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SDS

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 ;).

A Few Observations From OpenStorage Summit About SDS

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OSS EMEA 2013 was one of the more inspiring few days I’ve experienced recently at Nexenta.  It was not a marketing event.  It was war stories about the shift to OpenStorage and Software Defined Storage shared in sessions, over demos, and, yes, over beers.

A few things I learned included:

  • SDS is already real and leverages commodity hardware.  I had the opportunity to facilitate a cloud panel where I learned that the top hosting and cloud companies in Northern Europe are using NexentaStor as software defined storage – right now.  SDS is not done – we are furiously adding capabilities as is the broader community.  More below on that subject.  But – Schuberg Phils presented on how they manage NexentaStor via Chef and use it as the basis of their cloud infrastructure TODAY.  And how the use of commodity hardware means cost savings now and in the future and also – greater flexibility and supportability.  Schuberg Phils is rapidly moving towards an infrastructure comprised almost entirely of commodity hardware and software, including their use of CloudStack, KVM, Arista, Nicira, and open approaches to security and load balancing as well.
  • SDS is about to take the next step.  While approximately 190 customers and partners attended OSS and discussed in part their usage of NexentaStor as a version of software defined storage – the booths attracting the most attention were those showing forthcoming Nexenta capabilities that add infinite scalability of the management framework through further separating the control and the management frameworks as well as those that map application requirements to storage software and hardware configurations.
  • SDS isn’t just about deep and cheap.  While many larger enterprises use NexentaStor initially as second and third tier storage to save money – over time customers often use NexentaStor for the flexibility of the solution and for the ability of NexentaStor to perform when used as hybrid flash or or all flash storage.  Marik Lubinski, LeaseWeb’s Virtualization and Storage Engineer, reported that as one of the largest hosting companies in Europe, with operations extending to the United States, they have used just about every legacy storage solution available on the market today.  And he reported that, by far, NexentaStor is “the fastest storage by far, of any storage we run.”

SDS and its foundation, OpenStorage, are not just about marketing.  Despite many blogs and statements from legacy vendors arguing either that they already have SDS or that they soon will have SDS, the simple fact is that they have neither the open approach and software only business model needed OR – as last week reminded me – the people, the community and the sheer number of progressive users that OpenStorage based SDS has accumulated.  Together we are making a reality a fundamentally better approach to enterprise class storage.