- Why OpenStack is much more than just hype
- A summary of key OpenStack technologies
- Why to consider converged infrastructure for building private clouds
- The right way to scale-out OpenStack deploymentsÂ
Watch the webinar here!
//Richard
Archive
Posts Tagged ‘Virtual’
Official GA of Dell with Nutanix!! – #Dell, #Nutanix, #IaaS, #Web-Scale
November 6, 2014
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It’s official! Finally! đ
WEB-SCALE CONVERGED APPLIANCE
This disruptive solution integrates Dell PowerEdge servers, storage, and Nutanix software to create a scalable, simple, and easy-to-deploy, Web-scale appliance.
WHAT IS WEB-SCALE?
Web-scale is a transformative approach to buying, deploying and managing infrastructure. Pioneered by Internet companies, now available to enterprises. Benefits include:
- Predictable scale: Scale with the needs of your business, one node at a time
- Business agility: Deploy within an hour, update latest software within minutes, and shorten business processes
- Low total cost of ownership: Reduce upfront and ongoing costs by automating processes and spending less time trouble shooting
DELL XC SERIES
Meet the Dell XC Web-scale Converged Appliance – With Software by Nutanix.
FORRESTER REPORT
Forrester Research Evaluates the Web-scale Converged Appliance from Dell and Nutanix.
Read more here!
GARTNER REPORT
Why Your Legacy Storage Vendor Doesn’t Want You to Adopt Web-scale IT Infrastructure.
//Richard
#Nutanix Announces Global Agreement with #Dell
June 24, 2014
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Wow! This is interesting! đ
Strategic Relationship Significantly Expands Access and Distribution of Nutanix Solutions with Dellâs World-Class Hardware, Services and Marketing to Accelerate Adoption of Web-scale Converged Infrastructure in the Enterprise
SAN JOSE, CALIF. â June 24, 2014 â Nutanix, the leading provider of next-generation datacenter infrastructure solutions, today announced it has signed an original equipment manufacturing (OEM) agreement with Dell to offer a new family of converged infrastructure appliances based on Nutanix web-scale technology. The combination of Nutanixâs groundbreaking software running on Dellâs industry-leading servers delivers a flexible, scale-out platform that brings IT simplicity to modern datacenters. The Nutanix and Dell collaboration is designed from the ground up to deliver innovative web-scale technology to enterprises of any size. The agreement also includes joint sales, marketing, support and service investments, as well as alignment of product roadmaps.
The new Dell XC Series of Web-scale Converged Appliances will be built with Nutanix software running on Dell PowerEdge servers, and will be available in multiple variants to meet a wide range of price and performance options. The appliances will deliver high-performance converged infrastructure ideal for powering a broad spectrum of popular enterprise use cases, including virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI), virtualized business applications, multi-hypervisor environments and more. Nutanixâs web-scale software runs on all popular virtualization hypervisors, including VMware vSphereâ˘, Microsoft Hyper-V⢠and open source KVM, and is uniquely able to span multiple hypervisors in the same environment. The Dell XC Series appliances are scheduled for availability in the fourth quarter of this year and will be sold by Dell sales teams and channel partners worldwide.
âNutanix is a recognized leader in the converged infrastructure market with a software-driven offering that fits with Dellâs efforts to redefine datacenter economics and simplify IT for our customers,â said Alan Atkinson, vice president and general manager, Dell Storage. âBy combining market-leading infrastructure and software technologies from both companies with Dellâs world-class go-to-market capabilities, we believe our new solutions will be positioned to be a significant player in the growing, multi-billion dollar converged infrastructure market.â
âDell is a world-class leader in servers, storage and networking, and has established itself as a valuable IT partner for many of the worldâs largest organizations,â said Dheeraj Pandey, co-founder and CEO, Nutanix. âNutanix is teaming with Dell to accelerate our global sales growth through Dellâs vast direct and channel sales networks. In Dell, we chose a company that shares our vision of disrupting traditional datacenter infrastructures with intelligent software running on x86 hardware to power all datacenter services.â Read more…
Categories: All, Nutanix
Architecture, Citrix, Cloud, compute, computing, Dell, enterprise, IaaS, Infrastructure, Nutanix, OEM, Platform, scale, storage, strategy, VDI, Virtual, virtualization, web-scale, XenDesktop
OpenStack and Nutanix – perfect match! (perfect with VMware and Microsoft as well of course) – #Nutanix, #OpenStack, #IaaS
May 2, 2014
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This is a good post by Dwayne Lessner around how perfect match OpenStack and Nutanix is (not just OpenStack of course, Nutanix rocks with VMware and Microsoft as well)!
