Practical Guide to Making Software-Defined Storage Work in Your Data Center

Transcription

1 Practical Guide to Making Software-Defined Storage Work in Your Data Center

2 StorageSwiss Background Analyst firm focused on storage, cloud and virtualization Knowledge of these markets is gained through product testing and interaction with users and suppliers The results of this research can be found in the articles, videos, webinars, product analysis and case studies on our web site:

3 Speaker Background George Crump is the founder of Storage Switzerland, the leading storage analyst focused on the subjects of big data, solid state storage, virtualization, cloud computing and data protection. He is widely recognized for his articles, white papers, and videos on such current approaches as all-flash arrays, deduplication, SSDs, software-defined storage, backup appliances, and storage networking. He has 25 years of experience designing storage solutions for data centers across the US.

4 Software Defined Storage - A Brief History Storage has always been Software Defined LUN creation, LUN management and RAID In the Mid 90 s Storage Software moved into the forefront business continuous volumes, replication and replication and eventually snapshots In the Early 2000 s Storage Software became THE reason to buy snapshots, thin provisioning, auto-tiering, virtual volumes We also saw the birth of Storage Virtualization Datacore, FalconStor, IBM SVC, StorAge

5 Software Defined Storage - A Brief History ~2010 we saw the birth of Software Defined Storage (SDS)

6 SDS vs. Virtualization Not much Abstracts Storage Hardware from Storage Software Heavy focus on Software SDS Vendors believe Hardware is commoditized (it s not) Available in Software Only or Bundled

7 Software Defined Storage Is Available For Every Need Software Defined SAN/NAS Software Defined Cloud (private cloud, object storage) Hyper-converged Solutions

8 The Problems With SDS Adoption Most solutions create a new storage silo and can aggregate existing storage resources If they can aggregate existing storage, they need to take over and replace current storage services As a result most SDS conversions start in greenfield projects (VDI, private cloud, hadoop)

9 The Practical Guide To Making Software Defined Storage Work In Your Data Center

10 Step 1: Is Software Defined Storage Right For You? What Are Your Goals for SDS/ Lower Storage Acquisition Costs? Lower Storage Management Costs? Simplify Storage Infrastructure?

11 Step 1: Is Software Defined Storage Right For You? What Are Your Goals for SDS/ Lower Storage Acquisition Costs? Lower Storage Management Costs? Simplify Storage Infrastructure?

12 Step 2: Which Form Of Software Defined Storage Should You Select? Software Only Turnkey with Hardware Stand Alone Software and Hardware with Reference Design

13 Step 3: Implementing SDS

14 What Is The Purpose Of Your SDS Solution? Performance Capacity Workhorse

15 What Is The Role Of Your SDS Solution? Project Specific SDS Environment Specific SDS Whole Data Center SDS

16 Hardware Selection Performance vs. Capacity Components vs. Arrays Arrays vs. Storage Systems Hyper-Converged vs. Dedicated

17 Testing Your SDS Solution Dedicated Systems, once built, should be tested like normal But let s talk about testing normal systems Hyper-Converged testing is a whole new ball game

18 Moving From Test To Production

19 Moving From Test To Production Identify low risk workloads Use a replication tool to migrate to the SDS platform Some SDS Solutions have migration built in Once migrated, use migration tool to keep original copy updated With success increased risk

20 Converting an Environment To SDS: Example Use Case VMware Stand up SDS solution as a separate Storage System Implement SDS on a dedicated hardware vs. within the virtual infrastructure Select VMs to move to the SDS environment Leverage Storage vmotion to move VMs to the new environment

21 Summary All storage is Software Defined SDS type impacts flexibility, performance and cost SDS Testing and Implementation is Unique

22 Thank you! George Crump, Lead Analyst Storage Switzerland StorageSwiss on Twitter: StorageSwiss on YouTube: StorageSwiss on LinkedIN: