I’m using Veeam Backup & Replication (currently 8.0 Update 3) in my lab environment to backup some of my VMs to a HP StoreOnce VSA. The VMs reside in a NFS datastore on a Synology DS414slim NAS, the StoreOnce VSA is located in a local datastore (RAID 5 with SAS disks) on one of my ESXi hosts. The Veeam backup server is a VM and it’s also the Veeam Backup Proxy.

PernixData is one of the presenting sponsors at the Virtualization Field Day 5 (VFD5). One of the four key announcements is FVP Freedom. FVP Freedom will be available in the Fall of 2015 and it’s a completely free version of PernixData FVP. Of course, the functionality is limited. FVP Freedom will only support a single cluster, but with an unlimited number of VMs. Instead of SSDs, FVP Freedom will support up to 128 GB of DFTM (Distributed Fault Tolerant Memory) per cluster.

Yesterday, at 02:13am (CET), I got an awesome e-mail: Dear Patrick, I am pleased to welcome you to the PernixPro program! I’m very happy to be part of this program! PernixData | PernixPro This program is similar to the VMware vExpert or Microsoft MVP program. It’s designed to spread the magic of PernixData FVP. I am totally convinced of PernixData FVP. Because of this, I’m very pleased to be part of the program.

Some days ago I talked to a colleague from our sales team and we discussed different solutions for a customer. I will spare you the details, but we discussed different solutions and we came across PernixData FVP, HP 3PAR Adaptive Optimization, HP 3PAR Adaptive Flash Cache and DataCore SANsymphony-V. And then the question of all questions came up: “What is the difference?”. Simplify, then add Lightness Lets talk about tiering. To make it simple: Tiering moves a block from one tier to another, depending on how often a block is accessed in a specific time.

I’m a bit late, but better late than never. Some days ago I installed PernixData FVP 2.0 in my lab and I’m impressed! Until this installation, solutions such as PernixData FVP or VMware vSphere Flash Read Cache (vFRC) weren’t interesting for me or most of my customers. Some of my customers played around with vFRC, but most of them decieded to add flash devices to their primary storage system and use techniques like tiering or flash cache.