The final presentation from the event – SFD7 – was by Maxta , known for their Hyper-converged solutions in the market. Maxta is offering both appliance based and software-only solutions to the customers. These solutions are targeting customers with a variety of use-cases including Business Applications, Test/Dev, DR, VDI etc… Let’s discuss more about these products here in this post.
Solutions Overview : MaxDeploy and MxSP are the appliance-based and software-only solutions from Maxta respectively. MxSP runs on x86 hardwares and supports KVM, OpenStack and VMware platforms. Hyper-V platform is not supported by Maxta solutions. The MaxDeploy appliances comes with factory-configured Maxta software, which enables faster installation and initial configuration. Maxta claims the customers can have their VMs created by 15 minutes from power ON. oh, that’s really fast.!
Scale up or Sclae Out: Customers can add compute nodes without disks (adds processing power) or nodes with disks installed. Disks supported include HDDs and SSDs (Best practice : SSD capcity should be a minimum of 5% or 10% of HDD capacity depending on the configuration).Maxta solutions are optimized for a hybrid configuration, so going with a full-flash configuration may not give the best performance.
The portion of the SSD capacity will be used as protected cache (intent logs and metadata), across all the nodes. Maxta favors any new incoming writes to be forwarded to the underutilized/new nodes/drives. Data will be re-balanced periodically across all the nodes to avoid hotspots on nodes. Also the system does proactive relocation to reduce issues like disk-full condition etc…
Snapshots/clones functionality.available with Maxta is great and they allows quick recovery from snapshots. They have tested environments with 5K snapshots for a single VM. These are one of the functionality enables the Maxta solutions to have Enterprise-class data services.
When it comes to purchasing Maxta solutions, customers can have their desired hardware configuration for the Maxta MaxDeploy Appliances. And the software cost is based on the total raw capacity across the entire cluster, not on the usable capacity.
Additional Links :
Product overview from Maxta website
Here you can find more posts from me on SFD7. Comment your thoughts…
Disclaimer: My travel and accommodation expenses for the SFD7 (Storage Field Day 7) event were paid by the Tech Field Day team. I am not requested to post about event content and I am not getting paid for any posts or for the time I spend during the event.
Pingback: Hyper-converged solutions – The Maxta way…! - Tech Field Day