ATMCOMIO

Announcing Stratoscale Symphony V2!

Disclosure: This post is not sponsored. However, Stratoscale is a valued client of ActualTech Media. See our full disclosure page here: http://www.actualtechmedia.com/disclosures/. 

Private-Cloud-in-a-Box is a promise that many enterprise IT vendors today would like to deliver on. IT consumers can provision resources with a click of the mouse (or a snippet of code, more likely!) from public cloud providers like Amazon Web Services. Without the ability to provide the same thing in the data center, enterprise IT organizations are at risk of losing control over their data.
Open source projects like OpenStack and Docker are some of the tools organizations are using to achieve similar cloud-like capabilities in their own data center, but they’re notoriously complex for administrators who are familiar with more traditional infrastructure to deploy and manage.
Since the end of 2015, Stratoscale has been delivering their Symphony solution to anyone looking for a cloud-like experience without the hassle of wrangling all the components on their own. They’ve just iterated with the general availability of version 2.0 of the Symphony platform. In the half a year or so since GA of the solution, they’ve added a number of neat features!

SymphonyStack
The various layers of the Symphony stack

Symphony V2 New Features

The list of new features included in the press release is actually quite long! This is a major update. Some of the highlights (copy/pasted from the official release) that we think are particularly exciting include:

Dynamic Cluster Scaling

  • Symphony clusters can dynamically scale without reverting to professional services or developers. New servers are detected on the network using a beacon protocol, and are merged into the cloud infrastructure through a simple process managed using the user interface (UI) or command-line interface (CLI)
  • Servers can be removed for maintenance or fully decommissioned supporting the full lifecycle of the hardware
  • Stratoscale Symphony V2 is the only solution allowing both growth and reduction in cluster sized dynamically

Hyper-V Support

  • Native conversion tools now support Hyper-V VM’s. This complements the existing drag & drop UI for importing VMware and KVM applications

Data Protection

  • Multi-site data protection is built in, with configurable protection policies and backup and data recovery for virtual machines (VMs) and storage volumes
  • Protection at the block level to any number of destinations and configurable protection policies to define a schedule and destination ensures the cloud infrastructure, applications and data are always available

Unified Storage

  • Hyperconverged storage using direct attached SSD and HDD in all servers participating in the cloud infrastructure, keeping the costs low while ensuring enterprise-grade performance, availability and resiliency
  • Unified, converged storage preserves existing investment in expensive storage services. All existing storage resources are combined into the cloud infrastructure providing a unified converged storage view, and single workflow for all applications whether using external storage arrays or built in scale-out storage
  • Stratoscale Symphony V2 supports storage arrays from EMC, NetApp, IBM, Nimble, Pure Storage, Infinidat, Oracle, HDS and Dell

Microservices Architecture

  • Stratoscale Symphony V2 uses a modern micro-services architecture with over fifty system services hyperconverged in the cloud infrastructure
  • Each service is load balanced and is self-healing. Symphony v2 is the most advanced cloud infrastructure platform in the world and uses scale-out architecture principles created for web-scale environments
  • Stratoscale Symphony V2 is the first infrastructure platform in the world that uses Docker containers for its internal services

Check it Out

Stratoscale offers a free trial and it is worth checking out! They’re doing some really neat things, and being able to get your hands on the technology will help you understand it even better. Below are some links where you can find out more and get in touch with the folks at Stratoscale.