5 Worth It Certifications for the Storage Admin

Hey yo…

We’ve heard the tune of June and drenched in the rain of July. Within this timeline, Gartner gave the Magic Quadrants for some segments in Enterprise IT. First up, EMC is positioned as Leader for Enterprise Backup Software and Integrated Appliances. EMC also maintains its lead in the overall PBBA market with a 52.4% revenue share in the first quarter of 2015. In the Solid State Array segment, EMC is once again positioned as Leader along with Pure Storage, in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant. The EMC-Pure Storage rivalry took another turn as Pure Storage seems to have lured Jonathan Martin to be their new CMO. But I digress, readers and Storage Admins. This post is about IT certifications, which the storage admin ought to pursue in the SSDC era. In my last post, I discussed the new skills a storage admin ought to equip oneself with. Now, to validate those skills with certifications, this is an extension, as for what to do next. Here we go…

Certifications for the Storage Admin

1) VMware Certified Professional

Despite saturation seen in the market and pricing pressure from competitors, VMware continues to surge and dominate market share. And for the 6th year in a row, VMware sits at the top, as a Leader in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for x86 Server Virtualization Infrastructure. VMware’s offering for the Software-defined Data Center in Compute, Networking, Storage and Management is changing and disrupting the industry as a whole. This certification continues to be a hot skill and may stay that way for a long time.

According to a study by Global Knowledge the average pay of a VCP is $94,181. For more info on VCP-DCV, click here. For a quick reference on the details of the exam, check the pic below:

VCP6-DCV Exam

• @VMwarevSphere
• @VMwareCareers
• @VMwareU

2) AWS SysOps Admin

AWS Certifies SysOps Administrator – Associate

For 5 consecutive years, AWS has been ‘The Leader’ in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for IaaS. And now is turning out to be the runaway market leader for IaaS too. Storage Admins if you would ask that is AWS for IaaS what VMware is for Server Virtualization. My response would be – Safe Bet!

DR-as-a-Service, DB-as-a-Service, Desktop-as-a-Service etc AWS may enter your enterprise in any/more ways than one. Hybrid cloud seems to have become the route most companies would like to take. Storage Admins adhere yourselves with the Cloud and AWS in particular. I would like to go on a limb and say, “AWS is not only a #MustHave skill but a #WorthIt certification too”. For a quick reference on the details of the exam, check the pic above.

• @awscloud
• @AWSOpsWorks

3) Veeam Certified Engineer

How would you describe Veeam? A virtualization-centric backup and recovery solution? Or The leading VM backup vendor in the market? Or More than 145,000 customers worldwide have paid for a backup and recovery solution with simplicity, reliability and integration into VM management UI all included in one product?

Whatever you may describe it, Storage Admins I urge you to think big picture. In the SDDC era, x86 server virtualization has 2 major players – 1) VMware vSphere; and 2) Microsoft Hyper-V. Veeam provides backup solutions for both hypervisors with the same tools. Calling Veeam a hot skill would be an understatement.

As a VMware partner, Veeam supports VMware Virtual Volumes (VVols) and Virtual SAN (VSAN) 6.0. Plus, Veeam helps users move VMs around when using vMotion is not an option. #WorthIt certification indeed !

Veeam Certified Engineer Exam

• @veeam

4) VCE Certified Administration Engineer

VCE Vblock appliance falls under the Integrated Infrastructure or Converged Infrastructure segment. VCE likes to describe it as “Data Center in a box”. According to IDC, global sales of integrated infrastructure in Q1 ’15 totaled up to $2.1 billion. This is up 8.3% year on year. VCE is a bona fide leader in this market. Gartner’s Magic Quadrant Leader, 24.1% market share and 29.3% revenue growth, should be reason enough to pursue Vblock System Administration and add to your skillset. For a quick reference on the details of the exam, check the pic below.

VCE Vblock Systems Administration Exam

• @VCE

5) EMC Product/Technology Specific Certification

Storage Admins, I would like you all to take a stroll down memory lane with me. A time, when we took classes on Storage Fundamentals and prepared for an exam titled – Information Storage Management (ISM). Some would ace it, while some couldn’t even pass. Once that ISM hurdle was crossed, the EMCSA specialist exam would be the next frontier. Anyone wearing their EMC Specialist T-shirt in office would be the target of envy. And those wearing T-shirts of Expert level were considered lords. Alas! Those were the days.