Nutanix NDFS also provides an advanced and unique feature set for OpenStack based
private clouds. Key features include:
- Simplicity â The same great platform that simplified your virtualisation deployment can simplify the compute and storage deployment for key OpenStack services (Glance, Nova, Horizon, Keystone, Neutron, Cinder, and Swift)
- Single Scalable Fabric â NDFS provides a single fabric for data storage that integrates seamlessly with OpenStack services. NDFS-based storage is easy to provision, manage, and operate at scale.
- Hypervisor Agnostic â Just like OpenStack, Nutanix NDFS was designed from the ground up to be hypervisor agnostic. Nutanix enables customers to choose between KVM, Hyper-V, and the VMware ESXi hypervisor for deployments of OpenStack.
- Enterprise Ready â Nutanix enables a full set of enterprise storage features including Elastic Deduplication, Compression, In-Memory and Flash-based Caching, VM-Data Locality, intelligent Information Lifecycle Management (ILM), Snapshots, Fast Clones, and Live Migration.
Read more here.Â
Here you also have the link to the webinar with topic:
Building OpenStack on a Single 2U Appliance
OpenStack promises to be the open source cloud operating system. Automated provisioning and management of network, server and storage resource via a single dashboard is great, but how can you get the same one-stop-shop simplicity for the underlying infrastructure?Attend this advanced private cloud webinar and learn:
Categories: All, Cloud, Infrastructure, Nutanix, OpenStack, Storage
Cinder, Cloud, computing, deployment, design, ESXi, Glance, Horizon, Hyper-V, hypervisor, IaaS, Information Lifecycle Management, Keystone, KVM, Life-cycle, Microsoft, NDFS, Nova, Nutanix, Nutanix NDFS, OpenStack, perfect match OpenStack, Platform, private, private clouds, Swift, Virtual, VM, VMWare
#XenMobile and the #Citrix Mobile Workspaces Architecture – #BYOD
April 4, 2014
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This is a great blog post by Christopher Campbell and good picture to show the overall capabilities and architecture of the Citrix offering!
Youâve heard us talk about Mobile Workspaces and if youâre a techie youâre probably wondering if Citrix really has the architectural components (a complete, comprehensive and fully integrated architecture) that can deliver any app and data to any user on any device over any network?
Well letâs first identify a few of the market leading technologies that make up the Citrix Mobile Workspaces solution:
- XenApp mobilizes and secures Windows apps on any device
- XenDesktop securely delivers virtual Windows desktops and apps on any device
- XenMobile manages and secures mobile, web and SaaS apps on mobile devices
- GoToMeeting empowers people to meet and collaborate with anyone, anywhere
- ShareFile shares and syncs corporate data securely from any location
- NetScaler optimizes and secures app delivery and on any network
- CloudPlatform orchestrates and provisions apps, desktops and IT services from any cloud
OK, OK. We know you have the products but do they really integrate?
Yes. Donât believe me? Well as they say a picture is worth a thousand words. This is what the Mobile Workspace Architecture looks like.
OK. I get it. You have the architecture but that doesnât necessarily translate to a seamless user experience.
Still donât believe huh? Well this is what the user experience looks like.
XenMobile is a key ingredient in delivering a mobile workspace. Along with XenApp and XenDesktop it allows organizations to deliver on giving users access to any app from any device. In fact, if youâre an existing XenApp or XenDesktop customer, XenMobile seamlessly plugs into your existing architecture.
If youâre a XenDesktop or XenApp customer this is what your environment probably looks like.
Now this is what you need to enable EMM for BYO and COPE (Corporate Owned, Personally Enabled) devices and add that MDM, MAM, Secure Email, Secure Data…
Continue reading here!
//Richard
Categories: All, Citrix, CloudBridge, Device Management, Mobility, NetScaler, Networking, Receiver, ShareFile, Storage, StoreFront, VDI-in-a-Box, XenApp, XenDesktop, XenMobile
Android, apps, Architecture, BYO, byod, CIFS, Citrix, Citrix Mobile Workspaces, Collaboration, COPE, DaaS, Data, desktop, Desktops, email, EMM, GoToMeeting, integrated architecture, iOS, Mac, MAM, MCM, MDM, MIM, mobile, Mobile Workspaces, NetScaler, network, os x, Receiver, SAP, Secure, share, ShareFile, SharePoint, Support, Virtual, windows, XenApp, XenDesktop, XenMobile
#Nutanix – the ultimate Virtual Computing Platform for VDI – CBRC-like Functionality For Any #VDI Solution with #Nutanix – #IaaS – via @andreleibovici
February 3, 2014
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It’s really great to see the capabilities of the Nutanix platform! Just read this great blog post by @andreleibovici around Content Based Read Cache (CBRC) and how this isn’t necessary at all on a platform like Nutanix!
