intel

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

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.

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

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