Nexenta Blog
How to Get More from All-Flash Using Software Defined Storage
15 May 2017 by Nexenta
By: George Crump, Storage Swiss
Flash often makes the hardware selection less important, but makes the software selection very important. The right software can not only ensure optimal flash performance, but also extend flash implementation beyond the typical high-transaction database use cases and into modern apps and big data analytics. It is critical though that IT professionals make sure software defined storage solutions (SDS) include core enterprise features that they have come to count on.
Why is Storage Hardware Less Important?
Storage systems used to be full of proprietary hardware so they could extract every last drop of performance from the array. These custom chips were used because CPUs were relatively slow, software was cumbersome to create and maintain, and rotational hard disks were highly latent. Times have changed. CPU processing power is almost too plentiful, software development is much easier to start and continuously maintain, and most importantly, flash media has almost no latency when comparing the alternatives.
Although it matters what hardware IT uses, a mid-range configuration can help many organizations reach the performance levels they require. While they do exist, most data center workloads will not be able to take advantage of additional hardware investments to extract additional performance. A software-first approach provides IT professionals flexibility, enabling them to select hardware components that are the most affordable while balancing the right quality and the right amount of performance.
Once the organization meets performance requirements, it needs to focus on the other values flash media brings to the data center. For example, flash is denser and requires less power, making it ideal for rapidly growing organizations that are trying to avoid the cost of building another data center.
Why is Software More Important?
If it is flash-enabled, storage software really shouldn’t care what type of storage hardware it runs on. But it should take advantage of the reality of excess storage performance to provide a richer feature set to customers. For legacy data centers, this means a greater focus on data efficiency like inline compression, data management enabled by quality of service, data protection to lower recover point objectives and most importantly ease of use to lower administrative costs.
Flash’s Next Steps
Flash, in the form of either all-flash arrays or hybrid arrays, is now the dominant storage type for core applications based on Oracle or MS-SQL as well as virtualized environments based on VMware or Hyper-V. These environments typically leverage a scale-up storage architecture and SDS vendors need to support this very popular deployment model. Doing so allows the SDS solution to leverage storage hardware already in-place instead of forcing the customer to upgrade or change hardware to support a scale-out solution.
Flash as Deep Storage
An increasing number of organizations are looking to use flash storage not only to take advantage of its performance, but also its density. A flash-based system can store petabytes of information in less than half a data center rack. When factoring the cost of data center floor space, power and cooling, these offerings may actually be less expensive than the hard drive alternative. Then, applications like Splunk and Hadoop can leverage this density to access a broad data set that responds instantly to their queries to deliver deeper analysis and faster answers.
But these environments require a new approach to flash storage system architectures. They need to scale-out the same way the applications do, via commodity servers that act as storage nodes creating a cluster delivering a single pool of storage. Once again, the software creating this storage cluster is critical, as it needs optimization for flash media, automatic scaling and ease of management. In addition to storage management, the SDS software has the added responsibility of cluster management and network management.
StorageSwiss Take
A storage vendor traditionally delivers three elements to their customers: hardware, software and service. While storage vendors need to be aware of and take advantage of flash performance and density, they don’t need to be as concerned about designing proprietary hardware. The flash performance equalizer enables them to focus on the storage software and delivering quality support and service to customers. A focus on software also enables flexibility so customers can choose the hardware that makes the most sense for their environment.
https://storageswiss.com/2017/05/15/more-from-all-flash-software-defined-storage/
A Turnkey Storage Architecture for OpenStack and Docker
01 Dec 2016 by Nexenta
By George Crump, Storage Swiss
Click here to learn from George and the team about the Scale-Out All-Flash Solution with Nexenta, Micron and Supermicro…
Is DevOps changing storage from simple to API?
14 Oct 2016 by Nexenta
“Storage should be easy. It should be that anyone can manage it, it’s something you put in the closet and forget about.”
This was the mantra of storage vendors over the last 10-15 years. We saw vendors like EqualLogic make a dent and then get acquired after selling on simplicity. Then, EMC announced the VNXe and invited a third-grader to come onstage and configure it.
This worked well when selling into the small to medium business space, and many companies jumped on the bandwagon, but is it the future? As we see cross-cloud integration like VMware announced at VMworld, and the rise of containers into the enterprise, is simplicity really the key selling point?
I would argue it is not. The new paradigm is another one of the buzzwords of the past few years: DevOps.
If you are like most people in the market, you are still trying to figure out exactly what DevOps means. Do you need to have programmers on staff even though you sell insurance or auto parts? You don’t. In fact, you just need staffers that understand the underlying concepts.
The most general definition I have found was on Wikipedia: “A movement or practice that emphasizes the collaboration and communication of both software developers and other information-technology (IT) professionals while automating the process of software delivery and infrastructure changes.”
For this purpose, think about the integration you need as you move from an isolated enterprise to one that works with SaaS tools and newly developed applications. There is a glue that holds all these components together and allows us to achieve tight integration — that is the API.
