Chad Sakac is a very dynamic EMC executive with a reputation in the industry of being highly knowledgeable, technical, and innovative professional. He talked about the next steps in Software defined storage in the session INF1864 and I was right there to capture some key information to expand on my Storage Architecture knowledge.
He started off his talk by highlighting a few things and then spoke about the upcoming new technologies.
What is software defined
- Decoupling and abstracting control and policy from physical stuff that does the work
- Where the physical stuff that does work (data plane) can be software on commodity hardware – e.g. VSAN, VASA
- Programmable infrastructure APIs: automate everything
Four ‘Data Plane’ architectures
- Clustered Scale Up & Down e.g. Nimble, VNX, Nexenta
- Tightly Coupled Scale out clusters – e.g. Hitachi, 3Par
- Loosely Coupled Scale out -e.g. vSAN, ScaleIO, Nutanix, Simplivity
- Distributed share nothing e.g Swift, AWS S3
What to expect next
- SDS control planes maturing
- VVOL
- ViPR 2.0
- Cinder
- SDS data services moving to real world use
- Some Data Services become ‘features’
- Acceleration of ‘Old App’ Hyper-Converged Stacks
- Acceleration of ‘New App’ Hyper-Converged Stacks
VVOL EMC update
- VNXe3200 will be first to to use VVOL
- VMAX3 will be right behind VNXe
- VPLEX will support VVOLs (for VERY async vMotion)
- ViPR Controller will support VVOL control
- XtremIO will support VVOL
- ScaleIO will support VVOL
- VNX will get VVOL through same path as VNXe
- C4 – storage containerization that is adopted by VNX as a codestack. Used by entire VNX family
If you are testing the vSphere 6 beta release and trying out VVOLs then feel free to forward any feedback to veena.joshi@emc.com
Now EMC offers ScaleIO as a vCenter plugin to quickly deploy it. The plugin automatically goes through and deploys nodes and clients to access the underlying storage after some regular configuration stpes.
If you need to store stuff beyond VMDK’s then you can use ScaleIO vs vSAN (since a lot of people are thinking its the same as vSAN)
RecoverPoint for VMs
download fully functional EMC recover point at no charge with no time limit – October 2014.
For image archive- An S3 compliant datastore is the best option to store data
‘Phoenix’ Server Hardware – designed for EVO Rail – It is the only server that EMC sells and since it is not in the server business there is usually not much discussion around it.
It is a 2U server with internal disk and you can google it for more details.
Big Trends
- Increasing application diversity
- World of how apps run is geting more diverse
- SDS + commodity HW is awesome and belongs in many places but tightly coupled architectures will bias to appliance
The session ran slightly over time (Chad is so passionate while talking and takes questions so his sessions usually tend to go long) and we just glimpsed through the last slide.