CUMULUS' MARS ATTACKS PERFORMANCE BOTTLENECKS WITH NOSQL ANALYTICS
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Cumulus' MARS attacks performance
bottlenecks with NoSQL analytics
Analyst: Henry Baltazar
17 Jul, 2012
Six-year-old 'startup' Cumulus Systems is preparing to finally exit from stealth mode later this
summer with its cross-domain performance management platform known as MARS (Measure
Analyze Recommend Solve). In contrast to existing performance tools, which rely on relational
databases to hold data, Cumulus' MARS platform uses a NoSQL database to store the data it
gathers; this, it says, allows the platform to efficiently retain many more months of data and
provide much more rapid responses to queries than has traditionally been possible. Cumulus has
already secured an OEM win with Hitachi Data Systems and has over 50 paying customers.
The 451 Take
Cumulus is self-funded startup run by a veteran team of storage management veterans, and
it has developed a powerful platform for cross-domain performance analysis and remediation.
Unlike other startups that have attempted to break into the enterprise space, Cumulus is
exiting stealth with an OEM partnership with HDS, more than 50 paying customers, and has
been running profitably for a few years now. The cross-domain performance monitoring and
remediation capabilities of MARS are an asset that we believe will be in high demand, and
should only increase in value as convergence and virtualization increase. In shared
environments, MARS' ability to quickly locate misbehaving VMs and underperforming storage
systems will be essential for maintaining SLAs and minimizing downtime in virtualization and
cloud environments.
Copyright 2012 - The 451 Group 1Context Mountain View, California-based Cumulus is self-funded and currently has a headcount of 40, mostly made up of engineers. The vendor is led by its CEO Arun Ramachandran and CTO Ajit Bhave, who both previously worked at Hitachi Storage Software. Ramachandran and members of his engineering team founded storage management startup ComStock Systems, which was acquired by Hitachi Ltd in 2002. The software evolved into Hitachi's HiCommand Tuning Manager. After departing from Hitachi in 2005, Ramachandran and his team founded Cumulus in October 2006. Although Cumulus is only now exiting stealth mode, the company has been profitable since 2008 and currently has over 50 paying customers. The vendor recently secured a OEM win with HDS and a large server player in Japan. HDS has rebranded Cumulus' software as RIAT (Rapid Infrastructure Assessment), and has used the tool in pre-sales, post-sales and professional services engagements to provide customers with converged server-to-storage performance assessments. Cumulus decided against taking in VC funding in the past, since it did not want to be pressured to rush a product to market to meet an investor's timeline. Now that it is ready to push its MARS platform into general availability, it may potentially take in some funding to accelerate sales and marketing. Strategy Cumulus will be targeting its MARS performance monitoring tool for the virtualization market and emerging 'big data' analytics use cases such as Hadoop. Besides the two major partners that it has already signed up for OEM partnerships, Cumulus believes it could potentially attract additional partners in the virtualization market and solid state storage space. The vendor is also looking to build out a network of resellers and integrators to push MARS to market. Cumulus is planning to make MARS available both as a service (deployed by its partners) and as on-premises software for end users. On the services side, Cumulus' early partners have used the software for short (1-15 day) pre-sales engagements to discover a customer's environment, in order to size up latency and I/O requirements. Specifically, Cumulus partners have used MARS to identify low-performing storage systems in a customer's environment, and use this information to entice a customer to purchase its own storage to replace these systems. Partners have also used MARS in post-sales engagements to monitor performance and provide remediation at customer sites – and also to assist in stand-alone projects such as migrations and disaster-recovery assessments. End-user customers that have deployed MARS on-site have used the tool for end-to-end performance analysis to track an infrastructure from VMs down to the Copyright 2012 - The 451 Group 2
storage level. MARS has also been used to monitor performance trends to help customers set up thresholds and improve planning and forecasting. Products Cumulus' MARS platform consists of two main parts: probes that gather performance and configuration data from storage, servers and VMs; and a backend server that receives data from the probes and is responsible for processing, analysis and reporting. On the storage side, MARS has probes for NetApp and Hitachi Data Systems, and can address systems from EMC and other vendors such as Hewlett-Packard's 3PAR and EVA, and IBM through SMI-S 1.5. Using these metrics, MARS can keep track of a storage system's IOPS, throughput and latency. The vendor also recently added support for Fusion-io PCIe flash cards. On the server side, probes can gather data from VMware vSphere, Microsoft Hyper-V and Red Hat KVM virtualization platforms, and keep track of the performance of CPUs, memory, swap times and I/O operations. The MARS probes are deployed as virtual machines and provide agentless data gathering. For the backend server, customers (or Cumulus' partners) can either deploy the servers at a customer's site or remotely as a cloud deployment, which can be beneficial for partners that want to sell MARS to customers as a managed service. The MARS platform has a proactive VMware assessment module that matches VMware's 25 recommended performance best practices and runs on a scheduled basis. At the launch, MARS will have online management dashboards for VMware, EMC and Linux (with the Windows dashboard currently in beta). Later this year, Cumulus will be