Today, transformation is seen not only in the product portfolio, in marketing, in the operations but in their certification framework as well. The new Emerging Technologies Division @EMC has been making the rounds. And the certification track for most of the technologies under this new division is the new EMCP/T track. What makes this track unique is the one exam approach. ScaleIO, ViPR Controller, ViPR SRM and XtremIO are technologies covered under this track.

As per ESG, EMC ScaleIO is a flexible software-defined solution that leverages host-based internal storage to create a scalable virtual SAN with performance that is comparable to or better than an external SAN, at a fraction of the cost and complexity. Deployment options are – 1) as storage only; and 2) converging storage, compute and networking resources into a single scalable building block that is easy to manage. A worthy competitor for VMware’s VSAN and PernixData’s FVP. For a quick reference on the details of the exam, check the pic below.

ScaleIO 1.x Server-Based SAN Exam

The market segment for All Flash Arrays doubled in 2014 compared to 2013, with the total market revenue totalling up to $1.43 billion. The XtremIO Storage Array from EMC is an all-flash array (AFA), based on scale-out architecture. According to EMC, the XtremIO design unlocks flash’s full performance potential and deliver array-based capabilities that leverage the unique characteristics of SSDs. Performance, Scalability, Efficiency, Data Protection and a wide range of functionality is what XtremIO is all about. Strengths and shortcomings aside, EMC has been able to successfully sell and market XtremIO due to its vast sales force, channel bandwidth and execution prowess. Thus, the certification enlisted below ~ #WorthIt !!!

XtremIO 3.x Flash Storage Solutions Exam

The ViPR Controller is a storage automation software that centralizes and transforms storage into a simple and extensible platform by abstracting and pooling resources. It is designed to deliver automated, policy-driven storage services on-demand.

EMC’s ViPR Controller has got to be the single most exciting product from the Emerging Technologies Division. And EMC is taking this commercial product and releasing it to a community-driven development. The open source project, named CoprHD, makes the code for ViPR Controller available to the open source community. EMC, though, shall continue to sell EMC ViPR Controller as a commercial offering enhanced with service, support, training etc.

Simple, Extensible and Open are what describes the ViPR Controller. Optimizing resources and providing the IT team with the ability to deliver Storage-as-a-service. The ViPR Controller is bound to be a hot skill and a #WorthIt certification.

ViPR Controller and Data Services 2.x Exam

EMC describes ViPR SRM, as a storage management software to manage the complexity of growing, heavily virtualized storage environments. While the ViPR Controller abstracts and pools arrays into virtual storage pools, integration with SRM helps you understand the physical to logical relationships. In other words, relationships between ViPR tenants and the underlying storage are simpler to fathom. However, unlike the ViPR Controller, SRM isn’t open source yet.

Visualize. Analyze. Optimize. ViPR SRM aims to optimize capacity and improve productivity to get the most out storage assets. With ScaleIO, ViPR Controller and ViPR SRM, EMC’s Software-defined Storage position seems solid.

ViPR 3.x Storage Resource Management Exam

• @EMCProven
• @EMCScaleIO
• @EMCXtremIO
• @EMCViPR

Honorable Mentions

There are 5 more certifications that I believe deserve honorable mentions. Certifications, listed in the pic below, from Cisco-NetApp, HDS, EMC, DataCore and Nutanix. These certifications are for technologies that are market leaders in their own right and may find their way in your data centers if not already. Storage admins, you may want to keep tabs on these as well.

Certis worth honorable mention

My “2 cents”… Why these certifications ? I’ve got two reasons. First, they are recognized as the cream of the crop from one of the most revered market analysis firm – Gartner. Second, these technologies are market share leaders, which means more opportunities up for grabs. Rich Simmons, from EMC, stated “What was once considered a “boring” sector in IT is now hot again. We have new vendors entering the market at a furious pace, trying to gain position in all-flash, flash attach and software-defined storage”.

