Breqwatr unveils hyper-converged OpenStack cloud appliance

Breqwatr this week launched an OpenStack-based all-flash hyper-converged private cloud storage appliance.

The 2U Cloud Appliance has 24 TB of raw solid-state drive storage and four nodes per appliance with each containing 256 GB of memory for a total of 1.024 TB. It is preconfigured with the KVM hypervisor that resides behind the OpenStack Nova service for hosting and managing cloud computing systems and Ceph unified storage.

Breqwatr tested the scale-out appliance in a 16-chassis configuration with 64 nodes and up to 384 TB of storage, according to the Toronto-based startup's vice president of engineering Jason Harley.

"That is equal to a small private cloud," Harley said. "One chassis acts as the brain and additional storage can be purchased for linear storage and compute scalability. We are a one-stop shop for the private cloud. Customers can buy a unit and just drop it in a rack."

As a hyper-converged system, Breqwatr's goal is to include everything a customer needs to run the private cloud. It includes deduplication, compression and thin-provisioning storage services.

"There is [typically] a huge amount of research to be done by the IT team," Harley said. "We've done the research and legwork and we have distilled it down to an infrastructure as a service offering for the enterprise. Our sweet spot is medium-to-large companies. Developer shops are a huge target."

Paul Burns, principal analyst at Neovise, said, typically, users have to download the OpenStack software and go through the different modules to determine which storage and networking modules are good for their environment.

"They are making it easy to install and use an OpenStack platform," Burns said. "It's installed and it's ready to run."

The appliance offers a self-service UI so users can access more compute and storage resources needed for a particular department or job. The control plane offers instance-level high availability and the hardware management interface allow users to monitor the physical components.

Burns said the Breqwatr user interface is easier to use compared to the OpenStack UI. Also, the company is offering the hardware and software on a leasing model.