This article details all of my and Atlantis’ activities at VMworld US. Read more to get an introduction of what we will be doing and announcing and a sneak peek at our upcoming technology roadmap that solves some of the major business issues concerning performance, capacity and availability today. It is indeed going to be a VMworld with ‘no limits’ and one of the great innovations that we will be announcing is Teleport. More on this later!
I’ll be at in San Francisco from Saturday 23rd August until Thursday 28th August where I’ll be representing the USX team and looking after the Hands on Labs, running live demos and having expert one on ones at the booth. Come and visit to learn more about USX and how I can help you get more performance and capacity out of your VMware and storage infrastructure. I’d love to hear from you.
Where can you find me?
Atlantis is a Gold sponsor this year with Hands on Labs, a booth and multiple speaking sessions. Read on to find out what we’ll be announcing and where you can find my colleagues and me.
Booth in the Exhibitor Hall
I’ll mostly be located at booth 1529, you can find me and my colleagues next to the main VMware booth, just head straight up pass the HP, EMC, NetApp and Dell stands and come speak to me on how USX can help you claim more performance and capacity from these great enterprise storage arrays.
Speak to me about USX data services and I’ll show you some great live demos on how you can reclaim up to 5 times your storage capacity and gain 10 times more performance out of your VMware environment.
Here’s one showing USX as storage for vCloud Director in a Service Provider context and also for Horizon View.
https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/626574592
If that’s not enough then come and speak to me about some of these great innovations:
- If you’ve been waiting for a VVOL compliant all software vendor to try VVOLs with vSphere 6 beta then wait no more.
- VMware VVOL Support – all of your storage past, present and future instantly become VVOL compliant with USX.
- Teleport – the vMotion of the storage world which gives you the ability to move VMs, VMDKs and files between multiple data centers and the cloud in seconds to improve agility (if you’re thinking its Storage vMotion, trust me it is not).
- And more….
Sessions
We have three breakout sessions this year, two of them with our customers UHL and Northim Bank where Dave Rose and Erick Stoeckle respectively will take you through how they use USX in production.
The other breakout session is focused on VVols, VASA, VSAN and USX Data Services and will be delivered by our CTO and Founder Chetan Venkakesh (@chetan_). If you have not had the pleasure to hear Chetan speak before, then please don’t miss this opportunity. The guy is insane and uses just one slide with one picture to explain everything to you. He is a great storyteller and you shouldn’t miss it – even if it’s just for the F bombs that he likes to drop.
Chetan will also do a repeat 20-minute condensed session in the Solutions Exchange for a brain dump of Atlantis USX Data Services. Don’t miss this! Chetan will take you through the great new technology in the Atlantis kitbag.
| Session Title | Speaker(s) | When | Where |
| STP3212 – Unleashing the Awesomeness of the SDDC with Atlantis USX | Chetan Venkatesh – Founder and CTO, Atlantis Computing | Tuesday, Aug 26, 11:20 AM – 11:40 AM | Solutions Exchange Theater Booth 1901 |
| INF2951-SPO – Unleashing SDDC Awesomeness with Atlantis USX: Building a Storage Infrastructure for Tier 1 VMs with vVOLS, VASA, VSAN and Atlantis USX Data Services | Chetan Venkatesh – Founder and CTO, Atlantis Computing | Wednesday, Aug 27, 12:30 PM – 1:30 PM | Somewhere in the Moscone (TBC) |
| EUC2654 – UK Hospital Switches From Citrix XenApp to VMware Horizon Saving £2.5 Million and Improving Patient Care | Dave Rose – Head of Design authority, UHL Seth Knox – VP Products, Atlantis Computing |
Wednesday, Aug 27, 1:00 PM – 2:00 PM | Somewhere in the Moscone (TBC) |
| STO2767 – Northrim Bank and USX | Erick Stoeckle , Northrim Bank Nishi Das – Director of Product Management, ILIO USX, Atlantis Computing Inc. |
Thursday, Aug 28, 1:30 PM – 2:30 PM | Somewhere in the Moscone (TBC) |
Hands on Labs
You can find the hands on labs in the Hands on Labs hall, I’ll also be here to support you if you’re taking this lab. The Atlantis USX HOL is titled:
This HOL consists of three modules, each of which can be taken separately or one after the other.
Modules 1 and 2 are read and click modules where you will follow the instructions in the lab guide and create the USX constructs using the Atlantis USX GUI.
Module 3 however uses the Atlantis USX API browser to quickly perform the steps in Module 1 with some JSON code.
All three modules will take you approximately an hour and a half to complete.
I had an interesting time writing this lab which was a balancing exercise in working with the limited resources assigned to my Org VDC. Please provide feedback on this lab if you can, it’ll help with future versions of this HOL. Just tweet me at @hugophan. Thanks!
Note that performance will be an issue because we are using the VMworld Hands on Labs hosted on Project NEE/OneCloud. This is a vCloud Director cloud in which the ESXi servers that you will see in vCenter are actually all virtual machines. Any VMs that you run on these ESXi servers will themselves be what we call nested VMs. In some cases you could actually see 2 more or nested levels. How’s that for inception? Just be aware that the labs are for a GUI, concept and usability feel and not for performance.
If you want to see performance, come to our booth!
