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Software-defined storage

Questions from the Field: How do you define Software-defined?

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By Michael Letschin, Field CTO

If you’re in IT, and attending the usual industry events, you can’t help but notice the explosion of companies, from those making software to those making hardware, claiming to have Software-defined solutions.  I even bumped into someone (we’ll leave him nameless) who claimed that his company’s flash controller was “software-defined”, because after all, it was software that defined how the hardware should be managed; right?  Right …

Yes, software needs hardware, but that doesn’t make the resulting solution Software-defined.  While there are an increasing number of Software-defined solutions out there, it’s still a bit of the Wild West, and buyers best beware.  Have some healthy caution as you explore solutions and understand how your vendor defines Software-defined.  Getting that base-level understanding is important, because the solutions that flow from the definition have different characteristics that either will or won’t work with your use case.

So, how do we define Software-defined?  Well, we are Nexenta after all, the storage software company; we would say that the only true SDS solutions are ones where the software is hardware agnostic, architecturally flexible, and able to deliver business agility (along with the usual storage software features).  But don’t take our word for it, for a deeper dive into SDS definitions, check out George Crump’s latest blog “What Exactly is Software Defined Storage“.  The important takeaway here is that the definition of SDS matters when you’re trying to solve a problem – it defines the benefits that the solution is capable of delivering to you.

Next week we’ll be starting a blog series on how to Raise Your SDS IQ, where we’ll walk through the six different types of SDS, as the industry defines them, and explain where and why they excel, and fall down.  So, watch this space as we work to build out your buyer’s toolkit; that way you won’t be the guy (or gal) with the knife at the gun fight ;).

Using the Right Storage Protocol for the Right Use Case

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By Michael Letschin, Field CTO

IT professionals have no shortage of storage protocols to choose from, such as NFS, SMB, Fibre Channel (FC), iSCSI and Object. “Experts” are writing books about which protocol is best, usually taking the side of a vendor with a particular axe to grind. The truth is they each have their sweet spot. The key is to make sure that your storage solution is flexible enough to support all your data center’s needs at the same time.

Virtualization

In most data centers the virtual infrastructure supports the majority of the business critical applications and workloads. The virtualization platform of choice, at least for now, is VMware. While FC is still very prevalent in VMware environments and VVOLs makes FC more flexible, we believe NFS is the ideal choice for most VMware environments. Let’s face it, VMs are essentially files and what better way to store files than a protocol designed specifically for file based data like NFS. The advantages of NFS are well documented but the key is that NFS provides a much easier mapping of a VM to its datastore. You can now make decisions, like what tier of storage to place a VM on, at a discrete VM level.

Mission Critical Applications

Many environments, for a variety of reasons, choose not to virtualize certain mission critical applications. They may already be clustered or there may be too many performance concerns. For these situations, many data centers will leverage a block protocol like FC or iSCSI. If the high performance storage requires low latency access, then FC is ideal, but iSCSI can hold its own for other applications where latency is not critical. Again, your storage software should give you the flexibility to choose any or all of these protocols as it makes sense.

Files

Managing file data, or unstructured data for those who want to sound cool, is one of the biggest challenges facing IT. And just like applications not all this data is equal. Most IT professionals immediately think of user data here, created by office productivity applications. It needs to be put on moderately performing storage but not the fastest storage since most users today are connecting via WiFi or even broadband. You need to keep it a long time because users never want you to delete their files. For this data, assuming most users are running Windows, SMB is the protocol of choice.

Another type of file data comes from machines like cameras, recording devices and sensors. It can range in size from trillions of very small sensor files to a few very large files from video cameras. The industry will tell you that object storage is the way to go here, and it very well may be. But we encourage you to use NFS first. It takes a lot of data to exceed the maximum potential of a modern NFS server. Again, the storage solution should not force you to make a choice.

At the other end of the file spectrum is high performance data that you need to access rapidly or a process that needs to write data quickly. For this, NFS is ideal. It is a high performance file system and with the appropriate use of flash delivers the performance that these use cases demand.

Conclusion

If you noticed, NFS is most appropriate in the majority of the use cases but not all of them. We think the storage solution you use should not also force you into a specific protocol. You should choose the one that makes sense for your specific use cases. And that’s why we built NexentaStor.

Build better containers—with Intel’s latest processor plus NexentaEdge

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By Oscar Wahlberg, Director of Product Management, Nexenta

If you’ve been wanting to start using containers—or use them more extensively—here’s some great news: The Intel Xeon processor E5 2600 v4 product family and NexentaEdge make an ideal infrastructure for building containers.

Containers have become an important approach for building apps that can scale up to the demands of the cloud. With containers, you can bundle an application with all the parts it needs— such as libraries and other dependencies—and ship it all out as one package. With a Docker container, the application will run on any other Linux machine regardless of customized settings.

Containers are an easy choice for stateless applications that require little or no persistent storage. But they can also work for stateful applications, too, as long as you have persistent storage solutions that integrate with container deployments—like NexentaEdge scale-out storage software.

NexentaEdge’s scale-out storage architecture shifts the burden of compute-intensive workloads into the storage tier where they can take advantage of underlying Intel server technologies, like the Intel Xeon processor E5 2600 v4 product family, which supports containerized storage with more CPU cores and higher memory speeds. The Intel Xeon processor E5 2600 v4 product family provides up to 22 cores with top memory speeds of 2400 MT/s which significantly improves both single- and multi-threaded performance. NexentaEdge storage algorithms—such as deduplication, real-time compression, tiering, erasure coding, and encryption—benefit tremendously from the Intel Xeon processor E5 2600 v4 product family because of its higher level of parallelism and performance on large data sets. The Intel Xeon processor E5 2600 v4 product family provides high-bandwidth, low-latency access to memory and enhanced power management features for high performance with low power consumption. The net result is a reduction in disk space—and the need for drives and physical assets—in the datacenter, improving your datacenter operational efficiencies.

