SDS, commodity storage, and mission-critical workloads

[Thuleman]

I had DataCore SANsymphony at my old place in a low volume non-mission-critical environment and it worked fine.

Is anyone here running their production mission-critical workloads on the hundreds of TB scale on DataCore SANsymphony or Atlantis USX?

The rational mind suggests that SDS is the way to go. Let the software virtualize storage and say adios to the likes of EMC/HP/Hitachi. Just put everything behind white-box SATA, SAS, Flash and be done with it.

The cost savings on hardware and especially hardware support (I am looking at you EMC!) look too good to be true.

The rational mind also looks at the technology features and understands that SDS does indeed lower downtime and provide an unprecedented level of resiliency at a much lower price point than a VMAX or Isilon.

The irrational mind says; sure, go SDS and while you are at it dust off your resume because you'll need it the first time something goes wrong.

 

[NetJunkie]

There are people doing it. Usually in special use cases but they are out there. That's the whole use case of like ScaleIO..which might be a good compromise between a very niche player and full pain EMC pricing. There is going to be less supporting information out there so if you hit a big problem you'll be greatly relying on support to dig you out...but that's about the same even with a VMAX. Understand also that as you scale your architecture becomes important. You need to understand your workload requirements and how you plan to deliver that.

 

[Thuleman]

I started a somewhat related thread over in the SSD & Data Storage subforum, Let's talk about replacing an EMC Isilon , but it didn't get much attention over there yet. Seems like all the enterprise folks are hanging out in here instead.

Replacing the Isilon with SDS would be one of the use cases. Naturally those are still production workloads, but they are file system workloads and not VMs. It comes down whether Isilon reliability can be duplicated with SDS and commodity storage for a lower TCO over say 5 years.

 

[lopoetve]

LOTS of folks replacing Isilon with swift farms or the like - that happens all the time. As for production loads? Too much liability riding on it still for most places.

 

[Thuleman]

LOTS of folks replacing Isilon with swift farms or the like - that happens all the time.

Let's think about this.
Is it not true that the fundamental problem with object-based storage is that most apps are not designed to access data via REST? It's probably different for a devops shop, but if I look at our apps I can tell you that 100% of them expect NFS (CFIS,SMB) or iSCSI targets.

 

[lopoetve]

Let's think about this.
Is it not true that the fundamental problem with object-based storage is that most apps are not designed to access data via REST? It's probably different for a devops shop, but if I look at our apps I can tell you that 100% of them expect NFS (CFIS,SMB) or iSCSI targets.

Swift has NFS access capabilities as well (see: swift-on-file). It's not fast, but depending on what you need, that may be fine.

 

[Olga-SAN]

we've been using datacore and replaced them with other windows based vendor offering same functionality but free of charge

we're msp so don't need real good support from vendor as have tons of engineers to waste

atlantis had sense before flash become real cheap

good atlantis review

https://www.reddit.com/r/vmware/comments/3dzbpa/atlantis_usx_experience/

typically with mission-critical you need service level agreements and it's where you bring your dough to emc sales reps

I had DataCore SANsymphony at my old place in a low volume non-mission-critical environment and it worked fine.

Is anyone here running their production mission-critical workloads on the hundreds of TB scale on DataCore SANsymphony or Atlantis USX?

The rational mind suggests that SDS is the way to go. Let the software virtualize storage and say adios to the likes of EMC/HP/Hitachi. Just put everything behind white-box SATA, SAS, Flash and be done with it.

The cost savings on hardware and especially hardware support (I am looking at you EMC!) look too good to be true.

The rational mind also looks at the technology features and understands that SDS does indeed lower downtime and provide an unprecedented level of resiliency at a much lower price point than a VMAX or Isilon.

The irrational mind says; sure, go SDS and while you are at it dust off your resume because you'll need it the first time something goes wrong.