Remember some of these challenges in the days of traditional storage. Challenges like-

• Manual and slow provisioning
• Performance bottlenecks
• Alignment with applications
• End-to-end visibility
• Specialized hardware requirements

Storage Admins, I urge you to check out these 5 certifications. If honorable mentions seem more appropriate then go ahead with those. It’s not about overkill but looking at the big picture. Companies are undergoing restructuring and transformation. IT vendors are offering solutions to “Redefine IT” ( I know, EMC’s punch line ). Certification in these technologies would mean –

• Acquiring hot skills
• Competency in market leading technology
• Staying ahead of the curve
• As Seth Godin stated, you can potentially lead, contribute and demonstrate that the attention you are asking to be spent on you is worthwhile.

So, if you folks agree, somewhat agree or completely disagree I would like to read your comments on this topic below.

**In countries where English isn’t first language, an extra 30 minutes are allotted to candidates who take the exam in English

***Course is available to candidates in Instructor Led Training (ILT) and Online Instructor Led Training formats.

Sources–
VMware Exam
https://mylearn.vmware.com/mgrReg/plan.cfm?plan=64178&ui=www_cert

AWS Exam
http://aws.amazon.com/certification/certified-sysops-admin-associate/

Veeam Exam
http://www.veeam.com/vmce.html
http://www.veeam.com/blog/how-to-become-a-veeam-certified-engineer-vmce.html

VCE Exam
http://www.vce.com/services/training/certified/manage

EMCP/T Exam
https://education.emc.com/guest/certification/framework/pts/ScaleIO.aspx
https://education.emc.com/part/certification/framework/pts/xtremio3x.aspx
https://education.emc.com/guest/certification/framework/pts/ViPR_CDS.aspx
https://education.emc.com/guest/certification/framework/pts/ViPR_SRM.aspx

http://www.storagenewsletter.com/rubriques/market-reportsresearch/emc-pure-storage-ibm-and-hp-lead-magic-quadrant-for-solid-state-arrays/
http://www.storagenewsletter.com/rubriques/people/jonathan-martin-cmo-pure-storage/
http://www.storagenewsletter.com/rubriques/market-reportsresearch/2015-magic-quadrant-for-enterprise-backup-software-and-integrated-appliances-gartner/
http://www.storagenewsletter.com/rubriques/market-reportsresearch/ww-purpose-built-backup-appliance-market-grew-7-yy-in-1q15-idc/
http://aws.amazon.com/resources/analyst-reports/
http://www.gartner.com/technology/reprints.do?id=1-2IH2LGI&ct=150626&st=sb
http://www.storagenewsletter.com/rubriques/business-others/record-results-for-veeam-in-1q15/
http://emergingtechblog.emc.com/author/rich-simmons/
http://emergingtechblog.emc.com/category/products/scaleio/
http://emergingtechblog.emc.com/category/products/vipr/
http://emergingtechblog.emc.com/category/products/vipr-srm/
http://www.globalknowledge.com/training/generic.asp?pageid=3736

Skills that a Storage Admin #MustHave

EMC World 2015*

CoreOS FEST 2015**

Hey yo…

May is always the fully loaded month in the IT calendar. Microsoft Ignite, CoreOS Fest, SAP SAPPHIRE, EMC World, IBM Edge and more. Keynotes, hands-on labs, mentoring sessions and  disruptive new tech on display. With that said, where does that leave the IT guy. For the technologist, new tech means new skills. And right now in the Cloud-SDDC era, what skills are in demand and what are going to be ? Which ones to pick ? What route to take ? Well, the answer seems… “It depends”. I know it sounds cliche perhaps even vague. All this new tech may mean new skills for the techie, but for the business owners it means new options. So, what are our options, what new skills does the storage admin need to adopt. From my crystal ball, just kidding folks ;), I foresee 16 skills in demand for the storage guy. I’m presenting them in 2 sets . First set of five, are the Skills in Demand. And the second set of eleven, the New Tricks. Here we go… !!!