Hands on Labs modules
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Module # |
01 |
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Module Title |
Atlantis USX – Deploying together with VMware VSAN to deliver optimized local storage |
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Module Narrative |
Using Atlantis USX, IT organizations can pool VSANs with existing shared storage, while optimizing it with Atlantis USX In-Memory storage technology to boost performance, reduce storage capacity and provide storage services such as high availability, fast cloning and unified management across all datacenter storage hardware.The student will be taken through how to build a Hybrid virtual volume that optimizes VMware VSAN allowing it to delver high performing virtual workloads from local storage.
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|
Module Objectives |
A customer has built a resilient datastore from local storage using VSAN. This is then pooled by Atlantis USX to provide the Deduplication and I/O optimization that server workloads require. A joint whitepaper of this solution has already been written here:http://blog.atlantiscomputing.com/2014/02/atlantis-ilio-usx-and-vmware-vsan-join-forces-on-software-defined-storage/ Estimated module duration: 45 minutes |
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Module # |
02 |
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Module Title |
Atlantis USX – Build In Memory Storage |
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Module Narrative |
With Atlantis USX In-Memory storage optimization, processing computationally extensive analytics becomes easier and more cost effective allowing for an increased amount of data being processed per node and reduced the time to complete these IO intensive jobs, workloads may include Hadoop, Splunk, MongoDB.During this lab the student will be taken through how to build an Atlantis USX virtual volume using local server memory.
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|
Module Objectives |
The use case for this lab is increasing application performance by taking advantage of the storage optimization features in Atlantis USX.Estimated module duration: 30 minutes |
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Module # |
03 |
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Module Title |
Atlantis USX – Using the RESTful API to drive automation and orchestration to scale a software-based storage infrastructure |
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Module Narrative |
Atlantis USX has a powerful set of RESTful APIs. This module will give you insight into those APIs by using them to build out a Virtual Volume. In this module you will:
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Module Objectives |
The intent of this lab is to provide an example of how to use the Atlantis USX RESTful API to deploy USX at scale.Estimated module duration: 15 minutes |
Giveaways
That’s right! I’ll be giving some of these away at the booth, make sure you stop by to see the new reality in software defined storage!
You can also pick up some of the usual freebies like T-shirts, pens, notepads etc.
There are also Google Glasses, Chromecasts, quad copters and others. We’re also working on something special. Watch this space.
Live Demos at the Booth
Come and speak to me and my colleagues to learn how USX works. We will be running live demos of the following subjects:
- USX – Storage Consolidation for any workload on any storage.
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USX – Database Performance Acceleration.
- Run Tier-1 workloads on commodity hardware.
- Run Tier-1 high performance workloads on non all-flash or hybrid storage arrays.
- USX – All Flash Hyper-Converged with SuperMicro/IBM/SANdisk.
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USX – Teleport (think vMotion for VMs, VMDKs and files over long distances and high latency links). Come talk to me for a live demo.
- USX Tech Preview – Cloud Gateway – using USX data services with AWS S3 as primary storage.
- USX – VDI on USX on VSAN.
- VDI – NVIDIA 3D Graphics.
Atlantis Events
SF Giants Game, Mon, Aug 25th at 19:00. Please contact your Atlantis Representative or ping me a note if you haven’t received an invite.
USX Partner Training & Breakfast, Wed, Aug 27th at 08:00. Please contact your Atlantis Representative or ping me a note if you’re an Atlantis Partner but have not received an invite.
Let’s meet up!
If you’re at VMworld or in the SF Bay area then let’s meet up and expand our networks.
| Event Date | Hours | Event Name | Where | Register |
| Sat, Aug 23rd | 19:00 – 22:00 | VMworld Community Kickoff | Johnny Foley’s, 243 O’Farrell Street | http://twtup.com/6878fiv3e9fjrqz |
| Sun, Aug 24th | 13:00 – 16:00 | #Opening Acts | City View at Metreon | https://openingacts2014.eventbrite.com/?ref=wplist |
| Sun, Aug 24th | 15:00 – 17:00 | #v0dgeball Charity Tournament | SOMA Rec Center – Corner of Folsom and 6th Streets | http://tweetvite.com/event/v0dgeball2 |
| Sun, Aug 24th | 16:00 – 19:00 | VMworld Welcome Reception | Solutions Exchange, Moscone Center | n/a |
| Sun, Aug 24th | 20:00 – 23:00 | #VMunderground | City View at Metreon | https://vmunderground.eventbrite.com/?ref=wplist |
| Mon, Aug 25th | 19:00 – 23:00 | #vFlipCup VMworld Community TweetUp | Folsom Street Foundry | http://twtvite.com/vflipcup14 |
| Tues, Aug 26th | 16:30 – 18:00 | Hall Crawl | Solutions Exchange, Moscone Center | n/a |
| Tues, Aug 26th | 19:00 – 22:00 | #VCDX, #vExpert Party | E&O Restaurant & Lounge, 314 Sutter St | Invite only |
| Tues, Aug 26th | 20:00 – 23:00 | #vBacon | Ferry Building, 1 Sausalito | http://tweetvite.com/event/vBacon2014 |
| Wed, Aug 27th | 17:00 – 19:00 | VMware vCHS Tweetup | 111 Minna | |
| Wed, Aug 27th | 19:00 – 22:00 | VMworld Party | Moscone Center | n/a |
Can’t meet up?
Follow me and my colleagues on Twitter for live updates during VMworld and send us messages and questions, we’d love to hear from you.
Hugo Phan @hugophan
Chetan Venkakesh @chetan_
Seth Knox @seth_knox
Mark Nijmeijer @MarkNijmeijerCA
Gregg Holzrichter @gholzrichter
Toby Colleridge @tobyjcol
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