5 Reasons for All Flash vSAN Storage

1. High Performance  
All flash vSAN with a mix of NVMe, SAS SSD allows for superior input/output operations per second (IOPS) performance needed for all enterprise workloads. vSAN 6.7 can give  more than 500K IOPS with sub-millisecond read/write latency.  When compared to   spinning disks storage systems, all-flash vSAN system wins in all performance benchmarks.

2. Enterprise-class capability & Capacity
VSAN now provides all enterprise class storage performance and security such as Encrption, DeDupe, Compliance with all major standards: PCI-DSS, HIPPA, DISA, STIG, FedRAMP etc. Along with vRealize, vSAN can used for all data center automation functions to quickly provision storage, storage insights, storage resource management etc.

3. Guaranteed availability and resiliency
vSAN storage can deliver 99.9999 percent availability. All flash vSAN delivers high availability and high resilience with vSphere HA, Stretched clusters, Smart Rebuild/Rebalancing  to ensure highest data integrity.

4. Run multiple workloads 
High cluster level storage performance allows users to run multiple enterprise apps within the same cluster. Moreover, vSAN is now certified to run SAP HANA, Oracle, MS-SQL etc. This gives IT admins the confidence to run all mission critical IT apps in vSAN.  In addition to standard block storage services, vSAN with NexentaConnect can provide high-performance NFS file services - to provide unified storage solution.

5. DR & Data protection optimizes all-flash storage
Backup and recovery is always one of the highest IT priorities. VMware tools such as vSphere and other 3rd part tools provide enterprises the highest data protection. vSphere Replication, Rapid Array replication across stretched clusters, Storage vMotion etc., leverage all-flash storage best in class data protection. 

Build State of Art AI Deep Learning Systems

Newer AI and Machine learning applications require High Performmance Computing (HPC) and massive storage. HPE offers a full suite of HPC servers.

HPE Apollo 6500 Gen10 System is an ideal HPC and deep learning platform providing unprecedented performance with industry leading GPUs, fast GPU interconnect, high bandwidth fabric and a configurable GPU topology to match your workloads. The ability of computers to autonomously learn, predict, and adapt using massive data sets is driving innovation and competitive advantage across many industries and applications are driving these requirements.

The system with rock-solid reliability, availability, and serviceability (RAS) features includes up to eight GPUs per server, NVLink 2.0 for fast (up to 300 GB/s) GPU-to-GPU communication, Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors support, choice of high-speed / low latency fabric, and is workload enhanced using flexible configuration capabilities. While aimed at deep learning workloads, AI models that would consume days or weeks can now be trained in a few hours or minutes.

HPE SDS Storage Solutions

HPE Solution for Intel Enterprise Edition for Lustre is a high-performance compute (HPC) storage solution that includes the HPE Apollo 4520 System and Intel® Enterprise Edition for Lustre*. The Apollo 4520 is a dual-node system with up to 46 drives. Capacity can be increased by adding additional drives in a disk enclosure. The solution can scale by adding more systems in parallel to scale performance and capacity nearly linearly.

Scality RING running on HPE ProLiant servers provides a SDS solution for petabyte-scale data storage that is designed to interoperate in the modern SDDC. The RING software is designed to create a scale-out storage system, which is deployed as a distributed system on a minimum cluster of six storage servers.

Scality Ring Object storage software solutions are designed to run on industry-standard server platforms, offering lower infrastructure costs and scalability beyond the capacity points of typical file server storage subsystems. The HPE Apollo 4200 series servers provide a comprehensive and cost-effective set of storage building blocks for customers that wish to deploy an object storage software solution.

Vertica v9

Formerly, HPE Product, Vertica Version 9 delivers High-Performance In-Database Machine Learning and Advanced Analytics, Unified advanced analytics database features advancements in in-database Machine Learning.

Data Storage Tiers and HPE Solutions

Data centered economy implies that organizations need to store vast volumes of data, and this data has to be stored in an economic way - so as to get best performance/cost ratios. This implies creating multi-tier data storage systems, and having automated data management systems - such as HPE DMF solutions.

