Raise Your SDS IQ

by Michael Letschin, Field CTO

This is the first of six posts (aside from the Introduction) 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 first SDS flavor in our series is Scale-up Vendor-Defined “SDS”.

Scale-up Vendor-Defined “SDS” is where most of the traditional “big box” vendor solutions lie – think EMC’s VNX, NetApp’s FAS, or IBM DS4000 Series – each one being one or two usually commodity head nodes with JBOD behind it. While sold as an appliance, the argument is that SDS comes into play as front-end software that delivers REST-based management with rich APIs, to enable easy, automatic provisioning and management of storage.

Companies choose scale-up vendor-defined “SDS” often because it’s a well recognized brand, they have the vendor in-house already, and it appears to bring SDS benefits while maintaining a familiar in-house infrastructure. Scale-up Vendor-Defined “SDS” is often selected for legacy applications and some virtual apps, largely because its performance in these use cases is excellent. It’s a great choice if you’re running virtual machines with NFS, Exchange, or MS SQL. But, it’s still vendor-defined and not true SDS, so your hardware choices, and your flexibility, are restricted. It also means giving up one of the core SDS benefits – cost effectiveness – because you’ll be paying a premium for proprietary hardware. And that hardware is generally only one or two head nodes, so scalability is limited too.

Overall grade: D+

See below for a typical build and the report card: scale-up_vendor-defined

scale-up_vendor-defined_checklist

Watch this space for the next review in our series – Scale-up, Software-Only SDS

by Michael Letschin, Field CTO

If you’re like other storage buyers – you’re going to invest in a solution, you want storage on your terms – optimized for your organization, its requirements, now and in the future. When it comes to distinguishing the wealth of Software Defined Storage (SDS) solutions from one another, you probably have a better shot of telling monkeys apart (note: there are 260 species of monkeys). Even respected analysts like Gartner, IDC, 451 Research and TechTarget have different SDS definitions – SDS must be software only, SDS can be hyperconverged, SDS is open source, or SDS can be hardware-based. What most people seem to agree on is that SDS enables storage services through a software interface, and often runs on commodity hardware, enabled by the decoupling of storage software and hardware.

Yet that still doesn’t help answer the question, what meets YOUR needs? It may seem a little unconventional for a vendor blog, but our goal in this series (expect another six blogs after this one) is to give you some practical information on SDS types – what are the flavors, what works best where, how different SDS types rate against common use cases, and what you should select to bring up your organization’s SDS IQ.

We’re going to cover six types of SDS solutions:

Scale-up Vendor-Defined “SDS”
Scale-up Software Only
Scale Out
Hyperconverged
Virtual Storage Appliance
Containerized

Review our report cards to see whether your favorite SDS solution made the grade – we’ll look at each type and rate them on four critical categories: flexibility, scalability, performance, and cost; we’ll suggest the best use cases for each solution, and even share a few vendors to look at. We’ll be using a 5 point grading system:

A: Excellent; well-rounded and recommended solution
B: Very Good; above average solutions, especially for certain use cases
C: Passing; improvement needed for overall usage
D: Close fail; almost passing, solution with numerous gaps
F: Failing, not a workable solution

What’s on your SDS wish list?

To help you raise your SDS IQ, it’s helpful to start by doing your homework – what’s on your SDS wish list? For example, making sure you’re still in charge of managing drives, so you can handle predictable drive failures. Many organizations also want policy-based provisioning using REST-based APIs, specifically thin provisioning and scripted storage solution. Tiering is also often a must-have for SDS because of its ability to match data with storage types and maximize your return on investment. You might also be looking for SDS that’s independent of hypervisors. Hyperconvergence expands the portfolio of solutions even further. Take a few minutes to think through what matters most, and we’ll help you figure out how to get it.

Watch this space for the first review in our series – Scale-up, Vendor-Defined “SDS”

Raise Your SDS IQ (1 of 6): Practical Review of Scale-up Vendor-Defined “SDS”

It’s time to raise your SDS IQ