Out with the old – in with the new.....

compute • May 15, 2020

One of the main customer benefits for selecting vBridge IaaS services is that we maintain and upgrade the platform behind the scenes, whether that’s capacity, performance, availability or security driven. This year we are making a significant investment in the compute platform which will give us a leap forward for the years ahead.

vBridge have always maintained a multiple vendor strategy when it comes to core services. This means we don’t have all our eggs in one basket and any platform specific issue –no matter how serious -should always have containment.

This round of updates is no exception. Three years ago,we invested heavily in the HPE Synergy platform, that has been expanded over the years and has grown in compute capacity by around 350%. The Synergy platform is not going away and will continue to provide a robust, workhorse of a platform for years to come.

This year, we have some other compute platforms that are coming to the end of their planned life. These are a mix of HPE C7000 chassis with BL460c blades and Dell m1000e chassis with M630 blades. These still provide a significant amount of resource and capability,but time moves on, and we always want to give our customers the best experience for running critical workloads.

So, as with any major investment, we did our due diligence, testing and vendor wrangling.

This upgrade of the vBridge IaaS platform will see us bring in Dell MX 7000 Modular Infrastructure with MX740c Compute Sleds. This brings several advantages to the platform:

Maintains our Multi-Vendor strategy to reduce risk for you.
Newer generation CPU –performance benefits for newer workloads, plus some hardware mitigations over the well-publicised Spectre and Meltdown type side channel attacks.
Approximately a 1.5 increase in performance over older generation CPU, including better single thread rating.
No backplane-Compute Sleds attach directly to fabric interconnects-No single points of failure.
Gen 6 32Gb Fibre Channel. Importantly this gives us a way forward to roll out NVMe-oF.
25Gb Ethernet links to sleds, with 100Gb uplinks.
Integrates with our existing OME monitoring environment.
Positive Vendor support with local specialists.

What does this mean for vBridge customers?

Faster IaaS!
Faster Networks!
Faster/Lower latency storage!

So when can you get it?

We expect to start deploying the hardware next month, and after suitable burn in and testing we will slowly introduce the new hardware into the cluster before removing the legacy compute. VMware will do its thing and automatically balance the workload as needed. There is no action required by any vBridge customer. Just part of the service we provide to keep you up to date.

We look forward to updating you on this significant investment over the coming months.