Skills in Demand

1) Data Migration

Data Migration covers storage platform migration, application migration to new storage, moving operating systems to new storage, consolidation of data or database instances etc. Most migrations today are P2V conversions, V2V conversions, Cloud migrations etc. The tools we are accustomed to are still in demand like rsync, Hitachi’s Universal Replicator or EMC’s Open Replicator but the new stuff like EMC VPLEX, VMware’s Storage vMotion, NetApp MetroCluster are becoming the norm if not already. Every storage admin should seek to undertake as many migration projects as possible and those who have are golden. Storage admins, experienced and new, this skill is certified #MustHave !

2) Replication

Often referred synonymously with Business Continuity Management, local and remote replication are among the routine tasks of the storage admin. Yes, automation has crept in this realm. But, without expertise in replication the storage admin’s toolkit is incomplete. EMC’s SRDF/TimeFinder for VMAX, Hitachi’s TrueCopy/Shadow Image and NetApp’s SnapMirror/SnapVault are the industry’s leading remote/local replication solutions. However, over the years EMC RecoverPoint (RP) has been a revelation in the sphere of BC/DR. Admins once had to use different tools for every platform, whether physical or virtual, and RecoverPoint (RP) changed that with its “One Solution” approach. And now with EMC RecoverPoint for Virtual Machines, we have a VMware hypervisor-based, storage agnostic, software only data protection tool enabling local, remote and concurrent local and remote replication with continuous data protection for recovery to any PiT. #RP4replication #MustHave !

3) NAS

The dedicated, high performance, file sharing and storage device that provides ease of deployment, improved efficiency, flexibility and centralized storage (I know it sounds textbook), has not only entered datacenters but seems to be staying put for the foreseeable future. With its cousin Scale-Out NAS becoming more mainstream as we speak, embracing NAS seems inevitable. Scale-Out NAS has already carved a niche in Big Data and CCTV-Security solutions and traditional NAS a prominent feature in vSphere and Hyper-V. Hence, NAS ~ #MustHave

4) Shell Programming Languages

Shell programming languages have been used for repetitive task automation and will be doing so. Tasks like monitoring systems, data backups or creating snapshots, creating email based alert systems, finding available and free memory or finding info about local or remote servers, are automated with shell programming languages. With VMs and Containers taking helm, more processes would be preferred automated. Korn (ksh), Bourne Again (bash), Tickle (tcl) or C (csh), pick one and learn or as many as possible. If you are a Windows guy, then PowerShell is your weapon of choice. Bottomline, definite #MustHave for the storage admin’s toolkit.

5) VMware vSphere

The vSphere/ESXi hypervisor is the market leader in server virtualization. Yes, Hyper-V is hot on its heels. RedHat KVM and Oracle VM have improved leaps and bounds as well. But with vSphere 6, VMware is taking the fight to the competition. According to Bill Ferguson, author of The Official VCP5 Certification Guide, the new vSphere 6 is more powerful, more manageable, more secure and more flexible than any previous release of vSphere. It will be fun to learn how you can use it best for your own IT environment. And storage guys know that storage is an essential component of a vSphere design and provides the foundation for the vSphere environment. A successful vSphere design is based on a solid storage design that addresses capacity, performance, availability and recovery. So, Storage admins this is #MustHave indeed !!!

The New Tricks

1) Software-defined Storage (SDS)

According to techtarget.com, SDS is an approach to data storage in which the programming that controls storage-related tasks is decoupled from the physical storage hardware. It also states that, SDS places the emphasis on storage-related services rather than storage hardware. With the rise of DataCore and their SAN Symphony-V solution, SDS may be in your datacenter sooner rather than later. EMC and VMware are catching up with their offerings of SDS. With that said, EMC announced that the ViPR Software-defined Storage would become open source in June this year. Another vendor offering open source SDS like RedHat. IT is undergoing a paradigm shift and storage is a big part of it. Check the playlist below for SDS offerings from VMware, DataCore, EMC, HP and IBM –

