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SCALE UP IS HISTORY! IS SCALE OUT THE
FUTURE FOR STORAGE?
A Technical and Market Analysis
Chris M Evans
Langton Blue Ltd
Copyright © 2014 Langton Blue Ltd 1

2. clear concise consulting
ABOUT OUR SPEAKERS
• Chris M Evans
• 27 years experience in the IT industry across all platforms,
including IBM mainframe, Windows & Open Systems.
• Co-founder and independent consultant at Langton Blue
Ltd, a specialist consulting company in the UK.
• Blogger and part-time analyst at Architecting.IT
• Twitter: @chrismevans, @architectingIT, @langtonblue
• Web: www.architecting.it, www.langtonblue.com
Copyright © 2014 Langton Blue Ltd 2

3. clear concise consulting
WHAT YOU WILL LEARN
• How Scale-Out Solutions are Defined
• The differences and benefits between scale out and
traditional scale-up solutions
• How scale-out helps deliver hyper-converged
compute and storage solutions
• How to decide whether scale-out is right for you
• Vendor Roundup – hardware and software offerings
in today’s marketplace.
Copyright © 2014 Langton Blue Ltd 3

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SCALE UP STORAGE DEFINED
• The dominant storage architecture for the past
25 years
• Components all built into a single “monolithic”
hardware device
• Managed as a single hardware device
• Incorporates expensive highly redundant
components
• Originally used proprietary components (ASICs,
backplanes, internal bus) although industry has
moved towards commoditisation
• Designed for maximum availability and up-time
• Performance and capacity increased by adding
more components (processor, adaptor cards,
directors, disks) to the single device
Copyright © 2014 Langton Blue Ltd 4
EMC VMAX

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SCALE-OUT STORAGE DEFINED
Copyright © 2014 Langton Blue Ltd 5
• Systems built from clusters of hardware
(and software) nodes
• Support File, Block and Object protocols
• Built from commodity components (e.g.
1U standard servers & disk drives
• Protect data through RAID, Mirroring and
Erasure Coding techniques
• Failure of a disk/flash device or entire
node is designed into the architecture
• System scales capacity & performance by
adding nodes to the configuration
• Scale Out concept used as the basis for
hyper-converged solutions
SolidFire SF Series

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SCALE-UP/SCALE-OUT – PETS VS CATTLE
Copyright © 2014 Langton Blue Ltd 6
Pets are Named; nursed
back to health and cared
for when ill
Cattle are numbered, if they
get ill, they are “expendable”

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SCALE-UP/SCALE-OUT - COMPARISION
Scale Out
• “Loosely Coupled”
architecture
• Multiple nodes connected
through Network backplane
(e.g. Ethernet)
• Commodity components
• Tolerates disk and node
failures
• Storage/compute loss is 1/n of
node count
• Growth through adding
nodes/servers with compute
and storage capacity
Copyright © 2014 Langton Blue Ltd 7
Scale Up
• “Tightly Coupled”
architecture
• Controllers
• Dedicated backplane
• Proprietary components
• Designed for 100% uptime
of all components
• BBU, UPS, multiple
redundancy planes
• Growth through adding
faster controllers & disk
shelves

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SCALE OUT BENEFITS
• Lower Cost than Scale-Up
• Commodity components & SDS products
• Deploy as software-only with VMs
• Simpler maintenance – e.g. node-based upgrades, no data migration
• Scale “on demand”
• Grow capacity & performance by the node
• Simple deployment process – rack and join node cluster
• Lower Risk
• New nodes don’t have to be plugged directly into the running
infrastructure (like disk shelves)
• 1/n capacity lost on node failure – more nodes = less impact
• Rolling upgrade – add new (faster/bigger) nodes, decommission the old
ones – no fork-lift upgrades
• Greater Flexibility
• Geo-dispersal of data with erasure coding
• Software-only solutions, no hardware tie-in or cost
Copyright © 2014 Langton Blue Ltd 8

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SCALE OUT ISSUES
• Node Balancing
• Can have surplus or shortage of compute/storage resources with fixed
node configurations (solved with multiple node types & dynamic
balancing)
• Recovery Rebuild Process
• Can have performance impact if entire node’s data has to be recreated
(solved with prioritised/intelligent rebuild) – scale out rebuild can be fast
• Network Dependency
• Infrastructure is limited in write I/O throughput to network bandwidth
(need to protect new data across > 1 node)
• Storage Efficiency
• Many solutions use replicas (e.g. RAID-1/10), can be expensive on disk
capacity, especially with all-flash solutions
• Minimum Node deployment
• Hardware solutions usually require minimum of 3 nodes, usually
recommended to be 4
Copyright © 2014 Langton Blue Ltd 9

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SCALE OUT AND HYPER-CONVERGED
• Hyper-converged hardware vendors have used scale-out
storage concepts within their products
• Nutanix (NDFS), Scale Computing (SCRIBE), VMware EVO:RAIL
(VSAN)
• Scale out storage and scale out compute are a “natural
fit” for each other
• Scale out storage software can be used to deliver hyper-
converged solutions without buying a packaged solution
• StarWind Virtual SAN, VMware VSAN, ScaleIO
• OpenStack takes advantage of scale-out properties
• Swift (object), Ceph (block), GlusterFS (File)
Copyright © 2014 Langton Blue Ltd 10

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CHOOSING THE RIGHT PRODUCT
• What are my requirements?
• Protocols (block, file object)
• Geo-dispersal
• Features – data protection, hypervisor support
• Hardware or Software only?
• Is Scale-Out suitable for all of my data?
• Mix scale up and scale out technologies where appropriate
• What’s my Growth/Capacity requirement?
• Object typically 100TB+ deployments
• File & block, 10’s of terabytes
• Existing process/technology synergies
• Can I use commodity servers already in my environment?
• No extra support/maintenance cost
• “Mix & Match” storage and compute
• Great for software-only solutions
• Can I build out OpenStack or scale-out Compute Farm?
Copyright © 2014 Langton Blue Ltd 11

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VENDOR ROUNDUP - HARDWARE
Copyright © 2014 Langton Blue Ltd 12

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VENDOR ROUNDUP - SOFTWARE
Copyright © 2014 Langton Blue Ltd 13

14. • entirely software-based, VM-centric virtual machine storage, which basically
“mirrors” internal hard disk and flash memory between hypervisor hosts
StarWind Virtual SAN is…
before after
• eliminates any need for physical shared storage like SAS JBODs, iSCSI or
Fibre Channel or NAS and seamlessly integrates into the hypervisor

15. • Zero Hardware footprint
• Complete fault tolerance with just 2 servers
• No SSD / 10GbE / SAS JBOD required
• VM-Centric storage design
• Maximized storage performance
StarWind Virtual SAN – hardware-less storage

16. Basic 2-node configuration

17. Thinking storage outside the box

18. clear concise consulting
Q&A
Copyright © 2014 Langton Blue Ltd 18

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CONTACT US
Copyright © 2014 Langton Blue Ltd 19
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