Red Hat and Verizon teamed up to take attendees of Red Hat Storage Day New York on 1/19/16 through a tour of containerized storage and why it's important to the future of storage.

1. CONTAINERIZED STORAGE
Kapil Jain, Verizon Labs
Narendra Narang, Red Hat
With special thanks to:
Subhajit Mukherjee and Rehan Tahir at Verizon Labs
Jeff Darcy, Ben England, Shyam Ranganathan and Sayandeb Saha at Red Hat
Tuesday, January 19th
2016

2. Brief Bio: Narendra N. Narang

- Sr. Cloud Storage Solutions Architect at Red
Hat

- At Bloomberg for 11 years, where primary
focus was on storage and emerging
technologies

- 17 years experience working in various
information technology roles at New York
financial institutions.

3. Brief Bio: Kapil Jain

- Verizon Cloud platform team (storage)

- Verizon Terremark

- Verizon labs

- Dell Equallogic SAN management team

- Progress Relational Database SQL Engine Team

4. Agenda

- Strategic Business initiatives

- Technology Stack

- FSaaS

- Migrating to the cloud

- Architecture

- State of the Union

- Business benefits

- Proposed futures

- The Red Hat Engagement

5. Verizon Labs
- Center of excellence and
innovation
- Platform for Internet Services.
- Charter for the team

6. Strategic Business Initiatives

- Cloud platform for internal applications
created on commodity hardware, open-source
software

- Resilient, scalable and highly available
platform.

- Services for enterprise applications

- Migration path for existing applications

- Achieve substantial cost savings over
existing alternatives

7. Key Technologies & Vendors

- CoreOS – open-source lightweight OS ideal
for container environment

- EMC – Elastic Cloud Storage (ECS) for the
object store

- MESOSPHERE – mesos orchestration tool
for deploying apps in a cluster-computing
platform

- Red Hat – elastic, distributed, replicated ,
shared file system.

8. FSAAS
- Software Defined Storage (SDS)
- Containerized micro-services.
- Highly Available
- Disaster tolerance
- High Performance
- Support Structure

9. Performance & Costs Scaling
of SDS Architecture
Number of Storage Nodes
Reads/WritesThroughput(mBps)
Software
D
efined
Scale-out Storage
( G
lusterFS)
Traditional Enterprise
NAS Storage
Re-architecture of high performance NFS to scale-out achieves lower costs
Number of Storage Nodes
TotalStorageCosts($)
Traditional Enterprise
N
AS
Storage
Software Defined
Scale-out Storage
( GlusterFS)
Storage Performance Scalability Storage Costs Scalability

10. Migrating to the Cloud
Migrating from a traditional NAS environment to a SDS environment
- Characterization and segmentation of different NAS workloads on
based on performance requirements
- Mapping those workloads to software-defined-storage ( GlusterFS)
- Comparing and validating the reliability of Red Hat Gluster Storage
running on commodity off-the-shelf hardware with a traditional
enterprise class NAS appliance
- Aligning dynamic scaling of the persistent/storage layer (shared
filesystem) with the dynamic scaling requirements of the application
workload.
To meet our objectives and overcome these challenges, we engaged
Red Hat.

11. ETH/IB
appapp appapp appapp
Converged Computing Architecture:
Mixed App and Storage Compute Workloads
App-only servers
Converged servers
appapp
appapp +
Storage-only servers
Storage stack imposes only
3% - 10% load on compute processing
Applications and storage stacks can co-exist on same compute substrate.
This achieves higher server utilization and lower operational costs across the cloud

12. Architecture
Containerized Docker containers running on commoditized converged hardware

13. State of the Union

- Simplified Deployment via containers

- Synchronous replication for high availability

- Geo-Replicated for disaster recovery

- Seamless upgrade and rollback

- Dynamic scaling (up) of capacity as needed

- Performance and health metrics collection via
container monitoring agents and sending alerts.

14. Examples of Usage and Scale.
Volume Media Bricks Size Geo -
Replicated
File Store HDD 28 112 TB
and
growing
Yes
Cache SSD 20 8 TB No
Geo-Rep
Vehicle
HDD 12 48 TB Yes

15. Implementation Challenges
- DNS to resolve Gluster container hostnames
- Persistence of Gluster metadata
- Gluster FUSE client optimization
- Geo-replication performance

16. Solved Challenges
• New Technology - Trailblazing issues
• Provisioning resources based on demand, not
projections
• Unproven Software, production issues
• Storage in docker environment is relatively
unsolved
• Deploying and orchestration
• Automated Seamless upgrade.

17. BUSINESS BENEFITS
- Leveraging stable proven technology in a new environment
- Higher Resource utilization, reducing costs and capex
requirements
- Increase speed and reliability of product delivery, reducing
time to market and increase speed of innovation
- Reduce cost and reliance on specialized hardware by running
on commoditized hardware with open source software
- For disaster recovery, we have reduced the time to access
backups from a couple of days to a couple of hours
- Reduced dependence on external clouds.

18. Proposed Futures
- Data migration
- Better Management of resources and gluster
volumes – Heketi ???

19. Engagement with Red Hat
- Weekly Calls
- Responsive and meaningful interactions
- Developer Support
- TAM engagement
- Training and certification

20. Q&A