From a software configuration perspective, NexentaEdge leverages Linux containers (Docker) to simplify deployments and configuration. Depending on your needs, you might choose to:

  • Connect containers into your existing environments, providing the containers access to existing network-attached shared storage using NFS or iSCSI, and potentially leveraging ClusterHQ Flocker volume plug-ins for NexentaEdge.
  • Connect iSCSI-based block storage to the container hypervisor for persistent storage when the infrastructure has separate compute and storage servers.
  • Run containers alongside containerized NexentaEdge storage microservices on the same Linux servers. NexentaEdge storage microservices manage and pool the storage capacity across all nodes in the cluster and deliver low-latency, high-performance block services to application containers.

To deliver optimal performance for your containers, NexentaEdge leverages:

  • Intel Xeon processor E5 2600 v4 product family optimized instruction sets for high performance
  • Intel Xeon processor E5 and E3 families together with integrated Intel Data Direct I/O technologies to help remove bottlenecks, decrease latency, and increase data throughput
  • Intel SSD and Intel NVMe devices for write caching/acceleration
  • Intel 10GbE Ethernet cards, such as the X520 model or X540 model for networking.

To move your apps and scale them up to the cloud more easily, start building containers using NexentaEdge on the latest Intel architectures. Read more about Nexenta and Intel on our Intel Storage Builders Membership page., or click here to get your copy of our Solution Brief – Storage on Your Terms: Nexenta Software Defined Storage with Intel.

You can also find us on Intel’s The Data Stack – an IT Peer Network.

Questions from the Field: Hyperconvergence

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By Michael Letschin, Field CTO

Having the most complete portfolio of Software-Defined Storage solutions in the industry is something that Nexenta pride’s itself on, but with that comes questions about all sorts of other storage technologies when I am out talking with our customers and partners.  Their questions range from trying to understand the latest trends like enterprise containers to the impact of the Internet of  Things and augmented reality, but more often than not their questions are about how some of the newer datacenter technologies will help their business.  These technologies range from Software-Defined Networking to public cloud and of course hyperconverged solutions.  Sometimes we integrate very well, for instance with the VMware vCloud Air where we can run inside the public cloud and be a DR target for our existing customers, at a public cloud price point.  In other environments we have to explain that many solutions are not one size fits all.  Hyperconverged falls into that camp and George Crump, an analyst for Storage Switzerland, has a great write-up here – Is Hyperconverged worth the Hype? – on the pros and cons to that market.  I think a key takeaway is that if you’re looking at a new project or a new datacenter with fixed needs, then the simplicity of hyperconverged could be the answer; but if you are growing a datacenter or expect unpredictable growth there are some caveats: the inability to separate storage and compute as you grow can result in over-buying, and losing the benefits you get from virtualization and consolidation.  In those cases, the idea of a traditionally isolated compute and storage solution has real benefit.  Utilizing new technologies like Software-Defined Storage to give you the flexibility of choosing the right hardware for you when you need it gets the enterprise closer and closer to the dream of a next generation or Software-Defined Datacenter.

For more on hyperconverged, check out Is Hyperconverged worth the Hype? by George Crump at Storage Swiss.

Why is Fibre Channel resurging?

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By Michael Letschin, Field CTO

There was a time when Fibre Channel was the only solution for those looking for a high speed transport. But that is not the case anymore. The predominant storage protocol in many virtualization environments is NFS, primarily because virtualization administrators know that administering file-based datastores is much easier than those based on LUNs. In addition, advances in NFS and combining NFS with flash storage make the system’s performance ideal for hosting virtualized workloads.

But Nexenta is seeing a resurgence in customers expressing an interest in using NexentaStor’s Fibre Channel option. This is particularly interesting because, unlike other platforms, NexentaStor does not lock you into a particular protocol. Customers are free to choose NFS, SMB, Fibre Channel, or iSCSI. This means the only reason they would be using Fibre Channel is that it offers something that the other alternatives don’t – performance.

Performance is the main historical reason IT professionals prefer Fibre Channel over Ethernet; however, some may read that statement and disagree. Ethernet offers 40 Gb and Fibre Channel is only 16 Gb. If Ethernet has more bandwidth, how could Fibre Channel have better performance? The answer is bandwidth is not the primary performance consideration for some applications. If an application is looking for low latency, Fibre Channel will win over Ethernet almost every time. A look at the design of the two protocols will explain why.

Fibre Channel design assumes very short connections that are never longer than a Kilometer and usually much shorter. In contrast, Ethernet networks can stretch around the world. Due to this design difference, Fibre Channel can assume that all frames make it to the other side, where Ethernet assumes that many of them will not make it. This means Fibre Channel doesn’t have to do as much error checking and re-transmitting as Ethernet does. This translates into significantly lower latency numbers.

Another low latency device that is quite popular is Flash. Fibre Channel offers a better latency match to Flash than Ethernet does. Perhaps one has to look no further to see the reason behind this resurgence in Fibre Channel. If a customer has a latency-sensitive application, they are going to consider Flash as their storage medium. And if they are going to use Flash, they will want a low-latency protocol to communicate with their storage – and Fibre Channel meets the bill.

Whatever the reason for this particular resurgence in Fibre Channel, Nexenta’s solution allows customers to take advantage of whatever storage protocols they think are appropriate for their environment. And if they change their mind at a later date, they can start using a different protocol without changing their storage product. This is the flexibility of an open storage product like NexentaStor.

For additional information, read up on NexentaStor.