VSA

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

May 29, 2018 By Nexenta

By Michael Richtberg, Nexenta Advisory Board Member

It’s a great day when you get a deal on something you really need. Getting the most out of your existing IT infrastructure can really help you afford adding other business critical investments instead of duplicating something you already own. In the case of hyper-converged infrastructure or SAN block storage, you can increase the usefulness of these investments by adding full NAS capabilities without adding more hardware by using Nexenta’s leading storage software solution, NexentaStor.

Raise Your SDS IQ (5 of 6): Practical Review of Virtual Storage Appliances

June 21, 2016 By Nexenta

By Michael Letschin, Field CTO

This is the fifth of six posts (the last one was Hyperconverged “SDS”) 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 fifth SDS flavor in our series is Virtual Storage Appliances.

One of the lesser known flavors of SDS is the Virtual Storage Appliance (VSA); it’s less common because it requires a virtual machine environment (think Microsoft’s Hyper-V or VMware), and because there are only a few, software-only options for it (like FreeNAS, LeftHand VSA, or Nexenta’s NexentaStor). There also tend to be feature limitations as a result of the virtual machine environment, such as lack of replication across hosts. That said, for the right use case – such as remote offices, branch offices, small and medium-sized businesses, and multitenant apps – a virtual storage appliance (VSA) can offer a cost-effective storage solution. To use the VMware example, multiple head nodes each connect with vSphere and a VSA to present storage as one or more pools, with data from one or more VSAs.

Virtual storage appliances offer excellent flexibility through the hypervisor, because you can choose which one you’d like. The hypervisor host does confine scalability to VM size, that’s an important limitation. While managing individual VSAs across different hosts can bring some challenges, it also supports flexibility. You can spin up VSAs per group or per application to create multitenancy using VSAs. IT maintains control, even though individual teams might think they’re managing their storage pools. This approach offers good performance: even a loaded hypervisor only has minimal impact. And finally, this model doesn’t require any additional hardware, so there’s a nice cost benefit.

Overall grade: C

See below for a typical build and the report card:

Screen Shot 2016-06-21 at 1.58.47 PM

It’s time to raise your SDS IQ

April 26, 2016 By Nexenta

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”