Conclusion
Overtime I will discuss more about the technology behind Content and Extent Caches. For now what is important to know is that Nutanix provides a better in-memory microsecond latency benefits provided by CBRC for any VDI solution on any of the aforementioned hypervizors, for both Linked and Full-Clones. In fact, Nutanix engineers even recommend Horizon View administrators to disable CBRC because the Nutanix approach is less costly to the overall infrastructure.
It is amazing when your world turns upside down and a technology that used to be awesome becomes mostly irrelevant. It amazes me how fast technology evolves and help organizations to achieve better performance and lower OPEX.
Â
For a long time I have discussed the benefits of CBRC (Content Based Read Cache) available with Horizon View 5.1 onwards, allowing Administrators to drastically cut-down on read IO operations, offloading the storage infrastructure and providing greater end-user experience.
Â
Here are few of the blog posts I wrote on CBRC technology: Understanding CBRC (Content Based Read Cache), Understanding CBRC â RecomputeDigest Method, Sizing for VMware View Storage Accelerator (CBRC), View Storage Accelerator Performance Benchmark, CBRC and Local Mode in VMware View 5.1, View Storage Accelerator (CBRC) Hashing Function.
Â
CBRC helps to address some of the performance bottlenecks and the increase of storage cost for VDI. CBRC is a 100% host-based RAM-Based caching solution that helps to reduce read IOs issued to the storage subsystem and thus improves scalability of the storage subsystem while being completely transparent to the guest OS. However, CBRC comes at a cost.
Â
When the View Storage Accelerator feature (CBRC) is enabled, a per-VMDK digest file is created to store hash information about the VMDK blocks. The estimated size of each digest file is roughly:
- 5 MB per GB of the VMDK size [hash-collision detection turned-off (Default)]
- 12 MB per GB of the VMDK size [hash-collision detection turned-on]
The digest file creation for a large replica disk can take a large amount of time and a bulky quantity of IOPS, therefore itâs is recommendable not to run the operation, create new desktop pools, or recompose existing pools during production hours.
CBRC also uses a RAM to manage the cached disk blocks. The per-VMDK digest file is also loaded into memory. That is the reason why CBRC should not be enabled under memory-overcommit environments. If a host is memory over-committed and CBRC is enabled â the memory pressure is increased as CBRC also uses memory for the cache. In such cases, the host could experience increased swapping and the overall host performance could be impacted.
Whilst I wrote about CBRC benefits, I also received numerous negative comments about the technology, including lack of support for full-clone desktops, being unsupported for layering tools like Unidesk, and taking too long to generate new hashes for every replica.
CBRC is a platform feature (vSphere), however it is only enabled and available via Horizon View. Other VDI products such as XenDesktop or vWorkspace cannot utilize the feature.
Nutanix suppress the need for CBCR, providing similar functionality to any VDI solution running on top of vSphere, Hyper-V or KVM. Nutanix has a de-duplication engine built into the solution that works real-time for data stored in DRAM and Flash.
Â
Content Cache (Dynamic Read cache) Read more…
Nutanix NX-3000 review: Virtualization cloud-style – #Nutanix, #IaaS
January 29, 2014
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A great review of the Nutanix Virtual Computing Platform! đ
What do you get when you combine four independent servers, lots of memory, standard SATA disks and SSD, 10Gb networking, and custom software in a single box? In this instance, the answer would be a Nutanix NX-3000. Pigeonholing the Nutanix product into a traditional category is another riddle altogether. While the company refers to each unit it sells as an “appliance,” it really is a clustered combination of four individual servers and direct-attached storage that brings shared storage right into the box, eliminating the need for a back-end SAN or NAS.
I was recently given the opportunity to go hands on with a Nutanix NX-3000, the four nodes of which were running version 3.5.1 of the Nutanix operating system. It’s important to point out that the Nutanix platform handles clustering and file replication independent of any hosted virtualization system. Thus, a Nutanix cluster will automatically handle node, disk, and network failures while providing I/O at the speed of local disk — and using local SSD to accelerate access to the most frequently used data. Nutanix systems support the VMware vSphere and Microsoft Hyper-V hypervisors, as well as KVM for Linux-based workloads.
