What is the difference between the so-called software-defined storage SDS and traditional storage?

Distributed storage with hyper-convergence as the core is also a form of software-defined storage (SDS), and hyper-convergence architecture is essentially an integrated deployment mode of software-defined storage (SDS) and virtualization. So the difference between software-defined storage and traditional storage can refer to the difference between hyper-convergence and traditional architecture. Details are as follows:

I. Comparison of Architecture and Resource Management Mode Taking SmartX hyper-converged products as an example, the differences between the lower hyper-converged architecture and the traditional architecture in deployment and resource management mode are given respectively. Figure 1 deployment differences between traditional architecture and hyper-converged architecture Figure 2 differences in deployment and resource management modes between traditional architecture and hyper-converged architecture

Compared with the traditional FC SAN architecture, hyper-converged architecture has the following significant changes:

1. Use standard and easy-to-maintain x86 servers and 10 Gigabit Ethernet switches instead of proprietary storage hardware and networks;

2. The core is distributed storage, and each server is a storage controller. It should be noted that each node needs to configure SSD disk as cache, and the cache capacity is much larger than the volatile memory of traditional storage, and the concurrency of multiple nodes brings stronger aggregation performance;

3. Logically, storage is no longer a different storage space composed of RAID, but a unified and flexible storage pool with stronger expansibility;

4. Another benefit brought by distributed storage is that performance and capacity can be configured on demand in a unified resource pool, and data can be automatically balanced;

5. Compute virtualization and storage are deployed on the same server node.

Second, distributed storage+virtualization deployment is the essence of hyper-converged architecture. For hyper-converged architecture, because of its unique name, many users have a misunderstanding: the core of hyper-converged architecture is fusion, so the more functions of fusion, the better. However, through the comparison of the above architectures, we can see that the transformation of hyper-converged architecture is firstly the substitution of distributed storage for traditional storage, and other advantages brought by this substitution (such as building based on x86 server, concurrency, easy expansion, etc.).

Of course, the unique deployment mode of distributed storage and virtualization further simplifies users' IT architecture, reduces the use cost and the difficulty of operation and maintenance, and these values also greatly accelerate users' acceptance of distributed storage mode.

In addition, from SmartX and Nutanix, VMware provides enterprise-level storage services ranging from data checksum to rack awareness, dual-activity and off-site backup, as well as enterprise-level high availability and data protection solutions integrated with third-party products; 2. Concurrency performance is greatly improved and IO delay is reduced. The following still introduces why hyper-converged architecture can improve the performance of SMTX operating system and reduce access delay.

Among them, the localization of IO is mainly supported by SmartX and Nutanix, but the hyper-convergence based on open source products such as Ceph cannot be satisfied.

To give a concrete practical example, due to the bottleneck of dual control, HP 3PAR 8440 has basically reached the maximum performance among eight SSDs, but the reading and writing performance can be achieved only by using four SmartX hyper-converged nodes.

3. The expansibility is greatly improved. As mentioned above, compared with traditional storage, the core distributed storage of hyper-converged architecture has an essential improvement in scalability, including the following features:

Among them, the support of heterogeneous nodes needs to be confirmed with vendors, similar to SmartX, but many vendors do not provide such support.

4. The difficulty of operation and maintenance is greatly reduced. For the difficulty of operation and maintenance, we can compare the two architectures for the whole operation and maintenance cycle:

As can be seen from the above figure, hyper-converged architecture not only automates a lot of operations in the whole product operation and maintenance cycle, but also has short time and high efficiency. IT can effectively reduce the requirements for personnel, liberate IT personnel and enable them to carry out more innovative activities.

5. Reduction of procurement cost and total cost of ownership In terms of the cost that customers are most concerned about, the cost of server+hyper-converged software (or hyper-converged all-in-one machine) is greatly reduced compared with the cost of server+traditional high-end storage. But in addition to procurement costs, hyper-convergence also greatly reduces the total cost of ownership. Cost Advantages of Hyperconvergence Please visit the official technical blog: "What is the cost advantage of Hyperconvergence compared with the traditional FC SAN architecture? 》

IT can be seen that hyper-convergence makes IT infrastructure more agile and capable through innovative architecture, which will lay a solid foundation for users to accelerate digital transformation.