It’s here! EMC ScaleIO 1.31 is now generally available. You may be wondering about the benefits of this change—specifically, how much performance improvement is gained? This release provides a 2X performance improvement in VMware environments from an IO perspective and for the VMware administrators, there is the added benefit of an improved vSphere deployment process with support for VMware’s installation manager. Improved deployment is important as the ScaleIO architecture is elastic and can grow to thousands of nodes.
If you’re familiar with ScaleIO, you know that ScaleIO is based on a scale-out architecture in which each node in the cluster is a compute/storage converged machine. The machines themselves are the same servers that run applications in the data center. (If you’re not familiar, click here for a quick intro.) In the new version, the software supports both bare metal VMware and multiple non-VMware hypervisor environments that include KVM, Xen and Hyper-V. And today we’re changing the game for VMware deployments with kernel integration.
EMC and VMware are part of a unique federation that includes Pivotal and RSA. The ScaleIO 1.31 release is a great example of the EMC and VMware parts of the federation working together to deliver choice and value to customers. Interoperability between ScaleIO and VMware makes it easier for our customers to deploy ScaleIO in an ESX environment and provides the benefits of lower system overhead, ease of administration and improved performance.
Benefits for the VMware admin
Just recently, I mentioned the improved VMware integration. Today’s software release takes this to the next level. This is a great story for VMware customers deploying ScaleIO 1.31. As of today, administrators will deploy software that now has the ScaleIO Data Client (SDC) as part of the ESX 5.5 hypervisor.
New Capabilities
There is more to the story with this release than just integration with VMware. The ScaleIO 1.31 release improves a number of key areas and introduces a few new features. In addition to security improvement, support for SNMP traps provides an improved flexibility for customers to manage ScaleIO in their monitoring environment. We are also expanding bare metal deployment support and have certified the latest Linux releases including CentOS 7.0 and RHEL 7.0. In terms of performance we continue to expand on the RAM Read Cache that was introduced in the ScaleIO 1.30 release with more granular controls, as users can now specify specific volumes for read acceleration.
More support for OpenStack
Finally, with the ScaleIO 1.31 release we are extending our support for OpenStack to include the Juno release. This ensures that anyone who is evaluating an OpenStack environment has the ability to deploy software defined block storage using our OpenStack Cinder driver and RESTful APIs.
Additional Resources
If you want to learn more about ScaleIO check out our new whiteboard from Andy Waterhouse that describes our value and latest VMware integration or visit EMC.com/ScaleIO for more.
