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Raise Your SDS IQ

Raise Your SDS IQ (6 of 6): Practical Review of Containerized SDS

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by Michael Letschin, Field CTO

This is the sixth of six posts (the last one was Virtual Storage Appliances) where we’re going to cover some practical details that help raise your SDS IQ and enable you to select the SDS solution that will deliver Storage on Your Terms. The sixth (and final) SDS flavor in our series is Containerized.

Containers are a relatively new entrant on the storage scene – and they’re hot, because unlike virtual machines, they use shared operating systems; this means they’re incredibly more efficient than hypervisors in terms of system resource usage. The big benefit is that you can get more apps (think four to six times more) on the same old servers, and you can run those apps basically anywhere. Because the container space is virtualized, storage via Containers could be considered SDS. For storage, the containerization approach varies: It’s either all local storage as in the diagram on the left, or, as on the right, external components sharing file, block, or object presentation that gets integrated into container as staple storage. You can use solutions like Flocker to get stateful storage, which is important because not every app is completely stateless.

Containerization is useful for testing in DevOps or for use in hyperscale environments; and the storage is highly portable, which means flexibility is high. Currently few enterprises are actually moving production apps into these environments, with key issues being the ability of apps to write to containers and limited (but growing) knowledge of IT staff on this new virtualization paradigm. Containers aren’t designed to scale up to accommodate a lot of storage—which enterprise apps usually need – but it may be that a solution to this emerges.. You’ll notice that we’ve let off the grades for Performance and Cost Efficiency. For Performance, because Containers run in a virtual environment, there are far too many variables to provide a standard ranking; for Cost Efficiency, again, lots of dependencies on the underlying environment, although the ability to use existing infrastructure is a big plus.

Overall grade: (soft) B – incomplete grading

See below for a typical build and the report card:

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Raise Your SDS IQ (5 of 6): Practical Review of Virtual Storage Appliances

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By Michael Letschin, Field CTO

This is the fifth of six posts (the last one was Hyperconverged “SDS”) where we’re going to cover some practical details that help raise your SDS IQ and enable you to select the SDS solution that will deliver Storage on Your Terms. The fifth SDS flavor in our series is Virtual Storage Appliances.

One of the lesser known flavors of SDS is the Virtual Storage Appliance (VSA); it’s less common because it requires a virtual machine environment (think Microsoft’s Hyper-V or VMware), and because there are only a few, software-only options for it (like FreeNAS, LeftHand VSA, or Nexenta’s NexentaStor).   There also tend to be feature limitations as a result of the virtual machine environment, such as lack of replication across hosts. That said, for the right use case – such as remote offices, branch offices, small and medium-sized businesses, and multitenant apps – a virtual storage appliance (VSA) can offer a cost-effective storage solution. To use the VMware example, multiple head nodes each connect with vSphere and a VSA to present storage as one or more pools, with data from one or more VSAs.

Virtual storage appliances offer excellent flexibility through the hypervisor, because you can choose which one you’d like. The hypervisor host does confine scalability to VM size, that’s an important limitation. While managing individual VSAs across different hosts can bring some challenges, it also supports flexibility. You can spin up VSAs per group or per application to create multitenancy using VSAs. IT maintains control, even though individual teams might think they’re managing their storage pools. This approach offers good performance: even a loaded hypervisor only has minimal impact. And finally, this model doesn’t require any additional hardware, so there’s a nice cost benefit.

Overall grade: C

See below for a typical build and the report card:

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Raise Your SDS IQ (4 of 6): Practical Review of Hyperconverged “SDS”

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by Michael Letschin, Field CTO

This is the fourth of six posts (the last one was Scale-out) where we’re going to cover some practical details that help raise your SDS IQ and enable you to select the SDS solution that will deliver Storage on Your Terms. The fourth SDS flavor in our series is Hyperconverged “SDS”.

Hyperconverged systems are the subject of much industry hype and analyst debate. Some consider hyperconverged systems to be a form of SDS, others keep them out of the category for not having software-only options. What to know: a hyperconverged system is a single integrated hardware and software system comprising multiple head nodes that present all storage as one virtual pool (think Nutanix or VMware’s EVO Rail). This means that some of the software-only SDS benefits – like flexibility and cost effectiveness – are severely limited.

