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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:

Screen Shot 2016-07-05 at 12.51.23 PM

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”

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.