Month: October 2018

September sprint includes:

Budgetary Quote UI:

User doesn’t have to download excel to see the pricing on quote. The new interactive UI will allow one to see list prices and apply discounts to see the sales/net price. You can iterate the entire process (size, generate budgetary quote and apply discounts) and download the quote when fully satisfied.

Enhancements to the Financial assumptions:

– Support levels have been sorted

– Monthly support terms (14months, 26 months..etc.) have been added

– Brief description has been been added next to each support level

– Ability to apply discounts to Budgetary Quote has been moved to the new Budgetary Quote UI.

Regular/Robo Models

There was confusion on how robo models like the 1175S should be sized.  For Regular models which are used in data centers,  PM originally wanted to restrict the 1175S to just backup usage.  That in ROBO they could be used as application nodes that could be 1, 2, or 3+ nodes.

That brought some confusion when SE wanted to size a small cluster with say qty 5 of the 1175S.  Sure could do it in ROBO, but SE would say it is not a ROBO customer project.

So I worked with PM and we streamlined the rules and now models like the 1175S (lot of vendors have similar ones) are treated as fully functional models as follows:

Regular Model Rules

• All models included
• All use cases are allowed – main cluster application, remote cluster application and remote snapshots
• 3+ nodes are recommended for any model. It is considered good data center practice to have a minimum of 3 nodes.

ROBO Model Rules

• All models but only some models like the 1175S can size for 1 or 2 node, while others require 3 min nodes
• All use cases – main cluster application, remote cluster application and remote snapshots
• All models can go to 3+ nodes depending on sizing requirements

So what should you do

• Just stay with Regular models for most of your sizing needs. It is default and models like 1175S can indeed run applications.  Any recommendation would be 3+ nodes
• Only go to ROBO if you need 1 or 2 node for 1175S

For more info go to the Sizer wiki –  ROBO-Regular

Rack Awareness:

Nutanix has always had node awareness and for long time block awareness both of which are in Sizer.  With this release, Sizer will also have rack awareness where Data Availability is maintained even in an event of an entire rack or top-of-the-rack switch failure.

Supported Use Cases

• Heterogeneous solution made up of several different homogeneous blocks

–    For example, could have several 3460 blocks and several 3360 blocks

–    Here the 3460 blocks are all identical, while all the 3360 blocks are identical.  Given that, the 3460 block is homogeneous and the 3360 block is homogeneous.

–    These homogeneous blocks are dispersed across sufficient racks to meet rack awareness

• We will support a cluster wide setting for rack awareness and assume all workloads in that cluster must adhere to rack awareness

Other things

• Share notice in email. Sharing has been around forever and put in your Shared Scenarios but now when a person shares a scenario an email goes to them.  Great to increase collaboration and we will do more
• We have all Sizer and “non-Sizer” parts for all HP and Cisco models. Non-Sizer parts are things sizer does not analyze like say storage controller, boot drives , etc.  Where before we asked you to click link to HFCL we got in the BOM.
• Lots of product updates
• Inspur is a new vendor
• 3060-G6 NVME is there
• We allowed “no modification” as option for VDI when selecting desktop or office version.  Sometimes people have need to size for so much MHz or Cores per user and don’t want the modification.  In future Collector will use that option too when we upload a collector output