Gridstore Extends Product Line With Hyper-Converged Appliances

Gridstore, Inc. introduced a range of Hyper-V focused hyper-converged appliances, including an all-flash appliance to deliver tunable, auto-optimized compute and storage resources together in a single system.

The Gridstore HyperConverged Appliances improve operational and application performance yet save on both OpEx and CapEx.
 
They complement the existing Gridstore Storage Nodes which provide scalability and optimized price/performance storage for Hyper-V.

With this addition, the company is adding a new implementation option for customers that meets the growing need of IT organizations for a simple, easy-to-deploy solution, yet one that still allows elastic independently scalable compute and storage.
 
“Hyper-converged architectures are here to stay,” said Arun Taneja, founder, The Taneja Group. “The customer has spoken clearly that they like the idea of getting an entire infrastructure in a box that is easy to scale and even easier to manage. Gridstore’s ability to not only deliver a complete hyper-converged system but also allow for independent extensibility of the storage and compute makes it stand out in this market.”
 
Gridstore has leveraged its patented software architecture in this design. This architecture allows administrators to set QoS on a per VM basis to ensure the most important applications get the resources they need to perform. Unlike other hyper-converged systems that cannot scale storage independently it has the ability to mix and match HyperConverged Appliances and Storage Nodes, along with their associated servers. This means the turnkey deployment of hyper-converged systems can be combined with the extensibility of independent servers and storage, to maximize flexibility and resource management. Additionally, the design eliminates the need for the typical 3-way replica, thereby providing increased usable capacity and up to 50% TCO savings.
 
“We have seen a dramatic increase in customer demand for converged infrastructure systems that provide a simple, easy-to-deploy solution, yet one that still allows highly elastic scalable compute and storage,” said Skip Gould, president, BrightPlanIT, Inc. “We believe with the addition of Gridstore’s new HyperConverged Appliances to our portfolio, our clients will reap the benefits of having access to one of the most innovative “built-for-virtualization” storage solutions available in the market today.”
 
Gridstore Converged Infrastructure includes:

• HyperConverged Appliances: Single system that includes both compute and storage. Each appliance has four compute/storage nodes, and can be expanded with additional appliances and/or Storage Nodes up to 250 total nodes. Both all-flash and hybrid versions will be available.
• Compute Servers: Any Windows Servers to which are added the Gridstore vController, a small software driver that interfaces with Storage Nodes and provides simple management and end-to-end control of I/O from server to storage, eliminating the ‘I/O blender effect’ and allowing performance to scale linearly with capacity.
• Storage Nodes: Gridstore offers both Hybrid and Capacity Storage Nodes that scale from 12TB to 12PB with up to 250 nodes. Both Storage Node types include SATA drives for capacity and Hybrid Storage Nodes add PCIe Flash for caching to deliver high performance. These work with both Compute Nodes and HyperConverged Appliances.

HyperConverged Appliances are based on Gridstore’s software that delivers elastic resources, per-VM I/O Control, and deployment agility, all critical components of the private cloud.

• Elastic Resources: Start small and scale nondisruptively over time by adding either HyperConverged Appliances or Storage Nodes, scaling both performance and capacity independently and linearly according to business needs.
• Per-VM I/O Control: Gridstore’s end-to-end control creates an isolated I/O lane for each VM and auto optimizes to enable optimal application I/O. Coupled with Gridstore “TrueQoS, I/O per-VM can be controlled to ensure that the critical applications receive the highest priority, delivering the right performance and prioritization of resources when and where needed.
• Deployment Agility: The ability to expand infrastructure resources in compute, storage, and/or hyper-converged systems which together delivers the flexibility and agility IT organizations need to protect, extend, and complement existing IT infrastructure.

Gridstore will be offering both all-flash and hybrid versions of the HyperConverged Appliances.

First in the market with an all-flash hyper-converged system, Gridstore’s includes SSD for both the server and the storage, for performance on both reads and writes, managed to eliminate the wasteful duplication common in cache deployments. A read cache dedicated to the compute processes is used for read performance, with the integrated storage being all flash SSDs. The hybrid appliance will include SATA drives in addition to flash, for extended capacity.

HyperConverged Appliances are suited to certain crucial contemporary IT challenges, a few examples include:

• VDI where each HyperConverged Appliance can support up to 600 desktops in a typical deployment. Since VDI scales in uniform chunks based on the number of desktops being added: a hyper-converged solution is a fast way to scale these deployments.
• Hyper-V Initial deployment, where a HyperConverged Appliance can be installed and up and running the same day ready for application deployment or migration from existing environments.
• Branch Office deployment of a compute and storage solution in a box.

“Gridstore’s patented software architecture is the key to our delivery of a superior hyper-converged solution,” said George Symons , CEO, Gridstore, “Now with our HyperConverged Appliance, we’re answering the demands of the market for ease-of-use and extensibility, and expect to become the de facto standard for Windows environments.“

 HyperConverged Appliances will be available in Q4 2014. Storage Nodes are available.