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FEATURES AND BENEFITS OF A VM-AWARE STORAGE ARRAY
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T
new storage options for
organizations looking to ease the process
of VM provisioning, including a new wave
of VM-aware arrays. It’s best to take a bigpicture approach to your data storage infrastructure when deciding
whether to enter the all-flash array marketplace.
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Stephen Bigelow
As virtualization has become common in data centers of every size, administrators have hoped for an easier way to deploy and manage storage for virtual
machines. Within the last few years, several companies have stepped in to offer
products that help ease the storage provisioning process for virtualization, offering storage arrays with built-in software designed to logically map storage
to VMs rather than LUNs. Today there are a myriad of options available for
organizations looking to improve their business agility and response times by
allowing them to more easily provision and manage storage for VMs and virtualized workloads.
A virtualization-aware storage array carries several important considerations other than the standard suite of network connectivity and functionality
needed for a storage subsystem. Perhaps the most obvious issue is the available
storage type and capacity.
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Flash storage is gaining traction and an enterprise can deploy an all-flash
array or a hybrid array with both flash and magnetic storage (disks). The actual
choice depends on the performance and latency needs of the workloads that
will access the storage -- critical, latency-sensitive applications will usually
justify all-flash arrays. Storage capacities can range anywhere from 12 TB to
more than 300 TB depending on the vendor and model. Usable storage depends
on the use of data reduction features like compression and data deduplication.
A fundamental premise of virtualization-aware storage is integration with
the underlying virtualization platform. Therefore, it’s important to evaluate
hypervisor support in the array -- such as VMware vSphere, Microsoft HyperV, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, RHEL OpenStack Platform -- and even desktop
virtualization hypervisors -- such as VMware Horizon, Citrix XenDesktop and
so on. Next, check the maximum number of virtual machines and virtual disks
supported by the array. For example, an array like the Tintri VMstore T880
supports up to 3,500 VMs and 10,000 virtual disks.
After checking the number of VMs, consider the array’s management capabilities or features such as support for multiple array nodes -- which allows
you to deploy and manage more than one new array -- replication, synchronization and data encryption. These features may require additional software
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purchases. Look for granular VM-level policy control based on performance
or usage. “Virtualization-aware storage also allows applications like file servers, SQL and Exchange to work better by associating performance policies that
reduce the possibility of bottlenecks,” said Aldo Cabrera, network engineer and
release manager at W. P. Carey Inc., in New York City.
So where is virtualization-aware storage most effective today? In general
terms, virtualization-aware storage is suited for data center environments
with a large number of VMs that require automatic deployment and quick or
frequent adjustments. This includes almost any private cloud workloads, such
as Hadoop servers for internal big data projects, virtual desktop infrastructure
deployments, backups and other data protection tactics.
Virtualization-aware storage can also be used when virtualizing businesscritical applications and databases, including SharePoint, Oracle, Exchange,
SQL and SAP databases.
“We’ve seen good results in dynamic object storage environments where
I need to store and index clusters of multimedia,” said Pete Sclafani, COO
and co-founder of 6connect, a network automation solutions provider in San
Francisco.. “We’ve also seen good performance with standard database functions on a local level like running a MariaDB cluster.” Sclafani notes that data
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protection tasks like replication can work well between virtualization-aware
storage systems when latency is not an issue. Dedicated interconnects between
data centers can help prevent replication performance problems.
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DON’T OVERLOOK CLOUD
Virtualization-aware storage promises better provisioning speed and offers
flexibility that is suited for automated, highly scalable storage needs such as
cloud workloads and important business applications. Virtualization-aware
storage can be built on next-generation flash and hybrid storage arrays using
open-source or third-party software platforms. Pre-integrated systems can
also be purchased from vendors, further simplifying deployment.
But IT planners must weigh the potential costs and benefits of virtualization-aware storage in house against the proliferation of versatile public cloud
storage alternatives that are emerging. Amazon Web Services already provides
services like Elastic File System, which is designed to provision, grow and
shrink storage automatically as workload needs change. This can change the
cost/benefit calculus for businesses moving into the cloud.
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MOVING TO ALL-FLASH? THINK ABOUT YOUR DATA
STORAGE INFRASTRUCTURE
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Mike Matchett
Everyone is now onboard with flash. All the key storage vendors have at least
announced entry into the all-flash storage array market, with most having offered hybrids -- solid-state drive-pumped traditional arrays -- for years. As silicon storage gets cheaper and denser, it seems inevitable that data centers will
migrate from spinning disks to “faster, better and cheaper” options, with nonvolatile memory poised to be the long-term winner.