Automating Data management system over multiple tiers and building a cost effective SDS  systems is the way forward.

Today, HPE offers several SDS solutions for each data storage tiers.

Tier-1: VMWARE vSAN, HPE Simplivity & HPE VSA 
Tier-2: Lusture SDS with ZFS for scaleout NAS storage 
Tier-3: Scality Ring Object Store
Tier-4: HDD based RDX Cartridges for long term off-site secure backup

Tier 1 : This is frequently accessed storage, best build on SSD drives. NVMe SSD drives offer highest IOPS and throughput, SAS SSD offers highest capacity - while offering very high levels of IOPS performance.

Tier-2 :  Frequently used data, often files used by individuals. These files are best stored in a scale out NAS system. HPE offers Lusture ZFS built on Apollo 4500 servers - which offers infinite storage capability and at low cost solution when compared to dedicated NAS arrays.

Tier-3 :  Archived Object Store data, used infrequently but has to be stored for business purposes. HPE offers Scality Ring Object Store solution built on Apollo 4500 servers - which offers infinite storage capability and at very low cost solution  - which does not need backup, as data is replicated across multiple datacenters. 

Tier-4 : Backup Data stored in secure off line, off site location. Historically, tape storage was used for this backup, but with low cost HDD and very high reliability of Hard Drives, companies can use HDD for backup storage. HPE offers FLX HD cartridge solutions for long term data backup and off site archival.

Storage Versatility with SDS

Storage Versatility with SDS 

HPE offers a complete range of Software defined Storage solutions which work on HPE Proliant Servers - to provide a cost optimized, high performance storage solutions for all your cloud application needs.

SDS enables IT to provide multiple volume types, which differ in performance characteristics and cost points, so that you can tailor your storage performance and cost to the needs of your applications. These volumes types fall into following categories:

1. SSD-backed volumes optimized for transactional workloads involving frequent read/write operations with small I/O size, where the dominant performance attribute is IOPS.
Ex: vSAN, Storage Spaces Direct

2. A mix of SSD & HDD-backed volumes optimized for large streaming workloads where throughput (measured in MiB/s) is a better performance measure than IOPS.
Ex: vSAN, Storage Spaces Direct

3. A mix of SSD & HDD-backed volumes optimized for storing file systems which provides simple, scalable file storage for your cloud apps. Build an elastic storage capacity with scalable file systems, so your applications have the storage they need, when they need it.
Ex: Lusture File System

4. HDD-backed Object storage optimized to securely collect, store, and analyze their data at a massive scale, to store and retrieve any amount of data from anywhere over Internet.
Ex: Scality Ring Object Store

PUBLIC Vs PRIVATE Vs HYBRID Cloud Storage Options Compared

HPE Elastic Platform for Big Data Analytics

Big data analytics platform has to be elastic - i.e., scale out with additional servers as needed.

In my previous post, I had given the software architecture for Big Data analytics. This article is all about the hardware infrastructure needed to deploy it.

HPE Apollo 4510 offers scalable dense storage system for your Big Data, object storage or data analytics? The HPE Apollo 4510 Gen10 System offers revolutionary storage density in a 4U form factor. Fitting in HPE standard 1075 mm rack, with one of the highest storage capacities in any 4U server with standard server depth. When you are running Big Data solutions, such as object storage, data analytics, content delivery, or other data-intensive workloads, the HPE Apollo 4510 Gen10 System allows you to save valuable data center space. Its unique, density-optimized 4U form factor holds up to 60 large form factor (LFF) and additional 2 small form factor (SFF) or M.2 drives. For configurability, the drives can be NVMe, SAS, or SATA disk drives or solid state drives.

