VMworld
2021 digital. Will you be in attendance? Make sure you check out MinIO!
VMworld, the world's largest
virtualization and cloud computing event hosted every year by VMware, is
back again for 2021 in a digital setting. And one of the show sponsors this year is a company called MinIO.
MinIO is a leader in cloud object storage with a rich suite of enterprise features designed for public, private and edge environments. A pioneer in the area of high-performance, Kubernetes-native object storage, MinIO holds the object storage world’s fastest benchmarks for HDD, NVMe, Spark and Presto. Open source, software-defined and Amazon S3 compatible, MinIO’s object storage suite can deliver ML/AI, analytics, backup, application and archival workloads from a single platform.
Are you gearing up for VMworld 2021? Get started now by
reading this exclusive interview with Jonathan Symonds, MinIO's Chief Marketing Officer, to learn more, and start
getting excited for what's to come!
VMblog: Your company is sponsoring this year's
VMworld 2021 digital event. Can you talk
about what that sponsorship looks like?
Jonathan Symonds: This year is interesting for us as VMware
reached out to a few close partner companies in the startup space to
participate. The process was that VMware employees needed to nominate you based
on your ability to contribute to the success of VMware over the next 12-18
months. It is, unsurprisingly, called the Contributor Sponsor. Needless to say,
we are delighted to be included and have a number of assets on hand to support
the educational mission and some big time talent on the chat front for those
that are interested.
VMblog: What type of things will people be able to do
and find at your virtual booth this year?
Symonds: Our primary focus is on our plugin for the
vSAN Data Persistence platform (DPp). The integration brings our
high-performance, AWS S3 compatible object storage, into the heart of vSphere
and therefore into the heart of IT. Now administrators can seamlessly provision
multi-tenant object storage directly from the vCenter console while providing
API-level control to DevOps and application architects. MinIO supports vSAN,
vSAN-SNA and vSAN-Direct through this integration.
VMblog: And do you have any speaking sessions during
the event? If so, can you give us the
details?
Symonds: We were fortunate to be selected for a
speaking session. It was very competitive this year given the limited slots and
we think VMware's decision to dedicate time to DPp speaks to how important
object storage is to the success of Tanzu.
The session title is "Modernize Infrastructure with S3-Compatible Object
Storage on VMware HCI."
It will cover the application revolution and how those
applications look to object storage given their requirements around performance,
resiliency, scalability and RESTful APIs.
We are taking a hands on approach here and our CTO Ugur Tigli will will
walk through how to create a centralized, ultradense, multi tenant storage
infrastructure. This is, of course, the foundation of an at-scale object
storage-as-a-service play.
Definitely worth your time if you are on the Tanzu journey.
I would add that every demo at last year's VMworld, and every demo at this
year's VMworld around the DPp is done with MinIO. It is not a coincidence.
VMblog: Many attendees are chomping at the bit to get
back to a physical VMworld event. Is your company ready for the same?
Symonds: That is a resounding yes. Our first
VMworld was two years ago, before Tanzu was a reality, and because of that
show, VMware recognized that our Kubernetes credentials made us an ideal
candidate to be a design partner for the DPp. By last year's event we had launched
the first functional object store for the DPp (which was why all the demos
featured MinIO).
When next year rolls around - we will be making a big
in-person statement.
VMblog: Can you give us the high-level rundown of
your company's technology offerings? What kind of message would a virtual
attendee hear from you?
Symonds: At the highest level, MinIO is the leader
when it comes to high performance, Kubernetes-native, multi-cloud object
storage. We would start with our credentials in that space.
We would then talk about our flagship offering in the VMware
world - object storage for the Data Persistence platform and why it matters:
- MinIO supports VMware's vision of delivering
hybrid-cloud and multi-cloud. MinIO not only provides a complete cloud-native
object storage system that can be deployed on any cloud infrastructure to
convert them into an S3 compatible object storage service, but it also provides
seamless interoperability to existing storage systems. This enables
applications to access data on their existing legacy systems without migrating
the data over. Both cloud-native applications and traditional enterprise
applications can co-exist - creating a roadmap for the eventual migration to
100% cloud native.
- VMware has a goal of migrating cloud native
applications onto the vSAN Data Persistence platform. MinIO provides the
mechanism to achieve that. Given MinIO's vast credentials in the S3 arena, any
application that runs on MinIO (which is to say almost every cloud native
application) will run unmodified on the vSAN Data Persistence platform -
starting on day one.