But the storage skirmish today seems to be heading toward the total cost of
ownership end of things, where two key questions must be answered:
How much performance is needed, and how many workloads in the data
center have data with varying quality of service (QoS) requirements or
data that ages out?
Are hybrid arrays a better choice to handle mixed workloads through
advanced QoS and auto-tiering features?
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All-flash proponents argue that cost and capacity will continue to drop for
flash compared to hard disk drives (HDDs), and that no workload is left wanting with the ability of all-flash to service all I/Os at top performance. Yet we
see a new category of hybrids on the market that are designed for flash-level
performance and then fold in multiple tiers of colder storage. The argument
there is that data isn’t all the same and its value changes over its lifetime. Why
store older, un-accessed data on a top tier when there are cheaper, capacityoriented tiers available?
THERE’S HYBRID AND THEN THERE’S HYBRID
It’s misleading to lump together hybrids that are traditional arrays with solidstate drives (SSDs) added and the new hybrids that might be one step evolved
past all-flash arrays. And it can get even more confusing when the old arrays
get stuffed with nothing but flash and are positioned as all-flash products. To
differentiate, some industry wags like to use the term “flash-first” to describe
newer-generation products purpose-built for flash speeds. That still could
cause some confusion when considering both hybrids and all-flash designs. It
may be more accurate to call the flash-first hybrids “flash-converged.” By being
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flash-converged, you can expect to buy one of these new hybrids with nothing
but flash inside and get all-flash performance.
We aren’t totally convinced that the future data center will have just a
two-tier system with flash on top backed by tape (or a remote cold cloud), but
a “hot-cold storage” future is entirely possible as intermediate tiers of storage
get, well, dis-intermediated. We’ve all predicted the demise of 15K HDDs for a
while; can all the other HDDs be far behind as QoS controls get more sophisticated in handling the automatic mixing of hot and cold to create any temperature storage you might need?
WHITHER TRADITIONAL STORAGE?
This brings us to the issue of what traditional storage really is these days. Everyone compares their shiny new products to so-called traditional storage, yet
we think that what once was traditional storage has changed significantly and
is about to change even more. One of the biggest changes isn’t necessarily due
to the ability to drop in SSDs in place of HDDs, but rather being able to use the
growing bounty of computing power available.
CPU chip capabilities continue to advance as fast as flash. More built-in
processing power, like more cores supporting more threads, faster execution
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pipelines, and upcoming features like chip-level encryption support mean
more inline and online storage features can be delivered in software. For example, it’s now possible for most storage vendors to provide inline deduplication based on software processing.
This has led to the rise of software-defined storage (SDS), which is really an
acknowledgement that all of what a storage array does can be run as a program
and, in turn, be dynamically programmable. While some vendors still productively leverage custom ASICs (HP 3PAR, SimpliVity), many array controllers
have long been mostly software. While SDS vendors sell just the software part
and leave the infrastructure up to users, many SDS purchasers still end up
buying a pre-loaded SDS appliance that doesn’t look much different from “traditional” storage when it comes off the pallet.
Still, ambitious new SDS providers have brought some benefits to the
storage market. We see improvements offered in QoS at fine-grained levels,
dynamic online configuration and partitioning, inline storage features and
broader capacity efficiencies. SDS can enable faster refresh cycles to accommodate new technologies and provide increasingly intelligent storage-side
analytics.
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TIERING ISN’T A BAD WORD
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This brings me back to the key hybrid feature of auto-tiering. Tiering is evolving quickly from being based on relatively simple data aging or recent access
algorithms working with large chunks of data, to being based on fine-grained,
small chunk analyses of access and user/usage patterns over varying time intervals, the stated or required QoS of the data, competing workloads and the
increasingly dynamic makeup of available storage resources.
All-flash proponents might talk about how they’re becoming cost-efficient
(per capacity) enough to handle more mixed workloads with differing requirements. At the same time, flash-converged hybrids are getting better at delivering targeted QoS, including pinning top-end workloads in flash. The all-flash
array market gang counters with how any effort put into determining QoS is a
waste of Opex when every workload can get consistent flash performance. Still,
a large percentage of data quickly moves down the value chain, with much data
never or almost never getting accessed after a short active lifetime.
We’re definitely approaching a watershed moment in storage. Big vendors
like EMC, Hewlett-Packard, IBM and NetApp have hedged their bets with
traditional hybrid, all-flash and flash-converged hybrid options, while smaller
players like Kaminario, Nimble Storage, Pure Storage and Violin Memory each
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promote a specific vision. Either way, we suspect the future “traditional” storage array will provide for a wide range of workloads without much manual
storage administration, and the lowest TCO option will eventually dominate.
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