adding enhanced support for Linux to include support for Java metrics, MySQL, Linux FlashCache and Cassandra KVS. In the fall, the company will be added a forecasting and trending module that will use a queue model for performance forecasting and will also provide long-term capacity forecasting using the Holt-Winters algorithm on the R language. Technology Cumulus' main technology is its proprietary key value store and the Megha query-processing language it developed to take advantage of it. The platform was designed from the ground-up for the analysis of time series data – which is essentially a series of data points measured at specific time intervals (seconds, minutes, hours, etc.). As data is fed into the key value store from MARS' probes (SMI-S, vCenter, etc.), the data is de-duplicated and compressed by a factor of 2-5x to keep the footprint small enough to reside in RAM. Copyright 2012 - The 451 Group 3
Cumulus claims the data-optimization is a key point of differentiation since it allows MARS to store large amounts of data at a minute-level granularity. At a customer site, Cumulus claims MARS was able to monitor 250 VMs (on 14 ESX hosts) along with 70 LUNs for 14 months with minute-level granularity, while only consuming 16GB of disk space. The Cumulus' Megha query language is optimized for processing time series data, and has the ability to run processing operations without rehydrating data within the key value store – an important factor that allows the system to process complex queries in a matter of minutes, for operations that would normally take hours or days on a relational database. While Cumulus acknowledges that players such as Splunk have successfully utilized NoSQL technologies in its log analysis and management products, Cumulus contends it is still the first to apply NoSQL to the cross-domain performance management and monitoring space. Cumulus has encouraged developers outside of the IT industry to use its key value store and Megha query language, and has had some early success in engineering and financial services field. In these cases, the early adopters utilized the time series data analysis and query capabilities to discover trends within data. For example, an engineering firm fed data into Cumulus' platform from the motion sensors it deployed on a bridge to monitor and analyze how the bridge reacted to various stimuli, such as heavy winds, with the Megha query language. Competition Cumulus' MARS is not the first cross-domain performance management tool to enter the market. In terms of form and function, MARS is quite similar to NetApp's Balance platform, which came from its acquisition of Akorri Networks for $60m in February 2011. Both platforms have the ability to ingest performance statistics and notifications from storage systems, servers and VMs. Cumulus believes its NoSQL key value storage is the main point of differentiation it has against other software rivals, since it allows MARS to retain many months' worth of data (at minute-level granularity), and can rapidly process queries without dehydrating data. In the startup space, Virtual Instruments (VI) is the highest-profile player in terms of growth and market traction. While Cumulus acknowledges that VI has a strong platform, it notes that VI is focused on the fiber channel SAN space, and does not have in-band analysis capabilities for NAS or iSCSI systems, while Cumulus can work with a wide range of storage and is far less expensive and complex to deploy since it does not have to inject its products into the data stream. Cumulus' primary competition will likely come from the storage management packages from Copyright 2012 - The 451 Group 4
incumbents such as EMC, NetApp and Hewlett-Packard. Against these vendors, Cumulus will stress
the advantages of its proprietary key value storage (over relational databases). Cumulus can also
credibly position MARS as a vendor-neutral pre-sales tool, since Cumulus is not trying to sell storage
systems to customers.
Another potential threat for Cumulus is VMware, which could deliver similar performance
management tools and have the advantage of owning the most commercially successful
virtualization platform on the market. For this reason, Cumulus is expending a fair amount of
resources to extend the reach of its platform to other hypervisors such as Red Hat's KVM, Citrix's
XEN and Microsoft's Hyper-V. As enterprises and service providers migrate toward heterogeneous
virtualization environments (with two or more hypervisors), Cumulus believes MARS' broad support
could be a major asset.
SWOT Analysis
Strengths Weaknesses
Cumulus has an experienced team that has successfully The vendor is still quite small and is relatively
built enterprise-grade storage management tools. The unknown. Cumulus must build out a
MARS platform has the ability to retain and quickly query substantial reseller network and secure
large data sets, which is a powerful capability given the additional tier 1 partnerships to have a
growing complexity of enterprise, SMB and cloud significant market impact.
environments. Cumulus is profitable and has already
secured a tier 1 OEM partner.
Opportunities Threats
Virtualization and the trend toward hardware consolidation Some of the startup vendors in the
are creating performance problems while adding a large management space did not secure large exits
amount of complexity. Cross-domain management tools and failed to build up a brand for themselves.
such as Cumulus' MARS can quickly detect and isolate Large players already have storage and server
performance issues to accelerate remediation efforts. management tools that they can push out to
their customers, and may not be keen to
introduce third-party wares.
Copyright 2012 - The 451 Group 5Reproduced by permission of The 451 Group; © 2011. This report was originally published within 451 Research’s Market Insight Service. For additional information on 451 Research or to apply for trial access, go to: www.451research.com Copyright 2012 - The 451 Group 6
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