Scale up is history! is scale out the future for storage

clear concise consulting

SCALE UP IS HISTORY! IS SCALE OUT THE

FUTURE FOR STORAGE?

A Technical and Market Analysis

Chris M Evans

Langton Blue Ltd

Copyright © 2014 Langton Blue Ltd 1


ABOUT OUR SPEAKERS

• Chris M Evans

• 27 years experience in the IT industry across all platforms, including IBM mainframe, Windows & Open Systems.

• Co-founder and independent consultant at Langton Blue Ltd, a specialist consulting company in the UK.

• Blogger and part-time analyst at Architecting.IT

• Twitter: @chrismevans, @architectingIT, @langtonblue

• Web: www.architecting.it, www.langtonblue.com


http://www.architecting.it

http://www.langtonblue.com


WHAT YOU WILL LEARN

• How Scale-Out Solutions are Defined

• The differences and benefits between scale out and traditional scale-up solutions

• How scale-out helps deliver hyper-converged compute and storage solutions

• How to decide whether scale-out is right for you

• Vendor Roundup – hardware and software offerings in today’s marketplace.



SCALE UP STORAGE DEFINED

• The dominant storage architecture for the past 25 years

• Components all built into a single “monolithic” hardware device

• Managed as a single hardware device• Incorporates expensive highly redundant

components• Originally used proprietary components (ASICs,

backplanes, internal bus) although industry has moved towards commoditisation

• Designed for maximum availability and up-time• Performance and capacity increased by adding

more components (processor, adaptor cards, directors, disks) to the single device


EMC VMAX


SCALE-OUT STORAGE DEFINED


• Systems built from clusters of hardware (and software) nodes

• Support File, Block and Object protocols• Built from commodity components (e.g.

1U standard servers & disk drives• Protect data through RAID, Mirroring and

Erasure Coding techniques• Failure of a disk/flash device or entire

node is designed into the architecture• System scales capacity & performance by

adding nodes to the configuration• Scale Out concept used as the basis for

hyper-converged solutions

SolidFire SF Series


SCALE-UP/SCALE-OUT – PETS VS CATTLE


Pets are Named; nursed back to health and cared for when ill

Cattle are numbered, if they get ill, they are “expendable”


SCALE-UP/SCALE-OUT - COMPARISION

Scale Out• “Loosely Coupled”

architecture• Multiple nodes connected

through Network backplane (e.g. Ethernet)

• Commodity components• Tolerates disk and node

failures• Storage/compute loss is 1/n of

node count

• Growth through adding nodes/servers with compute and storage capacity


Scale Up• “Tightly Coupled”

architecture• Controllers• Dedicated backplane

• Proprietary components• Designed for 100% uptime

of all components• BBU, UPS, multiple

redundancy planes

• Growth through adding faster controllers & disk shelves


SCALE OUT BENEFITS

• Lower Cost than Scale-Up• Commodity components & SDS products• Deploy as software-only with VMs• Simpler maintenance – e.g. node-based upgrades, no data migration

• Scale “on demand”• Grow capacity & performance by the node• Simple deployment process – rack and join node cluster

• Lower Risk• New nodes don’t have to be plugged directly into the running

infrastructure (like disk shelves)• 1/n capacity lost on node failure – more nodes = less impact• Rolling upgrade – add new (faster/bigger) nodes, decommission the old

ones – no fork-lift upgrades

• Greater Flexibility• Geo-dispersal of data with erasure coding• Software-only solutions, no hardware tie-in or cost



SCALE OUT ISSUES

• Node Balancing• Can have surplus or shortage of compute/storage resources with fixed

node configurations (solved with multiple node types & dynamic balancing)

• Recovery Rebuild Process• Can have performance impact if entire node’s data has to be recreated

(solved with prioritised/intelligent rebuild) – scale out rebuild can be fast

• Network Dependency• Infrastructure is limited in write I/O throughput to network bandwidth

(need to protect new data across > 1 node)

• Storage Efficiency• Many solutions use replicas (e.g. RAID-1/10), can be expensive on disk

capacity, especially with all-flash solutions

• Minimum Node deployment• Hardware solutions usually require minimum of 3 nodes, usually

recommended to be 4



SCALE OUT AND HYPER-CONVERGED

• Hyper-converged hardware vendors have used scale-out storage concepts within their products• Nutanix (NDFS), Scale Computing (SCRIBE), VMware EVO:RAIL

(VSAN)

• Scale out storage and scale out compute are a “natural fit” for each other

• Scale out storage software can be used to deliver hyper-converged solutions without buying a packaged solution• StarWind Virtual SAN, VMware VSAN, ScaleIO

• OpenStack takes advantage of scale-out properties• Swift (object), Ceph (block), GlusterFS (File)



CHOOSING THE RIGHT PRODUCT

• What are my requirements?• Protocols (block, file object)• Geo-dispersal• Features – data protection, hypervisor support• Hardware or Software only?

• Is Scale-Out suitable for all of my data?• Mix scale up and scale out technologies where appropriate

• What’s my Growth/Capacity requirement?• Object typically 100TB+ deployments• File & block, 10’s of terabytes

• Existing process/technology synergies• Can I use commodity servers already in my environment?

• No extra support/maintenance cost• “Mix & Match” storage and compute• Great for software-only solutions

• Can I build out OpenStack or scale-out Compute Farm?



VENDOR ROUNDUP - HARDWARE



VENDOR ROUNDUP - SOFTWARE


• entirely software-based, VM-centric virtual machine storage, which basically

“mirrors” internal hard disk and flash memory between hypervisor hosts

StarWind Virtual SAN is…

before after

• eliminates any need for physical shared storage like SAS JBODs, iSCSI or

Fibre Channel or NAS and seamlessly integrates into the hypervisor

• Zero Hardware footprint

• Complete fault tolerance with just 2 servers

• No SSD / 10GbE / SAS JBOD required

• VM-Centric storage design

• Maximized storage performance

StarWind Virtual SAN – hardware-less storage

Basic 2-node configuration

Thinking storage outside the box


Q&A



CONTACT US


Download

StarWind Virtual SAN 30-Day Trial here:

www.starwind.com/starwind-virtual-san/

Headquarters:

301 Edgewater Place, Wakefield, MA 01880

USA/Canada: 1-617-449-7717

EMEA and Asia: +44-207-193-67-27

[email protected]

[email protected]

http://www.starwind.com/starwind-virtual-san/

mailto:[email protected]

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Scale up is history! is scale out the future for storage