Nexenta Blog

Global Leader in Software Defined Storage

It’s time to raise your SDS IQ

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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”

Nexenta has joined Intel’s new Storage Builders Program for Open Software-Defined Storage

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by Nexenta

Earlier in April, Intel hosted its Intel Data Center Group (DCG) Cloud Day. The event brought together its vast network of industry partners across the cloud and networking space, as well as journalists, analysts and other influencers, to discuss the the industry’s progress in the adoption of Software-Defined Infrastructure (SDI), highlighting the importance of Software-Defined Storage (SDS) to SDI. As part of this discussion, Intel announced it would be launching a Storage Builders Program – an extension of the Intel Builders Program.

We were delighted to be invited to join the exclusive group of vendors supporting the program – many of which we’ve worked with before and we’re excited to extend those partnerships further.

The program is a cross-industry initiative designed to increase ecosystem alignment, ignite innovation, reduce development efforts, lead open storage standards development and accelerate adoption of intelligent, cost-effective and efficient SDS.

There is no doubt that SDS has become an increasingly important market segment, and the introduction of this program is yet more evidence of that fact. Organizations across the world are finding that their legacy storage systems just aren’t up to scratch, cost far too much and, on top of that, they’re tied to a single vendor. At Nexenta our long-term mission has been to make storage open and we’re excited that Intel has the same future in mind.

As a participant in the program, we’ll continue to build on our current OpenSDS offerings, but will have the added benefit of using Intel’s expertise to create joint solutions for customers. We’ll have the ability to collaborate with other Intel Storage Builders members to drive broader market adoption of software-defined technologies across the data center and seriously accelerate traction in the storage market.

Our participation in the Intel Storage Builders program supplements our existing and continued support of all Intel server providers including Cisco, Dell, Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), Inspur, Lenovo, SuperCloud and Supermicro.

“Supermicro is raising the bar on performance and density with the Industry’s broadest portfolio of all-flash NVMe storage solutions and complete support for Intel’s latest Xeon E5-2600 v4 processors across our server platforms,” said Don Clegg, VP of Marketing and Business Development at Supermicro. “As a member of Intel Storage Builders with longstanding partner Nexenta, we are developing and deploying next generation software-defined storage solutions which deliver the most innovative, highly scalable, hyper-converged infrastructure, with lowest overall TCO.”

“We are proud to join Nexenta and select others as part of the Intel Storage Builders program. We’ve worked with Nexenta for a long time in supporting our mission to provide customers with the industry’s widest-range of tested and validated OpenSDS solutions,” said Travis Vigil, Executive Director Product Management at Dell Storage. “We are excited to continue working together along with Intel to produce high-end results for our customers.”

“Nexenta’s solutions will enable our customers to deploy flexible, software-defined storage environments on purpose-built HPE Apollo 4000 big data servers,” said Susan Blocher, Vice President of Compute Solutions at Hewlett Packard Enterprise. “The collaboration between HPE, Nexenta and Intel ensures our customers benefit from the combined innovation and high-quality of our next generation solutions.”

“Nexenta is a strong partner in supporting our growth in the enterprise storage market,” said Stuart McRae, Director of Product Marketing for the Lenovo Storage Business Unit. “At Lenovo, we strive to bring innovative customer value to our enterprise customers, and together with Intel and Nexenta, we will continue to expand our reach to bring new economics to data center storage. “

“We are pleased to partner once again with Nexenta, as they continue to support our company’s vision of shaping the future of software-defined storage by creating unprecedented value and opportunities for our customers and partners,” said Philippe Vincent, CEO at Load DynamiX. “Ensuring that software defined storage will perform and scale to enterprise data center requirements is a key focus of Load DynamiX. We are confident that, together with other Intel Storage Builder partners, we can achieve these goals.”

“Nexenta has proven to our customers the joint benefits of SDS in conjunction with our expertise in cloud computing hardware, software and services,” said Yuzhen Fang, CEO at SuperCloud. “We look forward to continuing development of these solutions with both Nexenta and Intel.”

“Nexenta and VMware have worked together for many years to provide mutual customers with flexible storage solutions to enable increased efficiency and availability, while lowering costs,” said Howard Hall, senior director, Global Technology Partnering Organization, VMware. “We look forward to working with both Nexenta and Intel to create additional value and drive broader adoption of software-defined technologies.”

For more information, visit: Storage on Your Terms: Nexenta Software Defined Storage with Intel

 

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.