[ The Nutanix NX-3000 is an InfoWorld 2014 Technology of the Year Award winner. Read about the other winning products in our slideshow, “InfoWorld’s 2014 Technology of the Year Award winners.” | For quick, smart takes on the news you’ll be talking about, check out InfoWorld TechBrief — subscribe today. ]
Nutanix was founded by experienced data center architects and engineers from the likes of Google, Facebook, and Yahoo. That background brings with it a keen sense of what makes a good distributed system and what software pieces are necessary to build a scalable, high-performance product. A heavy dose of innovation and ingenuity shows up in a sophisticated set of distributed cluster management services, which eliminate any single point of failure, and in features like disk block fingerprinting, which leverages a special Intel instruction set (for computing an SHA-1 hash) to perform data deduplication and to ensure data integrity and redundancy.
A Nutanix cluster starts at one appliance (technically three nodes, allowing for the failure of one node) and scales out to any number of nodes. The NDFS (Nutanix Distributed File System) provides a single store for all of your VMs, handling all disk and I/O load balancing and eliminating the need to use virtualization platform features like VMware’s Storage DRS. Otherwise, you manage your VMs no differently than you would on any other infrastructure, using VMware’s or Microsoft’s native management tools.
Nutanix architecture
The hardware behind the NX-3000 comes from SuperMicro. Apart from the fact that it squeezes four dual-processor server blades inside one 2U box, it isn’t anything special. All of the magic is in the software. Nutanix uses a combination of open source software, such as Apache Cassandra and ZooKeeper, plus a bevy of in-house developed tools. Nutanix built cluster configuration management services on ZooKeeper and heavily modified Cassandra for use as the primary object store for the cluster.
| Test Center Scorecard | |||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Â |  |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
| Â | 20% | 20% | 20% | 20% | 10% | 10% | Â |
| Nutanix NX-3000 Series | 10 | 9 | 10 | 9 | 9 | 8 |
9.3Â EXCELLENT
 |
Continue reading here!
//Richard
Categories: All, Cloud, Hyper-V, Infrastructure, Nutanix, OpenStack
availability, built, computing, facebook, Google, Hyper-V, independent servers, KVM, Microsoft, NS, Nutanix, performance, Platform, scalability, Test, Virtual, VMWare, Yahoo
#Nutanix Triumphs at V3 Technology Awards 2013 for Best Virtualisation Product – #IaaS
December 4, 2013
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This is great! A great product takes another award!!! đ
V3 Readers Award Nutanix with Prestigious Industry Recognition in Highly Competitive Category
Nutanix also won the Best of VMworld 2013 Gold Award for Private Cloud Computing!
LONDON, December 3, 2013 â Nutanix, the leading provider of hyper-efficient, massively scalable and elegantly simple datacentre infrastructure solutions, has been awarded for its continuing innovation in optimising datacentre infrastructure at the V3 Technology Awards 2013. During a ceremony at the Waldorf Hilton Hotel, the company was awarded Best Virtualisation product, beating a host of well respected and larger, more established organisations in the virtualisation market.
V3.co.uk is a leading source of news and analysis for technology professionals, written by a team of expert IT journalists in the UK and Silicon Valley. The awards were hotly contested this year, with more than 450 entries from 150 companies.
âItâs great to see a new company like Nutanix being recognised at the V3 Technology Awards, among the industry giants. It wasnât an easy task whittling down the hundreds of entries to create the shortlist, and then V3 readers voted in their thousands for their favourites, making this a significant achievement and a well-deserved win. Well done Nutanix!â said Madeline Bennett, Editor, V3 and The INQUIRER.
Alan Campbell, Regional Director of Western Europe at Nutanix, commented on the success: âNutanix is a company that is constantly innovating and striving to provide the best platform for its customers, so this recognition by a highly respected publication is a testament to the hard work of our team. Virtualisation is a rapidly evolving technology which we are proud to be at the forefront of and to receive an award in the UK, a key market for us, is an honour.
As the fastest growing enterprise…
Continue reading here!
