Last May Chad Sakac shared a demo highlighting the use of Nicira at the storage level. It's worth viewing this demo again in case you are at VMworld Barcelona and want to see it for yourself (at booth D20)7.
Over the past few months I've been using the diagram below to highlight application distance (the Y-axis) and geographic data distribution (the X-axis).
When an application I/O travels, for example, from a mobile device down the the lowest level storage system, it may often traverse 3-4 different networks. Network administration is difficult in this case, and guaranteeing bandwidth is similarly challenging. When discussing Nicira and Network Virtualization we often think of this vertical use case.
However, the Autovias demo at VMworld this week is an example of Nicira deployment on the horizontal axis.
The thought behind the horizontal axis is that historically data has increasingly become more distributed to the point that data migration between data centers is causing a significant surge in traffic between storage devices in those data centers. The diagram below shows a VPLEX configuration with Nicira in the picture.
One interesting use case supported by the Autovias demo is planned migration. If there is available bandwidth between the data centers, and a bulk move is about to occur, a set of scripts has been written that temporarily increases the amount of available bandwidth for VPLEX. This time sequence is highlighted below.
One of the things I like about this use case is that it plays well with the concept of a Software-Defined Data Center (SDDC). Picture a VMotion event that automatically acquires more back-end storage bandwidth via API cals and then gives it back when the storage transfer is done.
The team that built the Autovias demo would love to get your feedback at the booth (D207) this week. Stop by to find out more.
Steve
Twitter: @SteveTodd
EMC Fellow
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