That said, because it’s fast and easy to set up and drop in a hyperconverged system, it’s a good choice for branch offices or green-field deployments, where there are no existing storage systems to integrate with. Hyperconverged systems are somewhat of a “black box”– meaning you’re not going to have access to software to tune – but you can dial up the performance by increasing the number of nodes.

The downside of Hyperconverged “SDS” is that it’s difficult to impossible to change the system later. Hyperconverged “SDS” provides building block only. You buy what the vendor is selling, which narrows your options. Because you’re tied to a vendor and their pricing models, cost efficiency is also limited. Plus, you’ll need to buy equal amounts of storage and compute capacity. Unless you’re an organization where requirements for storage and compute capacity scale in perfect step, this means you’ll end up with too much of one or the other, wasting part of your investment.

Overall grade: C

See below for a typical build and the report card:

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Raise Your SDS IQ (3 of 6): Practical Review of Scale-out

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This is the third of six posts (the last one was Scale-up Software-Only “SDS”) where we’re going to cover some practical details that help raise your SDS IQ and enable you to select the SDS solution that will deliver Storage on Your Terms. The third SDS flavor in our series is Scale-out.

Scale-out is a fundamentally different approach from scale-up; with Scale-out, multiple head nodes can be attached over the network to dramatically increase scalability. This is a broad category, and solutions for it could be either vendor-defined / hardware based (think EMC’s Isilon), or software-only (Nexenta’s NexentaEdge); while we’d consider the software-only approach to be the SDS version, the technical benefits of either type of scale out are similar. You use low-latency networking to connect as many nodes as you want and form a cluster that provides storage services out to applications as unified name space.

The scale-out approach works well for Archive or Web 2.0 applications use cases. Scalability is top notch, because you can start small and grow just by adding nodes. While it provides the performance needed to handle huge capacities, there’s an important dependence on the network – the quality of your gear will significantly impact performance, because of the amount of communication between nodes; that may mean that your IOPS aren’t great

The flexibility of scale-out SDS is generally good but currently offers limited protocol support. Often the maturity of the platforms themselves limits your flexibility; for example, you can’t use Exchange to write to an object back end. Likewise, object-oriented applications won’t work with some back ends, either. Protocol support considerations also impact the cost effectiveness of Scale-out: they may restrict your hardware choices and lock you in to more expensive purchases.

Overall grade: B

See below for a typical build and the report card:

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Raise Your SDS IQ (2 of 6): Practical Review of Scale-Up Software-Only SDS

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by Michael Letschin, Field CTO

This is the second of six posts (the last one was Scale-up Vendor-Defined “SDS”) where we’re going to cover some practical details that help raise your SDS IQ and enable you to select the SDS solution that will deliver Storage on Your Terms.  The second SDS flavor in our series is Scale-up Software-Only SDS.

Scale-up Software-Only SDS is just that – SDS benefits delivered via a software-only approach; the software sits on industry standard servers (think Cisco, Dell, Supermicro) and can leverage a variety of JBODs (like Fujitsu, Supermicro, Quanta).  The end result is similar to what you get with Scale-up Vendor-Defined “SDS” — one or two commodity head nodes with JBOD behind it – but with two big differences: much better cost efficiency because it’s more vendor agnostic, and greater opportunity for scale up by leveraging big disks for the JBODs (like Supermicro’s 90-bay). Both provide REST-based management with rich APIs via front-end software, to enable easy, automatic provisioning and management of storage. Unlike Vendor-Defined, Scale-up Software-Only SDS offers good scalability and excellent cost efficiency and flexibility because of it’s software-only approach.

Scale-up Software-Only SDS is an excellent option for companies running virtual machines or the legacy apps that help run their business. It’s a good choice if you have accounting applications and legacy hardware because its performance in this use case is excellent. Unlike vendor-defined options, this one gives you the flexibility to design your solution as needed; and that applies both to the solution you need today, as well as creating flexibility for the future.. Plus, you can choose the most cost-effective commodity-priced machines rather than paying a premium for proprietary hardware – we’ve seen as much as 50-80% cost difference between identical solutions of the different types.  Scale-up Software-Only SDS is limited to one or two head nodes, but you can put larger drives behind them, so you can scale up pretty big, but obviously scale out is limited.

Overall grade: A-

See below for a typical build and the report card:

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