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
Howard Marks
What do you folks think about data locality? If the same group of servers are doing compute and storage should the data for a VM be on the server where that VM is running? or is that adding complexity?
David Nicholson
It is a trade off. Parallelism can be powerful. Compromise is an ability to create "domains" and "pick your media/connectivity".
Ed Beauvais
Generally speaking, data is sticker, and moving the compute or having it co-resident is an advantage that #serversan has. added benefits are also reduced latency
Howard Marks some of the products do locality and others don't. Which has lower latency and net traffic? We'll have to see.
Jeff Frick
@dfloyer -> Part of David Floyer's Mega Data Center story.
John F. Kim Not to be confused with BMW's Mega City (i3) story
Rodger Burkley
Why would you want that in a virtualized server San fabric? What about VM migrations to other physical hosts?
Chris Wilson
Ideally you'd like it close but the devil will be in the detail. What happens when you want to replace a node(s)....
Chuck Hollis
We go back and forth. For some apps (e.g. Hadoop), the benefit could be worthwhile. For others, not so clear. And then there is the complexity factor.
Jesse St. Laurent
It is almost always easier to move the VM than the data. A few GB of vRAM vs. 100s of GB of data
Barry Ader
then the system needs to be smart enough to handle that in a resilient elegant manner
Jesse St. Laurent
The admin should not need to know or care. The system should simply make this decision.
Kevin Deierling
The really interesting aspect of ServerSAN in virtualized environment is that compute and storage are now co-equal. They can be collapsed or distributed. That is data moves to the compute node or vice versa - whichever is faster.
Brian Sorby
Bingo! And applications and storage are closer to the CPU. Cutting out the middleman and SAN tax is also key
Jeff Frick Even at the speed of light, latency raises its ugly head
Jeff Frick
continuing the trend of increasing control by isolating, scaling parts
Enrico Signoretti
@daven007 I'm not a IB fan at the front-end (I like it in the backend of commodity storage). But, If I'm not wrong, 56GB IB is cheaper than 40GB eth... (and it's too much for 99,9% of the cases anyway)
Gabriel Chapman
thats 40GbE port adoption will eclipse IB in short order, more vendors will offer it
John F. Kim
You are not wrong... FDR 56Gb InfiniBand has better price performance and network effiiciency than 40Gb Ethernet, but 40GbE with RoCE is pretty damn fast too.
Gunnar Berger
Question for VARs: I see the ServerSAN as an enabler to a simpler datacenter. For VARs this could be bad as complexity increases service fees. I often wonder how the mighty dollar works against a simpler solution
Scott D. Lowe
Speaking as a former CIO: Simplicity good. Increased service fees bad. :-)
Gunnar Berger Agreed, end user customers would like this, which is why I asked for a VAR. Most of my experience is as a VAR and when a sales guy makes more selling X, they will try and sell it.
John F. Kim
VARs like both more service fees from complexity *and* simple easy solutions to increase deal velocity. Okay, maybe not always the same VAR liking both.
Stuart Miniman
the value chain is always flexible - if VAR is making $ for not adding value they need to reevaluate skill set and solution development.
Jesse St. Laurent I agree. The channel is in the process of reinventing itself right now. The best ones embrace compelling technology and take the opportunity to move their value up the stack.
Scott D. Lowe
Honestly, I think VARs in some cases are going to need to reinvent. Between this and things like O365 (i.e. MS reducing shared profits), the model is not turning in their favor.
John Furrier
I see this a huge opportunity for VARS to add value in services esp in light of hybrid cloud and big data plans coming together
Enrico Signoretti
@tier1storage Latency could be a serious problem, in certain situations Infiniband could be better. but I'm not sure that enterprises like infiniband anymore...
Jesse St. Laurent
I do not see customers with IB infrastructure. Even small customers are moving to 10GbE
John F. Kim If they have certain scale-out storage products or database appliances, they already have InfiniBand in the data center.
Enrico Signoretti Yep! 10GbE is getting cheaper and cheaper. Servers are shipped with 10GbE ports now at the same price (or very similar price).
Enrico Signoretti I agree that 10GbE is the present and 40GbE is the future. Eth won years ago.
Dave Vellante
Larry loves infinband! :-)
Enrico Signoretti larry loves catamarans too but they are not in the DCs. In any case, they use infiniband primarly in the backend (which I like a lot!)
John F. Kim I wonder if Larry's yacht has its own InfiniBand network. If not, will look into fixing that.
Gabriel Chapman
not enough diversity in vendors in the IB space to make it competitive for average customer, Eth is cheap in comparison
Jeff Frick -> "Bacon is for Closers" - I like that.
Howard Marks
Enterprises don't like IB. But today's 10/40/100Gbs Ethernet is under 2us latency so good enough. Especially with RoCE
Jesse St. Laurent Competing with "good enough" is very difficult. Competing with Ethernet is a recipe for going of business
David Nicholson
If #serversan is about driving out cost and complexity, then IB needs to be cheap and easy to play.
Scott D. Lowe
I think we're just seeing the very beginnings here of what we can do with this stuff. I see a primary goal as simplifying the data center. Any CIOs out there want to comment on this?
Stuart Miniman
I see some networking people @Tier1Storage - care to comment about advances in low latency networking that can enable this architecture?
Dave Vellante
yeah how do all these distributed nodes communicate and stay coherent?
Jesse St. Laurent That is the hard part
Kevin Deierling With 40GbE or 56G InfiniBand this is easy!
Kevin Deierling
RoCE (RDMA over Converged Ethernet) is being used for Storage
Kevin Deierling
Satya Nadella showed 10X VM migration improvement @ MS Teched
John Furrier great point about Nadella he's going to be a good CEO for the product revamp/tweaks at msft expect some cloud mojo and infra mojo to come forth
Enrico Signoretti
@stu Sure, most of them can but think about 10Gbe and then think about your legacy Unix server. it probably has good FC stack but not very optimized iSCSI implementation...
Dave Vellante
Don't forget to vote...the best posts will float to the top
John F. Kim
I get only one vote, right?
Stuart Miniman one vote per post, so vote early and often
Dave Vellante
Does anyone have an opinion on how/if the security model is impacted by server-san -- what are the implications?
Enrico Signoretti
Good point, but it should not happen with the correct design. isolation is not difficult to achieve.
Scott D. Lowe
I see potential for improving security in some cases. Storage is certainly more isolated in these models (ie. accessible only to the hosts and not available from elsewhere)
Scott D. Lowe
But that, too, is dependent on the solution.
Ed Beauvais
Security w/software defined architectures provide more flexibility, enabling isolation and multi tenancy, both important considerations for large enterprises and Service Providers
Scott D. Lowe The software nature seems like it could be more resilient to security issues, too... more easily patchable.
David Nicholson
Software Defined Security will address any issues. I am only half-joking. We have more abstraction/virtualization to deal with. Threats that dwell need to be ferreted out with analytics. Not good enough to build a wall. P or V.