2) Cloud-based Disaster Recovery

Expensive and complex are two traits connected with traditional Disaster Recovery (DR) solutions. The challenge in supporting the ongoing maintenance of traditional  DR solutions would force organisations to operate within limitations. Cloud-based DR, however, seems to have changed the game. How ? By providing simple, affordable and automated processes for recovering  data. As per 451 research, Cloud-based DR is expected to grow at 21% CAGR over the next several years and the storage admin should probably sleep on it. For more info on Cloud-based DR check out this ebook from VMware on this link.  Also below, is a playlist from vendors offering cloud-based DR solutions – AWS, VMware, Microsoft and Zetta – 

3) Hyper Converged Infrastructure (HCI)

SimpliVity states, at the highest level hyperconvergence is a way to enable cloud-like economics and scale without compromising the performance, reliability and availability you expect in your own datacenter. It has also been stated in techtarget.com, Hyper-Convergence (hyperconvergence) is a type of infrastructure system with a software-centric architecture that tightly integrates compute, storage, networking and virtualization resources and other technologies from scratch in a commodity hardware box supported by a single vendor like Nutanix, VMware, SimpliVity, Scale Computing, NiMBOXX etc As IT transforms in the direction of SDDC, HCI have been deemed the building blocks of SDDC, especially by VMware. And also, the hyperconverged systems market grew 162% in 2014 that shows rapid adoption. This skill is certified #MustHave !

4) Open Source Software (OSS)

Open source software has penetrated in datacenters and has become integral. And it all started with Linux. The big names like IBM and Oracle supported it and the newcomers that have become big names selling it – RedHat and Suse, have made OSS mainstream. Now, there is a new generation of OSS on the horizon that shall change and disrupt – OpenStack, Docker, CoreOS, Kubernetes and Flocker.

OpenStack is for service providers, enterprises, government agencies and academic institutions that want to build public or private clouds. 150+ companies support the mission of OpenStack and boasts of one of the fastest growing open source communities in the world. OpenStack provides redundant, scalable object storage using clusters of standardized servers capable of storing petabytes of data. It also provides persistent block level storage devices for use with OpenStack compute resources. For more info click here.

In my earlier post I had stated, “Docker is the software architecture that is eating the world. It also seems that Docker and LXC have won the market’s heart. And like Google, AWS, Microsoft, Red Hat and VMware, I too find myself on the Docker bandwagon. Why ? As I look past the hype and hyperbole, Docker is the real deal. How so ? When VMware came out with their server virtualization solution they offered features and functionalities like vMotion which none did, initiated P2V transformations across workloads in the datacenter. VMs have come a long way. Migrating mission critical workloads like Oracle, SAP, Microsoft etc to virtualized environments and new solutions in the offering like VSAN, VVOLS, NSX etc. VMs are the norm for SDDC. But, Docker being open source, meaning agility and elimination from vendor lock-in, offering light-weight virtualization and better performance than VMs depicts the potential of this technology.“. Every major IT solutions vendor is embracing this technology. Storage admins shouldn’t ignore either.

Launched in 2013, CoreOS had raised $20 million in Series A funding. It is also listed in CNN.com‘s 11 Startups to bet on in 2015, and has started a Linux Container as a Service to go up against the Cloud’s next big thing – Docker. Apart from Google, RedHat and VMware are also avid supporters of CoreOS. VMware announced support for CoreOS’s appc and shipped rkt in its Project Photon, making rkt available to VMware VSphere and VMware vCloud Air customers. Worth the hype ? I guess so.

The rise of Docker and CoreOS are evidence to the claim that Containerization has become one of the most important areas of innovation for modern computing. And Google doesn’t plan to sit idle, thus Kubernetes. Kubernetes is an open source manager for Docker containers. It helps you squeeze multiple Docker containers onto the same machine so that you can get the most out it. With Microsoft, RedHat, IBM, Docker, CoreOS, Mesosphere and SaltStack as active contributors it won’t take long for Kubernetes to creep in your environments.

