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News-Flash (A few flash related updates)

Hey all, its been a while since I put out anything that was non-VMware related. Actually, looking back, it was during the run up to VMworld. Well, this time of year is usually busy for us at VMware, especially with the vSphere 2013 (5.5) announcement and subsequent release and Virtual SAN going into beta. There have been a few things happening in the flash world over recent weeks so lets recap on some of those.

Violin Memory IPO

Well, lets starts with some IPO news. Violin Memory had its initial public offering last week. When I met with Violin at VMworld, they were showing off their new management interface called Symphony. I’ll be on the look-out for new developments from Violin Memory now that they have additional capital off the back of the IPO.

Cisco buy WhipTail

This news is a couple of weeks old now, but Cisco recently purchased the all flash array (AFA) vendor WHIPTAIL (you can read more about them in this article I did about them last year). There has been quite a number of AFA vendors bought up over the past number of years, the most notable being EMC’s acquisition of XtremIO and IBM’s acquisition of Texas Memory Systems (TMS). With this latest acquisition, all the big players now have their own AFA – HP have their all flash version of the 3PAR, DELL have an all flash version of their Compellent and NetApp have their EF540 series. Are we going to see any more acquisitions? And what does this mean for VCE? Interesting times ahead.

Pure Storage hires rock-stars

My good friend, Vaughn Stewart, recently announced his departure from NetApp to join Pure Storage. I guess to many of us Vaughn was the face of NetApp and departure came as a surprise in many circles. However, soon after Vaughn’s arrival at Pure, Wade O’Harrow (who headed up the EMC vSpecialist team for Chad Sakac) also announced his departure from EMC to Pure. And I’ve seen a number of other active community folks moving there too. It seems a lot of good things are happening at Pure with another round of funding announced in late August and their first user group conference (Pure EVOLVE) immediately after VMworld. With these new hires, I’m expecting to hear a lot more from these guys very soon.

Nimbus Data announce 4,000 VMware View desktops at less than $40 per desktop

So lets move on to more technical news. I just had this from Brittani Neff over at Nimbus Data. It looks like they got some great results using their Gemini F420 all flash array with Brocade G5 switches over 16Gb Fibre Channel. Using the evaluator group’s IOmark-VDI benchmark, they got 4,032 linked clone VDI images at a cost of $39.68 per virtual desktop. This is accomplished in just 2U of rack space and 350 W of power consumption. Pretty cool stuff. Tech Target did a piece on it here.

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