- VMware and MinIO have material requirements around
performance and the integrated product delivers. MinIO has built its reputation
in the private cloud as the world's fastest object store. It is why we are
attractive to so many applications from AI/ML to modern, data intensive cloud
apps. VMware provides the infrastructure to do this - first in a virtualized
environment and now in a containerized environment. Because vSAN Direct Configuration
provides optimal access to the underlying storage, we can run at full speed.
- VMware believes in the software defined data center -
so do we. VMware has built a full-stack hybrid-cloud infrastructure
platform that now extends to containers
and orchestration. While they have vSAN for software-defined block and file
storage, their customers wanted the addition of cloud-native object storage.
With the vSAN Data Persistence platform VMware offers true software defined
storage experiences for applications running on Kubernetes. This allows MinIO
to bring their Kubernetes-native object storage as a VMware Cloud Foundation
service.
VMblog: Talking about your product solutions, can you
give readers a few examples of how your offerings are unique? What are your differentiators?
Symonds: MinIO only does one thing - object
storage. We aim to do it better than anyone else on the planet. It is why
VMware picked us to be a launch partner. That relentless focus enables us to
achieve things larger companies with competing priorities cannot. Here is what
we mean:
- MinIO was built from scratch in the last four years and
is native to the technologies and architectures that define the cloud. These
include containerization, orchestration with Kubernetes, microservices and
multi-tenancy. No other object store is more Kubernetes-native.
- With its focus on high performance, MinIO enables enterprises
to support multiple use cases with the same platform. For example, MinIO's
performance characteristics mean that you can run multiple Spark, Presto, and
Hive queries, or to quickly test, train and deploy AI algorithms, without
suffering a storage bottleneck. MinIO object storage is used as the primary
storage for cloud native applications that require higher throughput and lower
latency than traditional object storage can provide.
- MinIO leverages the hard won knowledge of the web
scalers to bring a simple scaling model to object storage. At MinIO, scaling
starts with a single cluster which can be seamlessly expanded to create a
global namespace, spanning multiple data centers if needed. Expansion of the
namespace is possible by adding more clusters, more racks until the goal is
achieved.
- Minimalism is a guiding design principle at MinIO.
Simplicity reduces opportunities for errors, improves uptime, delivers
reliability while serving as the foundation for performance. MinIO can be
installed and configured within minutes simply by downloading a single binary
and then executing.
- Software Defined. The age of the storage appliance is
over simply because you can't containerize one. The future is software defined
and MinIO runs on everything from a Raspberry Pi to an Nvidia GPU and thus from
the edge to the datacenter.
- Open Source. MinIO products are 100% open source under
GNU Affero General Public License, Version 3.0 (AGPLv3). The advantages of Open
Source are well understood. These include the avoidance of vendor lockin,
security, consistent innovation, transparency, and the reliability that comes
with millions of community members hammering every release from every possible
angle.
The net effect of the innovation is that enterprises can now
run Kubernetes-native, high-performance object storage on any cloud. This means
lower costs as enterprises can choose the cloud that offers the best terms for
their infrastructure needs. This means better performance as they can choose
any combination of CPU, Network and Drive. This means more scale as any cloud
can become a warm tier (or even a hot tier). This is innovation.
VMblog: How does one adopt MinIO in the VMware
context and what does it cost?
Symonds: vSphere 7.0 Update 1 ships with the VMware
vSAN Data Persistence platform that enables software defined storage offerings
like MinIO to be natively integrated with vCenter Workload Clusters running on
top of vSAN. This deep integration allows admins to enable, manage and monitor
MinIO from vSphere APIs and UI.
The integration includes the lifecycle management of MinIO
object storage via the vSphere cluster while offering bare-metal like
performance and cost efficiencies.
To enable the plugin, log into vCenter and select the
cluster in which you want to deploy MinIO tenants.
Click Configure, then navigate to Supervisor Services and
select Services. Locate the MinIO row and activate the radio button. Click
Enable to enable the service.
That's it. The plugin comes with a 60 day free trial after
which a license key will be required. License keys come with full SUBNET
privileges. Cost is a function of capacity. Visit MinIO's virtual booth to see
a full demo or check it out on our YouTube channel.
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