Gridstore extends product line with HyperConverged Appliance

HyperConverged Appliances complement the existing Gridstore Storage Nodes which already provide the greatest scalability and optimised price/performance storage for Hyper-V available today. With the addition of the HyperConverged Appliance, Gridstore is adding a new implementation option for customers that meets the rapidly growing need of IT organisations for a simple, easy-to-deploy solution, yet one that still allows highly 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 unique, patented software architecture in this innovative design. This architecture allows administrators to set quality of service 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, and unique to Gridstore, is the ability to mix and match HyperConverged Appliances and Storage Nodes, along with their associated servers. This means the easy turnkey deployment of hyper-converged systems can be combined with the extensibility of independent servers and storage, to maximise both flexibility and resource management. Additionally, the Gridstore design eliminates the need for the typical 3-way replica, thereby providing increased usable capacity and up to 50 per cent 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. “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-virtualisation” storage solutions available in the market today.”

Gridstore Converged Infrastructure Includes:
- HyperConverged Appliances: Gridstore’s 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 Microsoft Windows Servers to which are added the Gridstore vController, a small software driver that interfaces with Gridstore Storage Nodes and provides simple management and end-to-end control of IO from server to storage, eliminating the “IO 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 unique software that delivers elastic resources, per-VM IO 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 IO Control: Gridstore’s unique end-to-end control creates an isolated IO lane for each VM and auto optimises to enable optimal application IO. Coupled with Gridstore Quality-of-Service - “TrueQoS” IO per-VM can be precisely controlled to ensure that the most critical applications receive the highest priority, delivering the right performance and prioritisation 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 organisations 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 maximum performance on both reads and writes, intelligently managed to eliminate the wasteful duplication common in cache deployments. A read cache dedicated to the compute processes is used for maximum 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 particularly well 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 and easy 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 complete 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.”