Illumina HCI from ConRes

ConRes (www.conres.com), or Continental Resources, technology provider for more than 50 years, was a sponsor at Veritas Vision conference a few days ago. They have presented an interesting HCI - Hyper-Converged Infrastructure - approach named Illumina 2400 based on Veritas InfoScale promoting x4 in performance and a cost of storage reduced by 70%.
Illumina is essentially a Dell system + Linux OS + Veritas InfoScale 7.1.

Veritas InfoScale is an SDS solution with 4 flavors: Storage, Availability, Operations Manager and Enterprise. InfoScale Storage is a scale-out storage service which provides a Global Namespace and Shared Storage up to 8 servers, not very large but largely enough for the majority of enterprise deployments. It seems that 16 nodes should be released soon. Two elements makes this offering different:

• SmartIO as a caching layer for hot data with a granularity at volume, file system or file level, available as a standalone or clustered version, and configurable also in write-back mode for high availability.
• FSS or Flexible Storage Sharing provides the SAN effect without a SAN thanks to a DAS approached enriched by this Veritas option. I already wrote a post about InfoScale FSS in September 2015.

The ConRes Illumina 2400 system exist in 2 modes - standalone or HA - respectively a 2U machine available in 4 models and a 4U machines (2 x 2U standalone coupled). For more information especially detailed configurations and benchmarks reports, please follow this link.