Catching the Software Defined Storage Wave

Copyright © 2014 DataCore Software Corp. – All Rights Reserved.Educational Content for Engineers, by Engineers
Catching the Software-Defined
Storage Wave
Jeff Slapp
DataCore Software

Copyright © 2014 DataCore Software Corp. – All Rights Reserved.
INTRODUCTION
2

 17 years as an IT professional
 15 years working with virtualization technology
 10 years working with DataCore Software in the field
► 5 years as a partner deploying DataCore solutions
worldwide
► 5 years as a customer deploying DataCore
solutions for south Florida cloud service provider
 Now working for DataCore Software as a Technical
Product Specialist
3
Background Info

Copyright © 2014 DataCore Software Corp. – All Rights Reserved. 4
Storage Market in Midst of Disruption
CHALLENGES
 Too many
incompatible
devices
 New software for
every device
 Silos of storage
 Management
Server Storage
1985
NAS
SAN
2000
Server Storage
Hybrid Arrays
Today
NAS SAN
Server Storage
Flash Arrays
Flash
Converged
Systems
Cloud

SOFTWARE-DEFINED STORAGE
OVERVIEW
5

 Leverages any commodity storage hardware platform
 Runs on any commodity server hardware platform
 Unifies disparate storage technologies
 Improves data service availability (i.e. high-availability)
 Improves data access performance
 Pools storage resources (i.e. capacity management and efficiency)
 Automates core storage functions (i.e. data protection)
 Exposes programming interfaces (APIs)
 Allows modification of storage architecture without interruption
Learn More
6
Software-Defined Storage Principles

Software-Defined Storage Virtualization Abstraction
7
Software-Defined Storage Dependencies
View Webinar

ABSTRACTION:
THE FOUNDATION OF
8

What Is Abstraction?
 Hardware abstraction, by way of software, serves to hide the
differences between the underlying hardware and the software
that lives above it.
 The purpose of abstraction is to simplify software development so
that software can execute regardless of the make and model of
hardware.
 The abstraction layer translates generalized software functions
into platform-specific hardware functions, and vice versa. The net-
net of this is a much broader range of hardware the software can
run on without needing to be recompiled.
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Typical Server Abstraction Example

Typical Storage Abstraction Example

 Without abstraction, we remain tightly-coupled with the hardware.
 If we remain tightly-coupled to the hardware, then most of the
benefits of Software-Defined Storage are lost, or at best are
purchased, thrown out, and repurchased with each hardware refresh
cycle… very wasteful.
 It is much more cost effective to purchase the storage intelligence
once, and swap physical disk resources in and out as appropriate for
the storage task at hand.
Watch Webinar
12
Why Is this Important?

THE SOLUTION:
ONE SOFTWARE PLATFORM
13

One Software Platform
for any Storage Hardware
Accelerate
Centralize &
Automate
Pool & Protect

Use Cases for Software-Defined Storage
Virtualize your
existing storage
hardware
Create virtual SANs
with server-attached
storage
Integrate
Flash/SSDs with
existing storage
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Virtualize External Storage Hardware
FUNDAMENTALS OF DATACORE
STORAGE VIRTUALIZATION
 Runs on standard x86 servers
 One set of common storage services
for all storage devices
 All storage capacity in a single pool
eliminating wasted capacity
 Unlike storage systems communicate
seamlessly reducing complexity and
preventing downtime
 Replicates data leaving
no single point of failure
 Seamless scalability with no reason to commit
to a single hardware manufacturer
16

Easy Integration and Sharing of Flash Storage
Flash Cards in
DataCore nodes
Flash Arrays in
storage pool
Flash Cards
in Virtual SAN
17
 Share Flash between
servers and applications
 Minimize downtime and
risk of integration
 Complete set of
storage services
 Block level auto-tiering
 Easily add Flash anytime
 Realistic path to all Flash
environments

REAL WORLD EXAMPLES OF
IN ACTION
18

 Environment A has been in service for two years.
 The IT Director has been given a project that requires various
performance classes of storage to be added to meet the new
workload demands.
 Normally this would require significant preparation, planning,
workload calculations, complex ROI models, and man-hours to test
and implement.
19
EXAMPLE #1 - Problem
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 Thankfully the organization leverages a software defined storage
solution that will maximize performance and utilization of any block-
level storage device that is presented to it.
 Storage can be safely added on-the-fly with no interruption to
workload processing.
 Auto-tiering ensures that the maximum performance benefit is
delivered to the datasets that require high performance disk.
 And for the business-critical data, synchronous mirroring is enabled
to ensure that not only is fault-tolerance provided through
component-level redundancy, but true high-availability through data-
level redundancy.
20
EXAMPLE #1 - Solution

 Environment B has been in service for five years.
 The IT Director is forced to perform a hardware refresh on the
existing storage arrays because the vendor is terminating support
for them within the next six months.
 Significant effort needs to be focused on choosing the right
hardware, the right vendor, the right technology, the right features, at
the right price.
 Additionally, over 50TB of production data spanning 100 volumes
need to be migrated to the new storage hardware and without
impacting production.
21
EXAMPLE #2 - Problem

 Thankfully, the organization leverages a software defined storage
solution that will make this transition seamless.
 Once the vendor has been chosen and the make and model has been
determined, simply add the new storage to the existing storage pool
and remove the old storage from the storage pool.
 The storage software will automatically migrate the data blocks from
the old storage to the new storage.
 The result: no interruption to production and the data migration
which could have taken months is completed in a fraction of that
time.
22
EXAMPLE #2 - Solution

 It is commonly thought that when a storage array or frame reaches
end-of-support-life, that it must be completely decommissioned. This
is simply not the case.
 It may not serve in a production role any longer, but that doesn’t
mean it can’t continue to be useful for test/development or VDI
solutions within the organization.
 Most storage array’s that are at end-of-life are still very capable
systems and continue to work fine for many more years. Combine
these legacy systems with flash through the use of auto-tiering and
they become as useful as they were the day you put them into
production.
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Other Points To Consider

One Storage Services Platform
across your entire infrastructure
 10th generation product
 16 Years of R&D
 25,000+ deployments worldwide
 Most comprehensive hardware-agnostic
storage stack in the industry
Cross-device Storage Services
Auto-tiering
Async Replication
Virtual SAN
Storage Pooling
Storage Load Balancing
Centralized Management
Analysis & Reporting
Sync Mirroring
Adaptive Caching
Thin Provisioning
Data Migration
Snapshots
Continuous Data Protection
NAS/SAN (Unified Storage)

Catching the Software Defined Storage Wave

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