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How to Get More from All-Flash Using Software Defined Storage

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By: George Crump, Storage Swiss

Flash often makes the hardware selection less important, but makes the software selection very important. The right software can not only ensure optimal flash performance, but also extend flash implementation beyond the typical high-transaction database use cases and into modern apps and big data analytics. It is critical though that IT professionals make sure software defined storage solutions (SDS) include core enterprise features that they have come to count on.

Why is Storage Hardware Less Important?

Storage systems used to be full of proprietary hardware so they could extract every last drop of performance from the array. These custom chips were used because CPUs were relatively slow, software was cumbersome to create and maintain, and rotational hard disks were highly latent. Times have changed. CPU processing power is almost too plentiful, software development is much easier to start and continuously maintain, and most importantly, flash media has almost no latency when comparing the alternatives.

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Is DevOps changing storage from simple to API?

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“Storage should be easy. It should be that anyone can manage it, it’s something you put in the closet and forget about.”

This was the mantra of storage vendors over the last 10-15 years. We saw vendors like EqualLogic make a dent and then get acquired after selling on simplicity. Then, EMC announced the VNXe and invited a third-grader to come onstage and configure it.

This worked well when selling into the small to medium business space, and many companies jumped on the bandwagon, but is it the future? As we see cross-cloud integration like VMware announced at VMworld, and the rise of containers into the enterprise, is simplicity really the key selling point?

I would argue it is not. The new paradigm is another one of the buzzwords of the past few years: DevOps.

If you are like most people in the market, you are still trying to figure out exactly what DevOps means. Do you need to have programmers on staff even though you sell insurance or auto parts? You don’t. In fact, you just need staffers that understand the underlying concepts.

The most general definition I have found was on Wikipedia: “A movement or practice that emphasizes the collaboration and communication of both software developers and other information-technology (IT) professionals while automating the process of software delivery and infrastructure changes.”

For this purpose, think about the integration you need as you move from an isolated enterprise to one that works with SaaS tools and newly developed applications. There is a glue that holds all these components together and allows us to achieve tight integration — that is the API.

“API” can be a scary term for many SysAdmins, since they are used to a GUI that lets them manage everything (back to the third-grader deploying storage). However, it does not need to be scary anymore, since more companies are making it easier than ever to work with an API.

The Open API Initiative (OAI) has influenced vendors to keep APIs more consistent and simpler for everyone. Combining the REST APIs with something like Swagger UI tool gives the general admin a simple representation of what an API can do. Swagger even provides a public-facing demo, “Swagger Petstore,” so that any administrator can understand how easy an API can be to use.

Most of the newer storage companies, and specifically those touting “software-defined,” utilize something like the Swagger UI as a web interface to clearly detail exactly what you need to put in a script to make the storage do what you want.

Take the Petstore example: When you use the “Try It Out” under the store inventory, it produces a new command to run

curl -X GET –header ‘Accept: application/json’ ‘http://petstore.swagger.io/v2/store/inventory’

No longer is a developer needed; you simply go to a website and cut and paste into the script. This impact can be felt throughout the data center.

This shift to a simplistic API, and even more importantly a simplistic and powerful interface to those APIs, can be used by enterprises to change the way the SysAdmins of today work. This will not eliminate the need for vendors to make simple, easy-to-navigate graphical interfaces, but it will give the freedom and flexibility that is needed as enterprises move more and more into the software-defined data center.

Designing an All-Flash Object Store

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by George Crump, Storage Swiss

Object storage is set to become THE way organizations will store unstructured data. As this transition occurs those same organizations are expecting more from object storage than just a “cheap and deep” way to store information. They expect the system will deliver data as fast as their analytics applications want it. The problem is that in terms of performance most object storage systems are sorely lacking. The reality is the transition to high performance object storage will require more than simply throwing flash at the problem. Underlying object storage software needs to change. 

More than Flash

Our entry “The Need for  Speed – High Performance Object Storage” shows the decisions to use flash for object storage gets support from improving time to results and increased density. The problem is that “just throwing flash at the problem” will lead to less than desirable outcomes. The key to optimizing a flash investment is making sure the rest of the storage infrastructure does not add the latency that flash removes. This is a particular problem for many object storage systems.

The Object Storage Bottlenecks to Flash Performance

One of the key inhibitors to maximizing flash performance is one of object storage’s biggest advantages….

To read this blog in its entirety, please visit: https://storageswiss.com/2016/10/04/designing-all-flash-object-store/

The difference between NexentaStor and NexentaEdge

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By: Thomas Cornely, Chief Product Officer

Deciding between NexentaStor and NexentaEdge is relatively easy if you understand the products and your applications. NexentaStor delivers unified file and block storage services, where NexentaEdge is our scalable object storage platform. So the question is simple: what are you looking for, file protocols or object storage APIs?

Key Differentiators Between NexentaStor and Nexenta Edge

It is true that both systems provide block services, although NexentaEdge’s block support is limited to iSCSI. But one easy way to choose between the two is if you want shared file services (e.g. NFS, SMB) then only NexentaStor offers that functionality. But if you want to start storing data the modern way using an object storage API such as S3 or Swift, then only NexentaEdge has that capability.

Other differences include that NexentaEdge is built on a Linux kernel versus NexentaStor that is built using OpenSolaris and ZFS. NexentaEdge was also built from the ground up to be our most scalable product, so if scalability is important to you, NexentaEdge will offer you the best choice.

Which one is right for you?

So the next question is, what applications and systems are you running, and what kind of storage are they looking for? If you are considering an OpenStack deployment, NexentaEdge was specifically designed with it in mind, along with full support for both the Swift and S3 APIs. NexentaEdge would, therefore, be the obvious choice for OpenStack.

What about containers – especially those with persistent storage? Cinder is one of the more promising ideas in that space, something NexentaEdge has full support for. In fact, NexentaEdge is so convinced of the concept of containers that we build it on containers. Using containers in our core product gives us a lot of experience with the challenges of running persistent storage with containers, and this experience is found in NexentaEdge.

If you are running a legacy application that requires NFS or SMB access, then NexentaStor is your product of choice. In addition, if you need Fiber Channel block access, only NexentaStor offers this.

The question is a little bit harder when discussing iSCSI, since both platforms offer iSCSI block access. Perhaps the deciding factor will be scalability or performance. While both products offer some level of scalability, we made scalability one of the core things we wanted to accomplish with NexentaEdge. NexentaStor can scale to petabytes, but NexentaEdge can scale to hundreds of them. On the other hand, if performance and low latency are your primary concern then NexentaStor is for you.

Most data centers will need both systems. First, a high performance, feature rich NAS that supports a variety of protocols. Legacy applications and data will be with us for decades consolidating them to a single storage platform that can reduce complexity and increase performance just makes sense. We deliver this with NexentaStor.

NexentaEdge is your choice for storing the petabytes of data that the internet of things (IoT) will generate, as well as delivering that data to modern applications like Splunk, Spark, Cassandra and CouchBase.