HPE ProLiant DL560 Gen10 Server is a high-density, 4P server with high-performance, scalability, and reliability, in a 2U chassis. Supporting the Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors with up to a 68% performance gain1, the HPE ProLiant DL560 Gen10 Server offers greater processing power, up to 3 TB of faster memory, I/O of up to eight PCIe 3.0 slots, plus the intelligence and simplicity of automated management with HPE OneView and HPE iLO 5. The HPE ProLiant DL560 Gen10 Server is the ideal server for Bigdata Analytics workloads: YARN Apps, Spark SQL, Stream, Mlib, Graph, NoSQL, kafka, sqoop, flume etc., database, business processing, and data-intensive applications where data center space and the right performance are of paramount importance.

The main benefits of this platform are:

1. Flexibility to scaleScale compute and storage independently
2. Cluster consolidationMultiple big data environments can directly access a shared pool of data
3. Maximum elasticityRapidly provision compute without affecting storage
4. Breakthrough economicsSignificantly better density, cost and power through workload optimized components

Why Use Lusture File System?

Lusture File System is designed for a large-scale, high-performance data storage system. Lusture was designed for High Performance Computing requirements – which scales linearly to meet the most stringent and highly demanding requirements of Media applications. 

Lustre file systems have high performance capabilities and open source licensing, it is often used in supercomputers. Since June 2005, it has consistently been used by at least half of the top ten, & more than 60 of the top 100 fastest supercomputers in the world, including the world's No. 2 and No. 3 ranked TOP500  supercomputers in 2014,Titan & Sequoia. 

 Lustre file systems are scalable and can be part of multiple computer clusters with tens of thousands of client nodes, hundreds of petabytes (PB) of storage on thousands of servers, and more than a terabyte per second (TB/s) of aggregate I/O throughput.  This makes Lustre file systems a popular choice for businesses with large data centers, including those in industries such as Media Service, Finance, Research, Life sciences, and Oil & Gas.

HPE Synergy Advantage for Software Defined Storage

Cloud Platforms requires massively scalable, programmable storage platform that supports cloud infrastructure, media repositories, backup and restore systems, and data lakes. HPE Syergy is an ideal plaform for such demands that provide a cost effective SDS storage solution; and introduce cost-effective scalability that modern workloads require.

HPE Synergy 12000 Frame forms an excellent platform for high performance SDS storage that scales to meet business demand. The Frame is the base infrastructure that pools resources of compute, storage, fabric, cooling, power and scalability. IT can manage, assemble and scale resources on demand by using the Synergy Frame with an embedded management solution combining the Synergy Composer and Frame Link Modules.

 The Synergy Frame is designed to meet today’s needs and future needs with continuing enhancements to compute and fabric bandwidths, including photonics-ready capabilities. Enhancements to the HPE Synergy 12000 Frame include several new capabilities:

 • Support for HPE Synergy 480 and 660 Gen10 Compute Modules.

 • Additional 2650W hot plug power supply options: HVDC, 277VAC, and -48VDC.

 • Product version to comply with the Trade Agreements Act (TAA).

 HPE Synergy is a single infrastructure of physical and virtual pools of compute, storage, and fabric resources, and a single management interface that allows IT to instantly assemble and re-assemble resources in any configuration. As the foundation for new and traditional styles of business infrastructure, HPE Synergy eliminates hardware and operational complexity so IT can deliver infrastructure to applications faster and with greater precision and flexibility.

D3940 Storage Module provides a fluid pool of storage resources for the Composable Infrastructure. Additional capacity for compute modules is easily provisioned and intelligently managed with integrated data services for availability and protection. The 40 SFF drive bays per storage module can be populated with 12 G SAS or 6 G SATA drives. 

Expand up to 4 storage modules in a single Synergy 12000 Frame for a total of 200 drives. Any drive bay can be zoned to any compute module for efficient use of capacity without fixed ratios. 

A second HPE Synergy D3940 I/O Adapter provides a redundant path to disks inside the storage module for high data availability. 

The HPE Synergy D3940 Storage Module and HPE Synergy 12Gb SAS Connection Module are performance optimized in a non-blocking 12 Gb/s SAS fabric.