ClusterHQ have created an open source tool named Flocker. It is a data volume and container manager that enables a container holding a stateful component to be live-migrated from one server to another without any loss of transactions, service or downtime. It is based on the ZFS file system and utilises ZFS based volumes at the back-end in combination with a network proxy at the front-end to enable stateful containers

5) New Stuff

Splunk, Veeam and Druva inSync are 3 new and exciting solutions the storage admin should make note of. Splunk Enterprise is a software platform to search, analyse and visualise the machine-generated data gathered from the websites, applications, sensors and devices, that comprise your IT infrastructure or business. Current features include – Indexing, Data Model, Pivot, Search, Alerts, Reports & Dashboards. As far as industry adoption is concerned, Hyperconverged Infrastructure market leader Nutanix have had success virtualizing Splunk workloads. And the Splunk app for NetApp’s Data ONTAP provides an essential building block  in data infrastructure monitoring. Fast Company has listed Splunk in its Top 10 most innovative companies in Big Data of 2015.

Veeam Software was born on July 1 2006. Its flagship product the Veeam Availability Suite has helped this company grow exponentially with 145,000 customers worldwide. Veeam brings backup and replication in a single solution to increase the value of backup and reinvent data protection for both VMware vSphere and Microsoft Hyper-V virtual environments. HP, EMC & NetApp are partners with Veeam and provide GTM solutions. This skill is certified #MustHave !

Formed in 2008, Druva is a specialist in backup for mobile devices. It is currently “the brand” in BYOD backup. It offers continuous backup for mobile devices with data deduplication and connection awareness. The flagship product inSync, provides automated backup of laptops, smartphones and tablets, data-loss protection on portable hardware via encryption and centralised visibility of devices and content. November 2014, Druva Inc earned the new AWS Partner Network (APN) storage competency designation from AWS and is sponsoring the AWS Summit in Tokyo on June 2nd. This company is definitely one to keep tabs on and Druva inSync may soon become DevOps’ favourite tool if not already.

My “2 cents”… the role and responsibilities of the storage admin aren’t going to change completely. Tasks of the admin like Zoning, ISL trunking, Creating RAID groups, Creating LUNs, Provisioning LUNs etc aren’t going to be irrelevant. But on the same token, paradigm shifts are taking place across the entire stack with disruptive technology. Hence, I reiterate, new tech means new skills for the techie. The skills I deemed #MustHave I think shall have a demand if not already across the industry. The ones I haven’t are the ones I would keep tabs on because they are disruptive in their own right and shall affect the daily tasks of the storage admin eventually. Still, does it seem overkill ? It may now. But, as techies we need to stay ahead of the curve as there is always the next big thing looming on the horizon and as knowledge workers, investing in our expertise is quintessential.

So, if you folks agree, somewhat agree or completely disagree I would like to read your comments on this topic below.

*I do not own copyright of the images presented in the collage. It is attributed to its owners and the original version can be found here.

**I do not own copyright of the images presented in the collage. It is attributed to its owners and the original version can be found here.

Sources –

• http://searchstorage.techtarget.com/conference/EMC-World-2015-conference-coverage#guideCategory1
• http://www.infoq.com/news/2015/03/flocker-docker-state-mobility
• http://www.zdnet.com/article/docker-containers-how-flockers-multimillion-injection-marks-the-rise-of-the-ecosystem/
• http://docs.splunk.com/Documentation/Splunk/latest/Overview/Whatsinthismanual
• http://www.fastcompany.com/3041638/most-innovative-companies-2015/the-worlds-top-10-most-innovative-companies-in-big-data#9_Splunk
• http://www.storagenewsletter.com/rubriques/software/splunk-app-for-netapp/
• http://www.veeam.com/news/veeam-achieves-record-2014-results-bookings-revenue-of-389-million-40-percent-annual-growth.html
• http://www.veeam.com/company/about.html
• http://www.computerweekly.com/news/2240177561/Endpoint-backup-scales-past-100000-with-Druva-inSync
• http://www.storagenewsletter.com/rubriques/oemchanneldistribution/druva-earns-amazon-web-services-storage-competency-designation/
• http://yourstory.com/2014/08/the-druva-growth-story-3000-customers/
• http://techcrunch.com/2014/08/06/druva-lands-25m-in-series-d-funding-to-expand-cloud-data-protection-strategy/
• http://googlecloudplatform.blogspot.in/2014/07/welcome-microsoft-redhat-ibm-docker-and-more-to-the-kubernetes-community.html
• http://googlecloudplatform.blogspot.in/2015/01/in-coming-weeks-we-will-be-publishing.html
• http://www.wired.com/2014/06/google-kubernetes/
• https://gigaom.com/2014/06/11/why-google-is-sowing-the-seeds-of-container-based-computing/
• http://www.businessinsider.in/Google-bets-big-on-this-little-tech-startup/articleshow/46829064.cms
• http://edition.cnn.com/2015/03/18/tech/startups-bet-on-2015/index.html
• https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/coreos
• https://coreos.com/blog/
• http://www.informationweek.com/cloud/infrastructure-as-a-service/coreos-unveils-linux-containers-as-a-service/d/d-id/1278956
• http://www.openstack.org/software/
• http://www.openstack.org/software/openstack-storage/
• http://hyperpolyglot.org/unix-shells
• http://searchstorage.techtarget.com/video/Open-source-ViPR-free-ScaleIO-announced-at-EMC-World-conference?src=5387466&asrc=EM_ERU_42704366&uid=16409561&utm_medium=EM&utm_source=ERU&utm_campaign=20150511_ERU+Transmission+for+05%2F11%2F2015+%28UserUniverse%3A+1513194%29_myka-reports%40techtarget.com

