I was visiting the expo area at MMS 2013 earlier today and saw that Iron Networks was showing a private cloud pod there, complete with a set of well-matched layers of compute, storage and networking.
They were demonstrating several of the latest capabilities in Windows Server 2012 and System Center 2012 SP1, including:
- Shared SAS Storage with Windows Server 2012 Storage Spaces, with multiple JBODs and different tiers of storage (SSDs, performance HDDs, capacity HDDs)
- Windows Server 2012 Scale-Out File Server Clusters using SMB 3.0, including SMB Multichannel and SMB Direct.
- Dual 10GbE RDMA networks for storage, dual 10GbE networks for tenants. Plus dual 40GbE aggregate switches and a management switch.
- Cluster-in-a-box solutions implementing several roles, including a Network Virtualization Gateway, System Center 2012 SP1 and File Server Clusters.
- Dense set of compute nodes running Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V hosts with lots of cores and memory
Here is some additional information from their booth signage:
They had a live system in the booth that was actually used in several demos at MMS 2013, including some of the keynote demos.
I took a picture and put some labels on it. Compare the physical systems below with their diagram above.
Loved this hardware! Makes our software solution really come to life...