VSAN & HYPERCONVERGENCE THE DATA CENTER OF THE FUTURE

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www.virtualizationsoftware.comwww.enterprisestorageguide.comwww.petri.co.il

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CHALLENGES FACING TODAY’S DATA CENTER

Increasing complexity

Increasing costs

Need for more flexibility

Resource silos Do you remember why we converged storage in the first place?

Increased demands on admin time

THE RENEWED FOCUS ON STORAGE

Storage used to be a pretty boring place The release of 15K RPM drives might have been the event of the early 2000’s

Storage challenges become real and significant “Throwing hardware at the problem” became a common solution to storage performance

challenges

The “I/O blender” came into being as organizations virtualized more and bigger workloads Inefficient storage operations (i.e. random writes to rotational storage

Lack of opportunity to apply management/quality of service to storage operations

New virtualization use cases – i.e. VDI, big data – exacerbated the storage performance issue

CONVERGENCE OF META IT TRENDS

Continually “doing more with less” and tight budgets Rethink data center economics

The rise of software Leverage the power of today’s processing behemoths

Emergence of the commoditization movement Replace custom hardware with powerful software

CONVERGENCE OF META IT TRENDSCIOs and CxOs that want IT more focused on outcomes

Focus on the business rather than bits and bytes

Eliminate complexity whenever possible

Less tolerance for data center related issues, including performance issues

Cloud scale infrastructure concepts moving to the enterprise Modern enterprises need new scaling opportunities that don’t

break the bank

DATA CENTER ECONOMICS

Initial investment Often based on projected needs

for next three to five years

Significant “zero return on investment” zone

Year 1 Year 2 Year 3 Year 4 Year 5

Load Purchased capacity

DATA CENTER ECONOMICS

Storage Team Network Team Server Team Data CenterTeam

Data center resource silos result in inefficiency in a lot of ways

Breaking down these silos can result in major efficiency and economic gains

COMMODITIZATION

Thank you, Intel! x86 reigns supreme

Tons of processing power for reasonable prices – particularly for mainstream products

Plenty of processor to handle new kinds of tasks

COMMODITIZATION

New ways of thinking Throw away specialized hardware when possible

Build software that replaces hardware functions

Not all hardware is bad, though

Assume that the hardware can and will fail Develop software constructs to handle failure domains

Buy cheap hardware and work around these items

CLOUD SCALE COMPUTING

Scalability Think big while also thinking small

The story of the $30,000 phone

Scale is vastly different for everyone

Ensure ongoing resource scalability – linear

Ensure reliability at scale

Scale with software

A FEW OTHER TRENDS

Software defined everything Factory-defined nothing

All brains and configuration reside in flexible software

Flash storage/solid state storage Helping to eliminate performance questions from the storage

equation

Hypervisor commoditization

CONVERGENCE SIMPLIFICATION

Convergence isn’t a new concept i.e. Ethernet, Fiber Channel FCoE

Convergence is about simplification and reducing costs

Right-size provisioning

CONVERGENCE IN A NUTSHELL

Reference architectures Still require a go-it-alone approach in a lot of cases

Macro level convergence Vblock, etc.

Often a high cost of entry

Not necessarily economically viable at small scale

Hyperconvergence Step size

The “$30,000 phone”

VSAN

In beta Expected to release in next couple of months

Aggregates host-based storage Requires at least one SSD and one HDD

Scalability Current supports between 3 and 8 nodes worth of storage

VSAN

Solid state storage Not used as a storage tier

70% is used as a read cache

30% is used as a write buffer Caches random writes into sequential I/O patterns that maximize write

performance

VSAN

Obviously, a vSphere-only solutionAt present, VSAN is a build-your-own solutionVMware is actively working with partners to create

packaged solutionsPricing has not yet been announced

NUTANIX

All software all the time – well…Broad hardware selection

Differentiated node type to enable more flexible deployment scenarios

Nutanix Distributed File System Leverages controller VMs on each node to enable linear scalability

A VSA??? The horror!!! Oh, wait…

NUTANIX

Replica-based data protectionDeduplication

But on the SSD storage only at present

Hypervisor agnostic vSphere

Hyper-V

KVM

SCALE COMPUTING

Hyperconvergence for the SMB!Leverages open source KVM hypervisor

Scale has built tools around KVM

Tiny step size = Ultimate granularity Step size: Single six-core processor, 64 GB of

RAM, and between 2.4 TB and 4.8 TB per node\

Up to 8 nodes per cluster = 200 or so VMs

SCALE COMPUTING

Wide striping = Performance with SSDsVirtIO

Per-VM feature

Multiple small write operations are cached

Then committed as a larger, single write operation

Reduces overall disk I/O

SIMPLIVITY OMNICUBE

Sometimes, a hardware cheat can be the perfect answer Overall, leverages commodity hardware

One custom purpose PCI-e card Enables the Data Virtualization Engine

Full system dedupe

Replica-based data protection

SIMPLIVITY OMNICUBE

Flexible storage opportunities Use for Omnicube needs

Can be exposed to external systems Hey! Replace storage for other systems, too!

For now, VMware vSphere support only But…

THANK YOU!

Don’t we have a Lego Death Star to giveaway?