. Previously they would have only been able to deduct a total of $25,000 of these types of purchases in 2015 and would have had to spread the rest of the deduction over the useful life of each asset. This law now allows them to enjoy the entire tax benefit right away!

Said another way, if a tax-paying SMB customer purchases a Scale solution before 12/31, they will be able to deduct the entire expense from their 2015 income. This means they will realize significant cash savings for 2015 by buying now. A $50,000 purchase now only really costs $32,500 because of the cash saved on taxes.

Example
Scale purchase: $50,000
Estimated tax rate: 35%
Tax savings: $17,500
Net 2015 cash impact: $32,500

I have been putting the Mellanox SX1012 through it's paces for the last couple of months and am impressed to say the least. 1U half width switch with 12 56GbE ports of QSFP+ that break out into 48 ports of 10Gig/1gig. Basically it is 1/10/40/56GbE for under 10 grand and has ZERO performance issues. http://www.mellanox.com/page/products_dyn?product_family=163 Iron Networks has it for ~5k - http://shop.ironnetworks.com/msx1012b-2brs?utm_source=google_shopping&gclid=Cj0KEQiA496zBRDoi5OY3p2xmaUBEiQArLNnK-nkxw0RsoMKFLQDuC3zgkhB0Fb0ZDrDLQ30Of5BHFgaAqON8P8HAQ

@FiyaFly hopefully, you arent using the Juniper firewalls..... http://thehackernews.com/2015/12/hacking-juniper-firewall-security.html?m=1

@hobbit666 the new 3 node 2150x starter cluster lists at 47k Sterling - be happy to chat it through with you if you like and show you one via webex

@JaredBusch Not that much more expensive and far more reliable for the job at hand

@Breffni-Potter One of our founders - Jason Collier is on the floor at Spiceworld London as we speak

And there it is... Awesomeness embedded in pixels. love it

@ntoxicator - yup, we do that too - 10gig out of band from the LAN path for storage stack handling and cluster self-awareness.

@thwr @breffni-potter @travisdh1 - we have just released our 1150 platform which brings all features and functionalities with both flash and spinning disk in at a pricepoint under $30k USD for a complete 3 node cluster.

@scottalanmiller your emails from the forum started showing up in inbox again. That is at least why I returned

@ntoxicator pricing seems to be relatively ok with 3250M5's, my concern is they seem a bit dated on specs vs others. The BIOS on them is a bit of a huge PITA in my opinion. Are you still thinking of rolling your own or is a prebuilt solution still on the radar for you?