serversan

Scalable Infrastructure
Chat with thought leaders, analysts, and customers on new server/storage architecture
   9 years ago
#ServerSanHyperconverged InfrastructureSharing new Wikibon Server SAN research and interactive Q&A
Enrico Signoretti
on the other hand serverSAN works at best with modern scale-out architectures. The server has to be the storage, the computer and the network to take full advantage. serving legacy stuff doesn't have the same benefits.
Brian Sorby
this is the paradigm shift. Allowing servers to serve...everything.
Rodger Burkley
This reminds me of the old mainframe and minicomputer days...the world is round (or flat) indeed.
Howard Marks The whole converged infrastructure model does remind me of the mini days when everything came from DEC
John F. Kim Yes (@Howard) but now you can buy complete stack from Oracle, Teradata, VCE Vblock, Nutanix, etc. Minus the printers.
David Nicholson I'm gonna pretend I don't know what those things are. I just had a birthday.
Stuart Miniman @Tier1Storage how about a 3D printer with the stack ;)
Jeff Frick
I am quoting @heidigro http://twitter.com/heidigro/status/431118816089612288
heidigro
RT @stu: @DeepStorageNet agreed - I see SDN as tangential. Server interconnect will be at the edge of any S... #serversan via https://t.co/
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Chris Wilson
Any features still missing compared to traditional arrays? distance replication / snapshots etc. reliant on higher level sw for this?
Dave Vellante
Great question chris - have to believe the stack is nowhere near as mature as a 20YO array's function - but would think innovation will happen fast
Jesse St. Laurent If you start with a clean slate and build the right core, it is amazing how much easier it is to bring new features to market. The 20YO+ products have 20 years of baggage.
Barry Ader
of course. But many of the solutions are adding those features very quickly.
David Nicholson
As a general rul #serversan lags behind the 25 + years of development that is part of modern arrays
Stuart Miniman
interesting point is - Server SAN should NOT necessarily require the same amount of functionality as a traditional array, rather new architectures and sw can do it differently
Scott D. Lowe Agreed. But features are always being added.
Jesse St. Laurent
It depends on the platform. Not in the @SimpliVityCorp platform. Inline dedupe, compression, replication, backup to the cloud, VM centric policy, etc.
David Nicholson
But the gap will close quickly
Howard Marks
Since these products are all in their early releases some have any given feature but few have all
John F. Kim
Most of these features will be added to Server SAN over time if not already there. Maybe biggest missing link is ability to add app servers without running Server SAN software on them?
Jesse St. Laurent Some of the Server SAN products offer that today
Jesse St. Laurent It is a critical feature you you want to truly decouple the scalability of CPU, memory, storage performance, and storage capacity.
David Nicholson Actually some allow that flexibility. Sometimes "patch tuesday" or "Oracle licensing" make this a requirement.
Howard Marks
Which of course begs the question where should services like snapshots and replication be provided. If hypervisors had good snaps and replication it would be a real argument
Chris Wilson Exactly :) Just trying to get my head around how this would all hang together compared to the solutions we deploy today
Noam Shendar
Great #ServerSAN discussion but I have to run! Thanks everyone.
Stuart Miniman
thanks for joining!
Kevin Deierling
How does server-san handle network virtualization? Needs a interconnect that is Overlay Aware?
Gunnar Berger
I have no idea :) but network virtualization seems like a reason to like the serverSAN more, its yet another thing that it can run becuase its just x86 and a hypervisor
Howard Marks
Most of the ServerSAN products just require bandwidth not SDN or overlays.
Stuart Miniman agreed - I see SDN as tangential. Server interconnect will be at the edge of any SDN deployment. Virtual networking is important...
John F. Kim Yes, but some scale-out storage products use both bandwidth and RDMA to cluster the storage nodes, even if they are not Server SAN
Scott D. Lowe
The existing products consume network, but don't actively manage it much... yet.
Scott D. Lowe
But I definitely see a future in which this is pulled into the environment as well
Kendrick Coleman agree. i would like to see a convergence solution that just daisy chains. no need for a backend switch.
Barry Ader
One of the key things that #ServerSAN gives you is elasticity. The ability to easily grow the "SAN" by simply adding more compute and/or storage on the fly
Jesse St. Laurent
The idea of data migration is often overlooked. Customers are telling me they spend 3+ months rolling in new storage and another 3 rolling it out. Scale out / scale in without a manual migration is a BIG deal
Howard Marks
At today's level of sophistication I'm kinda doubious that I really want 100 servers running storage software across them rather than 2-3 TinTris. What's going to be easier to manage?
Barry Ader
agreed. Also capacity planning becomes much less of an issue You no longer need to plan years in advance for how much storage you need
Enrico Signoretti
So, to recap. ServerSAN is enabled by CPU Power+10Gbe+efficient software+Flash. I would like to add "strong integration with S.O or Hypervisor"
Rodger Burkley
Yes...but do not forget the advanced software algorithms and trick meta data manipulations, etc. We've had CPU power and 10 10Gbe (and Infiniband) for some time. Flash also must be considered too, as you say.
Stuart Miniman
some solutions can work across physical and virtual environments - flexibility is a good thing
Enrico Signoretti
@NoamShen totally agree. but some solutions aren't efficient enough today to manage all the RAID calculations.
Noam Shendar
Moore's law takes care of that very quickly
Rodger Burkley
Right...so advanced features like inline dedupe or analytics can be added to the Server San layer
Rodger Burkley
One also has to wonder about Server SAN's ability to handle all the I/Os + compute without inducing latencies and perf degradations too...\
John F. Kim Having a high-bandwidth, low-latency interconnect is critical as the number of Server SAN nodes increases.
David Floyer
Server SAN has an additional benefit over traditional SAN - processing power can be moved to the data as well as the traditional model of moving the data to the processors. This gives potential flexibility of application design and fungibility of resources
Howard Marks
I think as we start talking about applications integration into the software storage layer we're getting into that hyperscale 1 architect across the entire infrastructure. Mortals buy apps that need standard interfaces
David Floyer Howard - True, it starts as standard interfaces. However, I would expect database systems (including Hadoop) to be able to take advantage of Server SAN architecture early on. The vendors will need to develop the capabilities for hyperscale.
Howard Marks
In terms of interfaces I'm looking most forward to T10 standardizing Atomic-write and having that pass on to the storage system, Full VAAI/ODX support for per-VM snapshots too,
Enrico Signoretti
@JesseStLaurent 10Gb+Flash but efficient software as well. w/out all the three components it's quite impossibile to have a good architecture.
Noam Shendar
Yep. Careful software optimization of the datapath is a must (and a lot of work)
Jesse St. Laurent
We can not ignore the impact of ever faster Intel CPUs either
David Nicholson
and 40Gb for some applications
Enrico Signoretti 40GB at the node level is too much at the moment. But I agree that some vertical like HPC can take the maximum advantage from that
David Nicholson
40g for selected nodes can make sense even today
Rodger Burkley
Also, Server SAN's lay the groundwork for taking advantage of non-Von Neuman compute architectures and true parallel processing...some day...
Rodger Burkley
Perhaps server San term relies implies/assumes or requires some degree of 'intelligent software management' of the stack. That's the secret sauce and key enabler...regardless of whether the SFW is tied to an appliance or server or whatever.