What are some design considerations to keep in mind for Software Defined Storage Solutions?
What sort of design considerations should be kept in mind when implementing a SDS solution? What are some possible pitfalls for other storage professionals to be aware of and how can they be avoided?
Sr. I.T. Manager at a wholesaler/distributor with 1,001-5,000 employees
Real User
Top 10
2020-06-08T04:33:02Z
Jun 8, 2020
Few points:
1) How in sync you are with Storage manufacturers as to use their apps/drivers efficiently.
2) How will you be able to update/upgrade live SDS running in live environment.
3) Do you think people will trust SDS for their live infrastructure? What assurance and advancement SDS will have than the current technology people are using?.
4) Keep a provision of having option to activate redundancies of data of various app eg. Oracle, SQL DB etc.
5) What if SDS itself is attacked/hacked/corrupted etc.?
6) Will SDS have all features of storage management too (Partitioning, Adding new storage, adding Network storage etc.)? if not, how SDS can efficiently perform?
7) How SDS would perform in case cache is over utilized? Will SDS configuration have reserve memories.
8) Will SDS have inbuilt performance monitoring tool like Windows performance monitoring service?
My points are at end users perspective e.g. ease of operations, safety, future advancement etc.
Search for a product comparison in Software Defined Storage (SDS)
I think the things to be considered are:
- How is it managed? Is it part of another solution?
- How does it cache? Are their multiple levels of cache? How good is it in caching?
- How does it handle the networking side? You must have a sync "ring" and an access "ring" of networking. Preferably sectioned off from the rest of the world.
- How does it use and present the disks? Can it manage both spinning and SSD?
And probably the absolute most important thing - support!! Does it have good support? Things will happen and you will need support.
I will readily admit I am an avid user of StarWind VSAN. I think it's better than VMware VSAN (no witness node). I think all the questions I've asked above it meets satisfactorily or better. I haven't compared it to every solution but I also don't believe in fixing something if it's not broke. No, they are not paying me to say this. I readily admit I'm not a storage expert. But then I haven't had to be either.
What is software-defined storage? Software-defined storage (SDS) is a software-based storage solution that provides greater flexibility and independence than the traditional network-attached storage (NAS) or storage area network (SAN). Although software-defined storage can work in and on top of both NAS and SAN environments, it is usually created to perform on the industry common x86 servers.
Software-defined storage allows for separation and independence from traditional hardware...
Few points:
1) How in sync you are with Storage manufacturers as to use their apps/drivers efficiently.
2) How will you be able to update/upgrade live SDS running in live environment.
3) Do you think people will trust SDS for their live infrastructure? What assurance and advancement SDS will have than the current technology people are using?.
4) Keep a provision of having option to activate redundancies of data of various app eg. Oracle, SQL DB etc.
5) What if SDS itself is attacked/hacked/corrupted etc.?
6) Will SDS have all features of storage management too (Partitioning, Adding new storage, adding Network storage etc.)? if not, how SDS can efficiently perform?
7) How SDS would perform in case cache is over utilized? Will SDS configuration have reserve memories.
8) Will SDS have inbuilt performance monitoring tool like Windows performance monitoring service?
My points are at end users perspective e.g. ease of operations, safety, future advancement etc.
I think the things to be considered are:
- How is it managed? Is it part of another solution?
- How does it cache? Are their multiple levels of cache? How good is it in caching?
- How does it handle the networking side? You must have a sync "ring" and an access "ring" of networking. Preferably sectioned off from the rest of the world.
- How does it use and present the disks? Can it manage both spinning and SSD?
And probably the absolute most important thing - support!! Does it have good support? Things will happen and you will need support.
I will readily admit I am an avid user of StarWind VSAN. I think it's better than VMware VSAN (no witness node). I think all the questions I've asked above it meets satisfactorily or better. I haven't compared it to every solution but I also don't believe in fixing something if it's not broke. No, they are not paying me to say this. I readily admit I'm not a storage expert. But then I haven't had to be either.
Forget Sofware Defined Storage SCSI V3,
Look in www.SNIA.org, what is NVMe technology - PCIe Gen3!