{"id":3776,"date":"2016-07-14T10:00:29","date_gmt":"2016-07-14T00:00:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.penguinpunk.net\/blog\/?p=3776"},"modified":"2016-07-13T09:36:53","modified_gmt":"2016-07-12T23:36:53","slug":"its-hedvig-not-hedwig","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.penguinpunk.net\/blog\/its-hedvig-not-hedwig\/","title":{"rendered":"It&#8217;s Hedvig, not Hedwig"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><b>Disclaimer: I recently attended\u00a0<\/b><b><a href=\"http:\/\/techfieldday.com\/event\/sfd10\/\" target=\"_blank\">Storage Field Day 10<\/a><\/b><b>.\u00a0 My flights,\u00a0accommodation and other expenses were paid for by Tech Field Day. There is no requirement for me to blog about any of the content presented and I am not compensated in any way for my time at the event.\u00a0 Some materials presented were discussed under NDA and don\u2019t form part of my blog posts, but could influence future discussions.<\/b><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.penguinpunk.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/07\/hedvig_logo_260x77-200x59.png\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-3947\" src=\"https:\/\/www.penguinpunk.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/07\/hedvig_logo_260x77-200x59.png\" alt=\"hedvig_logo_260x77-200x59\" width=\"200\" height=\"59\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Before I get started, you can find a link to my raw notes on <a href=\"http:\/\/www.hedviginc.com\">Hedvig<\/a>&#8216;s presentation\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/www.penguinpunk.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/07\/SFD10_Hedvig.pdf\">here<\/a>. You can also see\u00a0videos of the presentation\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/techfieldday.com\/appearance\/hedvig-presents-at-storage-field-day-10\/\">here<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><strong>It&#8217;s Hedvig, not Hedwig<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;m not trying to be a smart arse. But when you have a daughter who&#8217;s crazy about Harry Potter, it&#8217;s hard not to think\u00a0about <a href=\"http:\/\/harrypotter.wikia.com\/wiki\/Hedwig\">Hedwig<\/a> when\u00a0seeing the Hedvig brand name. I&#8217;m sure in time I&#8217;ll learn not to do this.<\/p>\n<p>If you&#8217;re unfamiliar with Hedvig, it&#8217;s\u00a0software-defined storage. The <a href=\"http:\/\/www.hedviginc.com\/product#hedvig-distributed\">Hedvig Distributed Storage Platform<\/a> is made up of\u00a0standard servers\u00a0and the\u00a0Hedvig software.<\/p>\n<p>Some of the key elements of the Hedvig solution are as follows:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Software is completely decoupled from commodity hardware;<\/li>\n<li>Application-specific storage policies; and<\/li>\n<li>Automated and API-driven.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><strong>Capabilities<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Hedvig took us through their\u00a07 core capabilities, which were described as follows:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Seamless scaling with x86 or ARM (haven\u2019t seen an ARM-64 deployment yet);<\/li>\n<li>Hyperconverged and hyperscale architectures (can mix and match in the same cluster);<\/li>\n<li>Support for any hypervisor, container or OS (Xen, KVM, HyperV, ESX, containers, OpenStack, bare-metal Windows or Linux);<\/li>\n<li>Block (iSCSI), file (NFS) and object (S3, SWIFT) protocols in one platform;<\/li>\n<li>Enterprise features: dedupe, compression, tiering, caching, snaps\/clones;<\/li>\n<li>Granular feature provisioning per virtual disk; and<\/li>\n<li>Multi-DC and cloud replication.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><strong>Components<\/strong><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.penguinpunk.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/07\/SFD10_Hedvig_Components.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignnone wp-image-3988\" src=\"https:\/\/www.penguinpunk.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/07\/SFD10_Hedvig_Components.jpg\" alt=\"SFD10_Hedvig_Components\" width=\"800\" height=\"277\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.penguinpunk.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/07\/SFD10_Hedvig_Components.jpg 2316w, https:\/\/www.penguinpunk.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/07\/SFD10_Hedvig_Components-300x104.jpg 300w, https:\/\/www.penguinpunk.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/07\/SFD10_Hedvig_Components-768x266.jpg 768w, https:\/\/www.penguinpunk.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/07\/SFD10_Hedvig_Components-1024x354.jpg 1024w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>The Hedvig solution is comprised of the following key components:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Hedvig\u00a0Storage Proxy &#8211; presents the block and file storage; runs as VM, container, or bare metal;<\/li>\n<li>Hedvig\u00a0Storage Service &#8211; forms an elastic cluster using commodity servers and\/or cloud infrastructure; and<\/li>\n<li>RESTful APIs &#8211; provides object access via S3 or Swift, instruments control and data plane<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><strong>How Does It Work?<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>This is oversimplifying things, but here&#8217;s roughly how it works:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Create and present virtual disks to the application tier;<\/li>\n<li>Hedvig Storage Proxy captures and directs I\/O to storage cluster;<\/li>\n<li>Hedvig Storage Service distributes and replicates data across nodes;<\/li>\n<li>The cluster caches and balances across nodes and racks; and<\/li>\n<li>The cluster replicates for DR across DCs and\/or clouds.