“API” can be a scary term for many SysAdmins, since they are used to a GUI that lets them manage everything (back to the third-grader deploying storage). However, it does not need to be scary anymore, since more companies are making it easier than ever to work with an API.
The Open API Initiative (OAI) has influenced vendors to keep APIs more consistent and simpler for everyone. Combining the REST APIs with something like Swagger UI tool gives the general admin a simple representation of what an API can do. Swagger even provides a public-facing demo, “Swagger Petstore,” so that any administrator can understand how easy an API can be to use.
Most of the newer storage companies, and specifically those touting “software-defined,” utilize something like the Swagger UI as a web interface to clearly detail exactly what you need to put in a script to make the storage do what you want.
Take the Petstore example: When you use the “Try It Out” under the store inventory, it produces a new command to run
curl -X GET –header ‘Accept: application/json’ ‘http://petstore.swagger.io/v2/store/inventory’
No longer is a developer needed; you simply go to a website and cut and paste into the script. This impact can be felt throughout the data center.
This shift to a simplistic API, and even more importantly a simplistic and powerful interface to those APIs, can be used by enterprises to change the way the SysAdmins of today work. This will not eliminate the need for vendors to make simple, easy-to-navigate graphical interfaces, but it will give the freedom and flexibility that is needed as enterprises move more and more into the software-defined data center.
Designing an All-Flash Object Store
04 Oct 2016 by Nexenta
by George Crump, Storage Swiss
Object storage is set to become THE way organizations will store unstructured data. As this transition occurs those same organizations are expecting more from object storage than just a “cheap and deep” way to store information. They expect the system will deliver data as fast as their analytics applications want it. The problem is that in terms of performance most object storage systems are sorely lacking. The reality is the transition to high performance object storage will require more than simply throwing flash at the problem. Underlying object storage software needs to change.
More than Flash
Our entry “The Need for Speed – High Performance Object Storage” shows the decisions to use flash for object storage gets support from improving time to results and increased density. The problem is that “just throwing flash at the problem” will lead to less than desirable outcomes. The key to optimizing a flash investment is making sure the rest of the storage infrastructure does not add the latency that flash removes. This is a particular problem for many object storage systems.
The Object Storage Bottlenecks to Flash Performance
One of the key inhibitors to maximizing flash performance is one of object storage’s biggest advantages….
To read this blog in its entirety, please visit: https://storageswiss.com/2016/10/04/designing-all-flash-object-store/
The difference between NexentaStor and NexentaEdge
27 Sep 2016 by Nexenta
By: Thomas Cornely, Chief Product Officer
Deciding between NexentaStor and NexentaEdge is relatively easy if you understand the products and your applications. NexentaStor delivers unified file and block storage services, where NexentaEdge is our scalable object storage platform. So the question is simple: what are you looking for, file protocols or object storage APIs?
Key Differentiators Between NexentaStor and Nexenta Edge
It is true that both systems provide block services, although NexentaEdge’s block support is limited to iSCSI. But one easy way to choose between the two is if you want shared file services (e.g. NFS, SMB) then only NexentaStor offers that functionality. But if you want to start storing data the modern way using an object storage API such as S3 or Swift, then only NexentaEdge has that capability.
Other differences include that NexentaEdge is built on a Linux kernel versus NexentaStor that is built using OpenSolaris and ZFS. NexentaEdge was also built from the ground up to be our most scalable product, so if scalability is important to you, NexentaEdge will offer you the best choice.
Which one is right for you?
So the next question is, what applications and systems are you running, and what kind of storage are they looking for? If you are considering an OpenStack deployment, NexentaEdge was specifically designed with it in mind, along with full support for both the Swift and S3 APIs. NexentaEdge would, therefore, be the obvious choice for OpenStack.
What about containers – especially those with persistent storage? Cinder is one of the more promising ideas in that space, something NexentaEdge has full support for. In fact, NexentaEdge is so convinced of the concept of containers that we build it on containers. Using containers in our core product gives us a lot of experience with the challenges of running persistent storage with containers, and this experience is found in NexentaEdge.
If you are running a legacy application that requires NFS or SMB access, then NexentaStor is your product of choice. In addition, if you need Fiber Channel block access, only NexentaStor offers this.
The question is a little bit harder when discussing iSCSI, since both platforms offer iSCSI block access. Perhaps the deciding factor will be scalability or performance. While both products offer some level of scalability, we made scalability one of the core things we wanted to accomplish with NexentaEdge. NexentaStor can scale to petabytes, but NexentaEdge can scale to hundreds of them. On the other hand, if performance and low latency are your primary concern then NexentaStor is for you.
Most data centers will need both systems. First, a high performance, feature rich NAS that supports a variety of protocols. Legacy applications and data will be with us for decades consolidating them to a single storage platform that can reduce complexity and increase performance just makes sense. We deliver this with NexentaStor.
NexentaEdge is your choice for storing the petabytes of data that the internet of things (IoT) will generate, as well as delivering that data to modern applications like Splunk, Spark, Cassandra and CouchBase.