//Richard
Categories: All, Cloud, Nutanix, Storage
Architecture, award, Award Nutanix, Citrix, compute, converged, datacenter, enterprise, flash, HDD, IaaS, Innovation, Nutanix, Private Cloud Computing, scalable, SSD, storage, V3, V3 Technology Awards, Virtual, virtualisation, virtualization, VMWare, XenDesktop
New #Nutanix Platforms for Graphics, Performance and Economical Storage – #IaaS, #XenDesktop, #BYOD, #NVIDIA
November 21, 2013
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This is really cool!!! Great job as usual Nutanix!!
and Economical Storage
Enterprises continue to embrace converged scale-out architectures to make their datacenters simpler and easier to manage. Nutanixâthe leader in converged infrastructureâbrings these benefits to all parts of enterprise IT, providing the flexibility and power to run any virtual workload within a single infrastructure. Nutanix has added several new products to its family of Virtual Computing Platforms:
NX-7000 series platform for
powering graphics intensive users
Virtual desktop computing has become mainstream in all size organizations, and throughout all industries. Despite its successful and pervasive enterprise deployment, virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) has been unable to deliver many graphics-intensive applications and services with the same level of performance as when running on physical workstations.
To address this need, Nutanix has partnered with NVIDIA and Teradici to broaden its VDI portfolio, and integrate cutting edge acceleration for graphics rich desktops. The NX-7110 supports configurations with both NVIDIA GRID K1Â
and K2 GPU technology, as well as Teradici PCoIP APEX cards. The Nutanix Virtual Computing Platform is the industryâs first converged infrastructure to support every type of VDI user, from task and knowledge workers to power and data scientists. Leveraging VMwareâs SVGA driver technology along with NVIDIA GRID, the NX-7000 supports multiple rendering models, including Soft 3D, vSGA and vDGA.
Existing Nutanix environments can dynamically deploy NX-7110 appliances into a unified cluster that is centrally managed, while maintaining graphics intensive users in a separate desktop pool. Additional benefits include the delivery of maximum compatibility and portability to any user. For the first time, organizations have the confidence to move away from more expensive and rigid physical workstations, and virtualize their entire portfolio of desktops. The NX-7110 is now generally available.
Â
NX-6020 delivers more economical
data storage
The NX-6020 supports VMs with very large datasets, such as SQL databases, big dataÂ
analytics projects and VDI deployments with full clones. It provides a 25% increase in available capacity. With both in-line and post-pr
ocess compression, it delivers between 42TB and 68TB of effective capacity in a space-efficient 2U platform. In addition, Nutanix has focused on cost-reducing other components within the appliance delivering a more economical data storage solution.
Â
NX-3000/6000 series gets more powerful CPUs for 30% faster performance
Nutanix has updated the existing NX-3000 and NX-6000 product families with four new platforms featuring Intelâs Ivy Bridge server CPUs. As a 100% software-defined solution, Nutanix Virtual Computing Platform can rapidly adopt new technologies.
These new appliances benefit from 25% more CPU cores, faster clock speeds and a reduced power profile. This translates to a 30% increase in performance for VMs running on Nutanix, as well as support for higher VM densities. Each of these new platforms can be seamlessly added to any existing Nutanix cluster to immediately take advantage of the most advanced CPU technologies.
Read more here!
//Richard
Categories: All, Nutanix, Storage
6020, 7000, Architecture, compute, datacenter, enterprise, GPU, grid, Infrastructure, Nutanix, nvidia, NVIDIA GRID, NX, performance, Platform, reference, scale-out, series, splunk, storage, TB, teradici, VDI, Virtual, virtual computing platform, Virtual Computing Platforms, virtual desktop infrastructure
Under the Covers of a Distributed Virtual Computing Platform â Built For Scale and Agility – via @dlink7, #Nutanix
November 21, 2013
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I must say that Dwayne did a great job with this blog post series!! It goes into expelling the Nutanix Distributed File System (NDFS) that I must say is the most amazing enterprise product out there if you need a truly scalable and agile Compute and Storage platform! I advise you to read this series!!
Under the Covers of a Distributed Virtual Computing Platform â Part 1: Built For Scale and Agility
Lots of talk in the industry about how had software defined storage first and who was using what components. I donât want to go down that rat hole since itâs all marketing and it wonât help you at the end of the day to enable your business. I want to really get into the nitty gritty of the Nutanix Distributed Files System(NDFS). NDFS has been in production for over a year and half with good success, take read of the article on the Wall Street Journal.
Below are core services and components that make NDFS tick. There are actually over 13 services, for example our replication is distributed across all the nodes to provide speed and low impact on the system. The replication service is called Cerebro which we will get to in this series.
Â
This isnât some home grown science experiment, the engineers that wrote the code come from Google, Facebook, Yahoo where this components where invented. Itâs important to realize that all components are replaceable or future proofed if you will. The services\libraries provide the APIâs so as newest innovations happen in the community, Nutanix is positioned to take advantage.