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><strong>Use Cases?<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>So where would you use Hedvig? According to Hedvig, they&#8217;re seeing uptake in a number of both &#8220;traditional&#8221; and &#8220;new&#8221; areas:<\/p>\n<p>Traditional<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Server virtualisation<\/li>\n<li>Backup and BC\/DR<\/li>\n<li>VDI<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>New workloads<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Production clouds<\/li>\n<li>Test\/Dev<\/li>\n<li>Big data\/IoT<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><strong>Further Reading and Final Thoughts<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Before I wrap up, a quick shout-out to <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/ckranz\">Chris Kranz<\/a> for his use of Hedvig flavoured magnetic props during his whiteboard session\u00a0&#8211; it\u00a0was great. Here&#8217;s a shonky photo of Chris.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.penguinpunk.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/07\/SFD10_Hedvig.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignnone wp-image-3951\" src=\"https:\/\/www.penguinpunk.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/07\/SFD10_Hedvig.jpg\" alt=\"SFD10_Hedvig\" width=\"800\" height=\"339\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.penguinpunk.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/07\/SFD10_Hedvig.jpg 952w, https:\/\/www.penguinpunk.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/07\/SFD10_Hedvig-300x127.jpg 300w, https:\/\/www.penguinpunk.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/07\/SFD10_Hedvig-768x325.jpg 768w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.linkedin.com\/in\/avinashlakshman\">Avinash Lakshman<\/a> is a super smart dude with a tonne of experience in doing cloud and storage things at great scale. He doesn&#8217;t believe that traditional storage has a future. When you watch the video of the Hedvig presentation at SFD10 you get a real feel for where the company&#8217;s coming from. The hyper-functional API access versus the GUI that looks a little rough around the edges certainly gives away the heritage of this product. That said, I think Avinash and Hedvig are onto a good thing here. The &#8220;traditional&#8221; storage architectures are indeed dying, as much as we might enjoy the relative simplicity of selling someone a dual-controller, midrange, block array with limited scalability.<\/p>\n<p>As with many of these solutions I feel like we&#8217;re on the cusp of seeing something really cool being developed right in front of us. For some us, the use cases won&#8217;t strike a chord, and the need for this level of scalability may not be there. But if you&#8217;re all in on SDS, Hedvig certainly has some compelling pieces of the puzzle that I think are worthy of further investigation.<\/p>\n<p>The <a href=\"http:\/\/www.hedviginc.com\/resources\">Hedvig website<\/a> contains a wealth of information. You should also check out <a href=\"http:\/\/twitter.com\/ChrisMEvans\">Chris M. Evans<\/a>&#8216;s SFD10 preview post on Hedvig here, while <a href=\"http:\/\/twitter.com\/VMRick\">Rick Schlander<\/a> did a <a href=\"http:\/\/vmbulletin.com\/hedvig-overview\/\">great overview post<\/a> that I recommend reading.\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/twitter.com\/DarkkAvenger\">Max<\/a> did a really good <a href=\"http:\/\/www.kamshin.com\/2016\/06\/hedvig-deep-dive\/\">deep dive post<\/a>, along with a higher level view that you can see <a href=\"http:\/\/www.kamshin.com\/2016\/04\/is-hedvig-the-solution-to-all-our-storage-problems\/\">here<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Disclaimer: I recently attended\u00a0Storage Field Day 10.\u00a0 My flights,\u00a0accommodation and other expenses were paid for by Tech Field Day. There is no requirement for me to blog about any of the content presented and I am not compensated in any way for my time at the event.\u00a0 Some materials presented were discussed under NDA and [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[900,5,686],"tags":[901,746,892,787],"class_list":["post-3776","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-hedvig","category-storage","category-storage-field-day","tag-hedvig","tag-sds","tag-sfd10","tag-storage"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.penguinpunk.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3776","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.penguinpunk.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.penguinpunk.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.penguinpunk.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.penguinpunk.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3776"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/www.penguinpunk.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3776\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3992,"href":"https:\/\/www.penguinpunk.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3776\/revisions\/3992"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.penguinpunk.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3776"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.penguinpunk.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3776"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.penguinpunk.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3776"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}