So if you can’t save a few dollars by mixing in white boxes for storage, what is software-defined net-working good for? You might as well just buy a traditional storage area network, right?
Darren Ashley, director of CRN Fast50 reseller BEarena, presents some compelling arguments.
“With a traditional SAN, the performance peaks on day one and it’s all downhill from there,” he says. “Also, the cost of scaling up is terrible. Say you wanted 50TB for the year. But for cost reasons you bought 30TB initially then added 20TB later – well, you end up paying a lot more doing that than just buying 50TB from day one. We’ve always seen that as a frustration.”
For BEarena, the solution is hyper-converged appliances from Nutanix. Such technology provokes fierce debate as to whether it can be considered software-defined storage. But the scalable boxes work for Ashley and his team, who have had tremendous success as an early Nutanix adopter, with clients such as Hyundai to their credit.
Another reason to consider SDS is the rise of mixed media. Flash storage is now well and truly in the mainstream, but the additional cost still means many resellers and end customers would need to have both in their IT environments. With SDS, controls can be put in place to direct certain workloads to flash and other I/Os to spinning disk.
“The [flash] industry would have us believe that customers will shift 100 percent to all flash, but it is not practical due to the costs involved, and the large installed base of storage that must be addressed,” says DataCore’s Teixeira.
“We will need smart software that has the feature stack that can optimise the cost and performance trade-offs and migrate workloads to the right resources needed, whether flash or disk. Software-defined storage done right can help unify the new world of flash with the existing and still-evolving world of disks. Both [of these] have a future.”
Hybrid cloud also presents fertile ground for SDS.
VMware is an example of a vendor that has adapted to this trend. In the past, the company actively discouraged its channel from using Amazon Web Services. But in November, VMware was seen on the exhibition floor of AWS’ re:Invent conference spruiking how its vRealize Suite cloud management product seamlessly deals with the Amazon cloud as well, as its own vCloud Air.
“What has changed during that time? Essentially, VMware has canned the vitriol and decided to position itself as a ‘true’ hybrid cloud provider, according to partners,” reported CRN US at the time.
If VMware can see the light, it won’t be long before your customers do.
It’s worth mentioning that there are parts of the industry that don’t yet “believe” in SDS. US vendor Quantum is an example, with senior vice-president of strategy Janae Stow Lee saying the confusing variations of SDS from different vendors make it more difficult for customers and partners, not easier.
“At a time of increased demands on IT staff and continued budget constraints, it’s unlikely that customers will have or be able to maintain all the skills and expertise to understand – and trade off – the wide variety of IOPS, throughput, latency, cost and durability features different options provide,” she said. “Sometimes flexibility just equals complexity – and that means many software-defined solutions won’t make the cut because they just plain aren’t easy enough to understand.”
For those resellers that do want to experience SDS, some of the major vendors – NetApp (Clustered Data ONTAP) and EMC (VIPR), to name two – are now including access to their software with new hardware sales. Whether the software layer remains as a conventional “single node” controller or if a true SDS is implemented is up to the partner.
Westcon’s Grauman tells us: “It’s time for everyone to dip their toes in the water and give software-defined storage a try. Next time you put in new storage, just put in a virtual layer on top.”
FACTFILE: Hyper-converged
There is considerable debate as to whether hyper-converged boxes such as those from Nutanix and Simplivity can be considered software-defined networking.
Hyper-converged appliances combine storage and compute, with those resources from all the boxes combined by a software layer to act as one large pool. Scaling up or down is a simple matter of plugging more boxes in or taking boxes out.
As a prominent Nutanix reseller, BEarena absolutely considers it a viable storage solution.
“Different models of Nutanix have different ratios of compute and storage,” says director Darren Ashley. “So if your focus is on storage, you get boxes that are geared towards that, and then you have software-defined storage.”
Westcon’s manager of innovation and services, Darryl Grauman, says that hyper-converged devices are excellent in certain situations but can be costly for to implement inside of existing environments.
“They’re not cheap. You pay for compute, storage and integration of the two with hyper-converged devices. So they’re convenient for new ‘greenfield’ set-ups,” Grauman says. “But for a client with existing infrastructure who wants to fill a specific gap, you might end up paying for things that are redundant.”
Storage accelerators such as PernixData are also looking in from the fringes of software-defined storage. PernixData provides a software layer that intelligently directs I/O onto different types of storage to optimise performance. The vendor’s claim to fame is that it can use server RAM as storage – reminiscent of the 1990s IBM-compatible PCs running virtual disk – for lightning-fast performance for apps that need it.
FACTFILE: Storage
CRN’s sister publication, iTnews, has produced The Buyer’s Guide to Primary Storage, an excellent read for those who want a crash course in the world of storage (you can download it at bit.ly/1yxFwzE). Courtesy of the guide, here is a quick run-down of the different categories of storage:
Traditional: The majority of customers buy traditional types of storage. These systems contain Redundant Arrays of Inexpensive Disks (RAID) of mostly spinning disks. They tend to be 7.2k, 10k, and 15k RPM disks, connected with SAS, SATA, or fibre channel connectors for some of the older-style arrays.
Flash: Provides a step-change in low-latency performance. Spinning disk latency is limited by the physics of moving parts: the fastest 15k RPM disk will only give you about 4ms average latency; 2ms for both seek time and rotation delay. Flash, meanwhile, can regularly and consistently achieve well under 1ms latency. There are no moving parts, so you’re limited by a completely different sort of physics, at the electrical and, yes, even atomic level.
Hybrid: An attempt, often successful, to achieve “the best of all possible worlds” in a single device. These products work in unison to combine the capacity and price of spinning media, which is then supplemented by Flash and memory to improve the performance.
Server-SAN: is a term coined by Wikibon to describe the recent practice of putting physical storage inside servers (as was the common place before dedicated storage devices) so that it is closer to the CPU, and aggregating the storage across servers using software.
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