#scale-out

Latest @klmacomber Blog: The State of the Software-Defined Data Center

The concept of the “software-defined data center” (SDDC) emerged around 2012, and since then the term has been adopted by nearly all vendors and heavily debated by analysts. While some argue that it is nothing more than a “marketecture,” and a largely unfulfilled and currently unattainable vision, others tout true capabilities and value. In this blog series, Storage Switzerland will dissect what…

Achieving Cloud Efficiency Without Cloud Scale

Our last blog, “Are Cloud Providers Really Efficient“, discussed how cloud providers, from a resources perspective, aren’t really any more efficient than the typical data center. The provider’s use of automation and their scale is what separates them from the traditional data center. Traditional data centers can’t afford to scale to the size of a cloud provider and the multitude of disparate…

Latest @georgeacrump Blog: The Multi-Site Scale-Out Storage Problem

When an organization buys a scale-up storage system it has to predict how much storage performance and capacity it will need over the life of the investment. If an unpredictable requirement for either of these resources occurs then IT will need to either upgrade or replace the system long before it reaches its life expectancy. Scale-out storage resolves this problem by incrementally adding…

New @georgeacrump Blog: Why Data Management is Cool Again

In the early data center, IT managed data because it HAD to. The cost of online storage was too expensive to hold all the data needing processing. But over time storage became less expensive and storage system vendors created architectures that could scale to near infinite proportions. Data management seemingly became unnecessary. Then flash was implemented, eventually all-flash, resolving the…

New Briefing Note by @georgeacrump "DriveScale - Disaggregated Hadoop Clusters"

Web-scale applications are designed to run on dozens, if not thousands, of small commodity servers, which expect direct-attached storage. As a result storage performance and capacity is directly tied to the purchase of more compute (servers). Over time almost every scale-out cluster ends up with either too much capacity or too much compute, wasting data center floor space, power and budget.…

Microsoft Software Defined Storage AKA Scale-out File Server (SOFS)

Business Challenges:

$/IOPS and $/TB

Continuous Availability

Fault Tolerance

Storage Performance

Segregation of production, development and disaster recovery storage

De-duplication of unstructured data

Segregation of data between production site and disaster recovery site

Continuous break fix of Distributed File Systems (DFS) & File Server

Continuously extending storage on the DFS servers

S…