All the services mentioned above run on multiple nodes in cluster a master-less fashion to provide availability. The nodes talk over 10 GbE and are able to scale in a linear fashion. There is no performance degradation as you add nodes. Other vendors have to use InfiniBand because they donât share the metadata cross all of the nodes. Those vendors end up putting a full copy of the metadata on each node, this eventually will cause them to hit a performance cliff and the scaling stops. Each Nutanix node acts a storage controller allowing you to do things like have a datastore of 10,000 VMâs without any performance impact… continue reading part 1 here.Â
Under the Covers of a Distributed Virtual Computing Platform â Part 2: ZZ Top
In case you missed Part 1 â Part 1: Built For Scale and Agility
No itâs not Billy Gibbons, Dusty Hill, or drummer Frank Beard. Itâs Zeus and Zookeeper providing the strong blues that allow the Nutanix Distributed File System to maintain itâs configuration across the entire cluster. Read more…
Categories: All, Infrastructure, Nutanix, Storage
agility, amazing enterprise, Apache, availability, Cassandra, cluster configuration, community, controller, Curator, disk, DRAC, ESXi, facebook, flash, Google, Hadoop, IaaS, ILO, IP, IPMI, Medusa, NDFS, Nutanix, Nutanix Distributed File System, oplog, performance, Prism, REST-API, SAN, scalability, scale, scale-out, Stargate, Stats, vDisk, Virtual, virtual computing platform, Wall Street, workloads, Yahoo, Zookeeper
There was a big flash, and then the dinosaurs died – via @binnygill, #Nutanix
November 15, 2013
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Great blog post by @binnygill! đ
This is how it was supposed to end. The legacy SAN and NAS vendors finally realize that Flash is fundamentally different from HDDs. Even after a decade of efforts to completely assimilate Flash into the legacy architectures of the SAN/NAS era, itâs now clear that new architectures are required to support Flash arrays. The excitement around all-flash arrays is a testament to how different Flash is from HDDs, and its ultimate importance to datacenters.
Consider what happened in the datacenter two decades ago: HDDs were moved out of networked computers, and SAN and NAS were born. What is more interesting, however, is what was not relocated.
Although it was feasible to move DRAM out with technology similar to RDMA, it did not make sense. Why move a low latency, high throughput component across a networking fabric, which would inevitably become a bottleneck?
Today Flash is forcing datacenter architects to revisit this same decision. Fast near-DRAM-speed storage is a reality today. SAN and NAS vendors have attempted to provide that same goodness in the legacy architectures, but have failed. The last ditch effort is to create special-purpose architectures that bundle flash into arrays, and connect it to a bunch of servers. If that is really a good idea, then why donât we also pool DRAM in that fashion and share with all servers? This last stand will be a very short lived one. What is becoming increasingly apparent is that Flash belongs on the server â just like DRAM.
For example, consider a single Fusion-IO flash card that writes at 2.5GB/s throughput and supports 1,100,000 IOPS with just 15 microsec latency (http://www.fusionio.com/products/iodrive2-duo/). You can realize these speeds by attaching the card to your server and throwing your workload at it. If you put 10 of these cards in a 2U-3U storage controller, should you expect 25GB/s streaming writes, and 11 million IOPS at sub millisecond latencies. To my knowledge no storage controller can do that today, and for good reasons.
Networked storage has the overhead of networking protocols. Protocols like NFS and iSCSI are not designed for massive parallelism, and end up creating bottlenecks that make crossing a few million IOPS on a single datastore an extremely hard computer science problem. Further, if an all-flash array is servicing ten servers, then the networking prowess of the all-flash array should be 10X of that of each server, or else we end up artificially limiting the bandwidth that each server can get based on how the storage array is shared.
No networking technology, whether it be Infiniband, Ethernet, or fibre channel can beat the price and performance of locally-attached PCIe, or even that of a locally-attached SATA controller. Placing flash devices that operate at almost DRAM speeds outside of the server requires unnecessary investment in high-end networking. Eventually, as flash becomes faster, the cost of a speed-matched network will become unbearable, and the datacenter will gravitate towards locally-attached flash â both for technological reasons, as well as for sustainable economics.
The right way to utilize flash is to treat it as one would treat DRAM â place it on the server where it belongs. The charts below illustrate the dramatic speed up from server-attached flash.
Continue reading here!
//Richard
The IT Melting Pot! 