How do you enable live migrations from the datacenter
The Big Picture: In this video learn how to solve a few important problems that have major impact including: migrating business critical workloads to the cloud non-disruptively. Another is how to manage primary data and workloads when they span multiple datacenters and clouds. In this short video you’ll learn how Jetstream’s solution accomplishes just that.
Important Quotes: Rich Petersen: “…how do you enable live migration of the virtual machines and their applications, and in particular their data, without disruption?”
Rich Petersen: “…the key issue is how to support data management in an environment that comprises multiple locations, multiple data centers, and multiple cloud services.”
Mike Matchett: Hi. I'm Mike Matchett with Small World Big Data, and I'm here today talking with Richard Petersen of JetStream. Known Rich going back from quite a few different companies. Welcome today Rich.
Rich Petersen: Hi, it's great to talk to you.
Mike Matchett: Maybe you could just tell us a little bit about JetStream and where JetStream has come from.
Rich Petersen: Sure. JetStream software is, technically speaking, a startup. We're just launching the company, but our roots go back more than eight years. The founding team originally started FlashSoft software. FlashSoft was acquired by SanDisk in 2012. We worked together at SanDisk, and then after SanDisk's acquisition by Western Digital, we spun JetStream software out as a standalone, independent software development company.
Mike Matchett: This is not brand new IP heart and soul. This is stuff that's tried, true, proven, in worldwide use. Now you guys have added this new perspective throughout the whole thing. You've added this cloud perspective. Tell me why cloud. Why cloud and why did you go there?
Rich Petersen: Well you know, obviously we had a front row seat to the transition that was taking place in the storage industry, with enterprise customers moving to the cloud. We were a very close partner with VMware, and we saw VMware's transition from the vision of the software defined data center, to the vision of the company as a cloud platform, even to the point of VMware Cloud on AWS. We saw, since we were already partnering so closely in providing new capabilities for the VMware platform in the data center, we took a look at the opportunity to provide unique capabilities to the VMware environment in the cloud.
Mike Matchett: VMware has made big strides here with putting VMware and AWS particularly, right? Now people who want to take advantage of that are faced with a number of challenges. We were talking through some of those before, but maybe you could just tell us about those particular challenges you're helping them with.
Rich Petersen: Sure. I mean the number one challenge really that people encounter first is the challenge of simply migration, moving from the on premises data center to the cloud environment. Now this could be VMware Cloud on AWS. It could also be one of VMware's many cloud service provider partners. In any event, when you have an application or an environment that can't be interrupted, but you want to migrate it to a cloud service, the challenge is, how do you enable live migration of the virtual machines and their applications, and in particular their data, without disruption?
Mike Matchett: We talked about, and probably not enough time to go into detail here, nor a white board, but how you were actually not just doing migration of data in a accelerated way, or a changed data way, but you are able to work hand in hand with a kind of forward, I thought it was cool, forward migration, forward replication, while you're physically transporting the data as well, so you can get the job done faster by combining methods.
Rich Petersen: Yeah. I mean, if you were to kind of give you a quick enumeration of our differentiating characteristics, the first is that our JetStream migrate solution is more lightweight. It uses the IO filters API rather than snapshots. It installs very simply and runs very seamlessly. Secondarily, we have the ability to predict how much time data replication will take, so administrators can really forecast the project with a lot more accuracy. Then lastly we have the ability to support the live migration of virtual machine and its applications and data, even when that data's being moved on a physical device. That's a unique capability.
Mike Matchett: Yeah, and so you're helping people move their workloads into the cloud, but a lot of what JetStream is doing is to help service providers, on the other hand, actually accelerate and deliver storage that is cloud like. This is really part of the core value proposition of being JetStream now.
Rich Petersen: Exactly. I mean that's why we named the company JetStream Software, the idea of a very fast cloud. You're absolutely right, the idea of thinking of the cloud service provider as the customer. I think in our industry a large number of the technologies that you see today really have their foundation in technologies that presumed the enterprise on premises IT operation was the customer. JetStream Software was developed, our company was founded specifically to focus on the cloud service provider as the customer, with their requirements for multi-tenancy, multiple location support, and dynamically changing workload requirements.
Mike Matchett: In particular, I was like, thin provisioning in the cloud, which is kind of boggling my mind a little bit, because the cloud's already cloudy, and now we're thin clouds and stuff. You guys have that covered for those guys as well I understand.
Rich Petersen: Yeah.
Mike Matchett: Yeah, cool. Just to sort of wrap up a little bit then on the third leg of the stool, if you will, you're also talking about coming out with things that help people do cross cloud, what does that mean?
Rich Petersen: Sure. Both our JetStream Migrate and JetStream Accelerate products are under the umbrella of what we call the JetStream Cross Cloud Platform. There will be some future releases later this year, but the key issue is how to support data management in an environment that comprises multiple locations, multiple data centers, and multiple cloud services. It may be an on premise computing environment that has some data stored with its loud service provider. It may be the cloud service provider delivering disaster recovery as a service to the enterprise customer. It may just be disaster recovery internally, within a cloud operation. The whole point is to address these challenges of managing data with extremely low latency, even when that data is distributed across multiple locations.
Mike Matchett: You guys already have this leg up from your legacy, well I shouldn't say legacy, but your historical basis in FlashSoft technologies, and now you just bring it to the cloud. I know we're running out of time here, but we talked about hundreds of terabytes of NVME going to waste unless they put your solutions on there and really make effective use of them, and letting service providers also compete heavily with some of the big hyper scale service providers, in terms of storage efficiency finally. Some really great values there. When is this stuff available? You said some of it's now.
Rich Petersen: JetStream Accelerate is available today, and that really addresses that problem of efficiency and performance within the data center. What we've added to the product is the scalability component, the ability to deploy it across hundreds of nodes across the data center. JetStream Accelerate is available today. JetStream Migrate is in the hands of our beta customers right now, and will be generally available in Q2. Then the cross cloud platform will have additional releases coming out in the second half of this year.
Mike Matchett: Very exciting stuff Rich. I'm glad to catch up with you today. Thank you for being here.
Rich Petersen: Mike, thank you very much for your time. It was great to talk to you.
Mike Matchett: Thank you for watching. This is Mike Matchett with Small World Big Data, and I'm sure we're going to keep an eye on JetStream and let you know about whatever else they come up with later on this year. Take care.