@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

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

working on fixing a broken installer for the 6.x kernel on 12th gen nucs

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

@stacksofplates Yes, we did in 2019. There are a couple of ways that can be done. When you snapshot a VM, any disk in that snap can be mounted to any other vm, provided that the logged in user is at a permissions level allowing it. That is actually part of the mechanism that several backup vendors (acronis, storware,etc) use to do agentless backups of Scale Computing VM's. If you haven't taken a look since 2018, you should take a look again as there has been so very many things added since then.

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

@scottalanmiller - adding Simplivity and Nutanix to the mix might be interesting, but you would additionally have to factor in the cpu/ram resources being consumed by their VSA's (SAN being implemented as virtual machines with protocol overhead) which would require the use of higher end procs and larger RAM footprints to be able to run the same number of VM's at the same performance level as either Scale or VMWare VSAN. Seems to me the density implications would wind up having a direct impact on the bottom line prices of any of the VSA based offerings when comparing to the platforms that don't need one.

@scottalanmiller said in Replacing the Dead IPOD, SAN Bit the Dust:

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looking at this thread, I would say that a Scale 1150 cluster would fit the bill nicely, and even with a single node for second site dr, he would still likely be under $35k all-in

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

@thwr sure thing
the 1150 ships with a baseline of 8 broadwell cores per node with the E5-2620v4 upgradable to the e5-2640v4 with 10 cores per node. It ships with 64 GB RAM upgradable to 256 GB per node. It ships with either a 480 GB, 960 GB, or 1.92 TB eMLC ssd per node and 3 1,2, or 4 TB NL-SAS drives per node. Each node has quad gigabit or quad 10gig nics. All features and functionalities are included (HA, DR, multi-site replication, up to 5982 snapshots per-vm, auto tiering with HEAT staging and destaging and automatic prioritization of workload IO to name a few). All 1150 nodes can be joined with all other scale node families and generations both forward and back, so upgrade paths are not artificially limited.

@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.