• Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar
Nexenta Blog

Nexenta Blog

Global Leader in Software Defined Storage

  • About Nexenta

NFS

Using the Right Storage Protocol for the Right Use Case

April 5, 2016 By Nexenta

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.

Why is Fibre Channel resurging?

March 7, 2016 By Nexenta

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.

Primary Sidebar

Search

Latest Posts

Introducing “The Essential”- A Quick-Start NexentaStor Virtual Storage Appliance

Taking the EZ-Pass Lane to a Hybrid Storage Cloud

File Services for HCI and Block Storage Simplified

“NAS-up” Your Hyper-converged Infrastructure or SAN with NexentaStor (and get hybrid cloud, too)

NexentaCloud Complements On-Prem NexentaStor for Hybrid Deployments

Categories

  • all flash
  • cloud
  • Corporate
  • Data Protection
  • Dell
  • NAS
  • Object Storage
  • Raise Your SDS IQ
  • Software-defined data center
  • Software-defined storage
  • Uncategorized
  • Virtualization

Nexenta Blog

Copyright © 2023