Turbonomic 6.0 – What’s new?

Turbonomic have today announced the next major release of their software, version 6.0. In the previous release Turbonomic firmly jumped with both feet into the cloud. They continue that trend plus a major overhaul to the interface and other features in this release.

Interface

Let’s start with the pretty stuff.  This release follows industry trend with a HTML 5 interface. They have taken the chance with the move to HTML 5 to give the interface a complete overhaul which has a clean and clear look. This is now the default interface with almost 100% feature parity compared to the old UI.

Turbonomic new HTML 5 interface

The interface can be amended for customised dashboards using drag and drop.

Storage Control

Choosing the correct cloud storage tier is important to ensure that you are getting the required performance but not overpaying for performance that isn’t required.  Onsite we have storage tiering such as 3PAR Adaptive Optimization to allow for optimum placement of data to balance performance and cost.  In this release Turbomic introduce the concept of Storage Control.  This technology is able to analyse storage performance and suggest the appropriate tier of storage. A move between tiers can be controlled by Turonomic to allow the dynamic online movement of storage workloads.

Relational DB Control

Relational DB’s are the fastest growing service in AWS.  This release brings the traditional Turbomic capabilities of analysis and auto scaling to relational DB’s.  Turbomic analyses CPU, Memory, IO and NetThroughput to determine if to scale up or down.  This will assure performance and minimise costs

Minimised Unused Instances

With the cloud being a pay to play cost model we only want the work loads live that are being utilised at the time. 6.0 delivers the ability to suspend or terminate unused instances.  This can be achieved in two ways on a pre-configured schedule or in an automated fashion by identifying inactive instances.

Cost

Total instance cost control allows a snapshot view of the costs associated with an instance compute, licensing (OS), IP and storage cost

Instance pricing using Turbonomic 6.0

You can read more in the official press release

 

 

 

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Turbonomic and Hybrid IT

What is hybrid IT?

Hybrid IT must be one of the most used terms in IT at the moment. But one of the questions I keep asking myself is what does it rtureally mean and how does the average company enable it.

Accidental Hero’s

I suspect a good many companies are already running a hybrid model already, if we keep the definition broad. With companies running their standard onsite datacentre plus a SAAS offering such as Office365 for productivity or SalesForce for CRM. Starting with SAAS is simple but taking the next step is complex with questions like how do I work out what else to move from the datacentre, how much will it would cost in the cloud and how would you migrate those systems to the cloud?

Turbonomic 5.9

I attended a blogger briefing for Turbonomic 5.9 last week and it felt like the product may aid with some of these decisions and process. They are not claiming to be the magic 8 ball of the data centre answering all the stuff you ever wanted to know, but their latest offering has a range of tools that certainly look like they will help with the journey.

As a quick reminder Turbonomic assures performance. This means that it monitors your environment and is able to make recommendations to enable best performance from your environment such as scaling up or down a VM’s resources.

Moving to a cloud model

My wife and kids love leaving the lights on around the house. I am sure they work for the electricity company, I have run background checks on all of them but so far this has revealed nothing. With the cloud like electricity you pay per unit of use. In the datacentre of course you pay upfront, and so understanding the cost of moving a VM to the cloud and comparing different clouds required a bit of heavy lifting. Turbonomic is now able to do this for you, since it is able to monitor your on premises datacentre and accurately predict what resources will be required in the cloud and the cost of that configuration. Once you are happy with the configuration you are able to let the Turbonomic product perform the migration to the cloud.

Cost Control

Once you have migrated some workloads to the cloud you are able to view all the costs centrally within Turbonomic. The product is able to show costs from Azure and AWS in a single view. Future costs can be projected and also controlled.

 

Auto Scaling

Those familiar with Turbonomic will recognise the example I gave earlier of the product changing the resources of a VM to meet performance requirements. Turbonomic now carries that capability across to the cloud with the ability to autoscale VM’s to meet performance requirements.

Placement Rules

Other neat stuff include the ability to set placement rules to ensure compliance is met in terms of onsite cluster placement or in a cloud setting ensuring the correct cloud region /zone

 

 

 

 

 

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VMTurbo Metamorphosizes

I was invited to a briefing last week where VMTurbo announced they were changing the company name and brand. At first I was surprised to hear a company which has spent such a significant amount of time building a strong brand presence would wish to start over with a new name. So what’s in a name change?

The Beginnings

VMTurbo was founded back in 2008, launching their 1.0 release of VMTurbo Operations Manager in 2010. The purpose of VMTurbo‘s Operations Manager product is quite simply to allocate resources within your environment as efficiently as possible. This helps to ensure that you are maximising performance, whilst proactively preventing issues before they occur and getting the greatest ROI on your infrastructure.

VMTurbo ensures the optimal allocation of resources with what it calls its economic scheduling engine. I have covered this in more detail previously, but in short it assumes resources are finite and will be sold or allocated to the highest bidder.

When VMs ruled the world

I came into virtualisation late compared to many, around VMware Virtual Infrastructure 3.5 when I was asked to take on a small test environment. I purchased Mastering VI 3.5 and sat about reading it, I quickly realized the power of virtualisation and began badgering my boss that virtualisation should not be used for a small test environment but should be the first choice for the majority of production work loads. It felt kind of like a revolution and like VM’s would be at the cutting edge forever.

A new era

But nothing ever stands still in technology and it feels more and more like we are entering a new era of IT. Technologies like cloud now form a part of everyday conversation, whilst emerging technologies like containers continue to gain momentum. VM’s continue to form a key component of many companies infrastructure but are not the sole focus anymore, they form part of an infrastructure. It is this evolution of the industry that has led to the re-branding of VMTurbo.

An example of a traditional infrastructure stack is shown above, whilst a containerized stack is shown below.

container stack

 

Since VMTurbo’s economic market abstracts all resources they were already well placed to not only mange your onsite VM’s but also cloud and other elements of the emerging infrastructure stack. It is in this basis that VMTurbo is becoming Turbonomic, a reflection of delivering the same resource optimisation service but to a wider set of infrastructure.

Green Symbols

I think I am seeing a trend in IT companies branding strategies. HPE spent a significant sum of money on their new brand which is a green rectangle, The Turbonomic brand is based around a green circle at its core. Before anyone else gets it I’m taking the green triangle…….

 

 

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