Ravello Systems : A 4 year-old startup you got to keep tabs on

Hey yo… Social Media Week at Bangalore last month was fantastic. Cool venues, awesome keynotes, lots of networking and to-the-point Q & As. Make sure to search for #SMWBangalore on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. Anyway, I digress. Allow me to bring to you – Ravello Systems

Ravello Systems was found in early 2011. Today it is based in the US and Israel. Back in January 2015, Ravello Systems raised $28 million in its 3rd round of funding bringing the total capital raised to $54 million. This venture, as stated in the company website, is brought to you by the same team that gave us the KVM hypervisor. With Ravello Systems, they plan on changing the way companies, large and small consume the public cloud.

Ravello states migration of a VM (or set of VMs) from a private cloud into a public cloud or between different public clouds, is complicated or even impractical for many uses. To address this issue they came up with the HVX stack. HVX is a virtualization platform that enables abstraction of underlying cloud infrastructure from the application VMs completely.

Ravello’s vision, to have an infrastructure that normalizes the public cloud and the data center from the application’s perspective. And their product line, to accomplish this, comprises – 1) HVX; 2) Nested Virtualization; 3) Overlay Network; 4) Storage Overlay; 5) Management; 6) and SaaS Operations.

HVX

HVX is a thin virtualization layer running on Linux. Linux supports para-virtualization and device driver availability, for all VMMs, make it a good weapon of choice. Also utilization of Linux schedulers, memory management and the network stack simplifies overall system design and implementation. HVX comprises of 3 major components -a) Nested hypervisor; b) Virtual networking layer; and c) Cloud storage abstraction layer

HVX Architecture

Nested Virtualization

A nested hypervisor or VMM capable of running unmodified guests on top of already virtualized hardware is what the HVX experience is. Note that, while other hypervisors – VMware ESXi, KVM and Xen are designed to run on physical x86 hardware and use virtualization extensions offered by modern CPUs ( Intel VT and AMD SVM ), the HVX employs Binary Translation to implement high-performance virtualization that does not require these extensions. According to Ravello, HVX fully controls the extension of its guest VMs. This feature is a foundation that enables other features like –

a) HVX allows to intercept all network traffic and therefore allows the implementation of their software-defined network.
b) HVX allows to intercept all storage access making storage overlay possible.

Overlay Network

According to Ravello, multi-VM applications can run unmodified in the cloud using a software-defined network that virtualizes the connectivity between the VMs in an application. In SDN, we separate the network control plane and service plane. The control plane of Ravello’s SDN includes a distributed router and also distributed DNS and DHCP servers. Each service is located at every HVX node. The data plane of the virtual network is formed by a fully distributed virtual switch. It also includes a virtual router software component residing within HVX. Packets that are sent by VMs are intercepted and injected into the switch. Their switch operates very similar to a regular network switch.

Overlay Network*

Storage Overlay

Storage Overlay Solution**

Storage is different compared to compute and network in the HVX stack. Ravello’s Storage Overlay focuses on performance, persistence and security. It abstracts native cloud storage primitives such as object storage and various types of block devices into local block devices exposed directly to guest VMs.

Some features to take note –

a) The Ravello HVX Storage Overlay solution acts as a global overlay on top of a distributed object store that contains the VM images.
b) Cloud storage abstraction and presentation as a local block device, coupled with the HVX overlay networking capabilities allow for running various NAS appliances and their consumption over network based protocols such as iSCSI, NFS, CIFS and SMB.
c) The Ravello HVX Storage Overlay even natively supports the attachment of CDROM drives to guest VMs with inserting and ejecting media which was uploaded to the Ravello Image Store. This enables the unique capability of installing an OS from scratch in the cloud.
d) The Ravello HVX Storage Overlay, together with the Ravello Management System, implements an algorithm to use various disk primitives in the different cloud providers and constructs an ad-hoc RAID 0 transparently to the guest to support high performance storage as well as large volumes.

Management

Ravello management system is a highly available enterprise-grade system, which is deployed in the public cloud. In order to isolate different tenants, and eliminate any risk of data leak or data corruption, the management follows industry’s best methodologies. It is responsible for all aspects of defining, running and controlling an application running on HVX.

SaaS Operations

Ravello’s deep technology is wrapped up and presented to users as an easy to use service. Ravello leverages AWS’s and Google’s best-in-class hardware, scale, economics, and operational practices to provide a robust enterprise grade cloud service to its customers.

My “2 cents”… Tech that allows the user to “do more with less” always intrigues me. With Ravello Systems, you get to do so much. Now, Hybrid Cloud seems to the buzz in cloud computing. Everyone from EMC, HDS, NetApp, IBM, VMware etc are on the bandwagon. And the situation in IaaS is a bit complex as different cloud providers utilize different hypervisors. Amazon EC2 is based on Xen hypervisor, Microsoft’s Azure on Hyper-V and we are all aware that VMware’s ESXi is the leading hypervisor out there. Network & Storage configurations, too, vary from vendor to vendor.

Ravello’s HVX stack allows the user to migrate VMware workloads to Amazon’s EC2 or Google Compute Engine, almost seemlessly. I know there are similar offerings like Xen-Blanket and the Turtles Project. But, Ravello’s solution have an offering that is #MustSee. 888 Holdings PLC, the famous online gaming website, felt alike and use Ravello’s cloud service powered by nested virtualization. 888 selected Ravello as they were able to successfully encapsulate and manage the application environment as a whole, and successfully recreated on AWS, the same complex network.

Thesedays, the DevOps community is big on Docker. So am I. And with Ravello’s technology, it is possible to implement a Hybrid Docker + VM based solution. It enables convergence of deployment – deploy and run VMs, Docker containers, Virtual appliances, Linux and Windows machines, all running within a single unified environment. For more info, read this post.

So, before you believe hype and hyperbole, try it and check the links listed below.

@ravellosystems
Ravello Systems @CrunchBase
Ravello Systems @YouTube
Ravello Systems @Bloomberg

*I do not own copyright of this image. It is attributed to Ravello Systems and the original version can be found here.
**I do not own copyright of this image. It is attributed to Ravello Systems and the original version can be found here.

References-

1) HVX: Virtualizing the Cloud by Alex Fishman, Mike Rapoport, Evgeny Budilovsky & Izik Eidus
2) HVX: Virtual infrastructure for the cloud – http://www.ravellosystems.com/technology/hvx
3) HVX: High performance nested virtualization – http://www.ravellosystems.com/technology/nested-virtualization
4) HVX: Software defined networking (overlay network) – http://www.ravellosystems.com/technology/software-defined-network
5) HVX: Storage overlay – http://www.ravellosystems.com/technology/storage-overlay
6) The Ravello management service – http://www.ravellosystems.com/technology/management
7) SaaS operations overview – http://www.ravellosystems.com/technology/saas-cloud-infrastructure