True
plug-in storage
In an effort to make it easier for HPC system operators to add the storage needed for today’s applications, manufacturers are taking the ‘appliance’ approach.
Paul Schreier investigates
when referring to devices and gadgets in the home, but it is appearing more and more frequently in the environment of high- performance computing, particularly with regards to storage. A number of companies have introduced ‘storage appliances’, meaning that they incorporate much more than disk drives and now generally also contain controllers and operating/ storage-management software. Although the definitions of a storage appliance are ‘all over the place’ according to Jeff Denworth, VP of marketing at DataDirect Networks (DDN), the term generally refers to a package of hardware and software that combines a file system and storage in a scalable architecture to achieve capacity or bandwidth requirements.
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Storage becoming unmanageable The problem that has led to the popularity of storage appliances is well described in a 2010 report by the Enterprise Strategy
40 SCIENTIFIC COMPUTING WORLD
o matter what context, the word ‘appliance’ connotes ease of use – plug it in and off you go. We’ve been using the term for decades
THIS APPROACH OF
ALLOWING MULTIPLE HOSTS TO TAP STORAGE, NO MATTER WHAT OPERATING SYSTEM THEY RUN, IS ALSO A
CHARACTERISTIC OF TODAY’S STORAGE APPLIANCES
Group (ESG) entitled ‘Scale-out 2.0: Simple, Scalable, Services-Oriented Storage’. It states: ‘Humans can no longer manage storage the way it has traditionally been managed. It is just too big, with millions of LUNs (logical unit numbers) being required to get traditional storage systems to petabyte scale; there are just too many elements to manage and there is just too much inefficiency in traditional storage architectures. This inefficiency is driving users to look at new ways of doing things that are more efficient and flexible, to make IT a business enabler rather than an inhibitor. ‘It is driving discussion around cloud
services to reduce costs and the creation of internal IT resource clouds and service catalogues to deliver IT-as-a-service. Public
cloud storage services are built on scale-out platforms, but many don’t offer enterprise features. ESG expects to see more and more cloud service providers and enterprise IT organisations embracing scale-out 2.0 platforms over time as they prove to deliver simplicity and flexibility at scale.’ Here the report adds a key definition:
‘Scale-out 2.0 systems are basically a mash- up of enterprise unified storage functionality and scale-out architecture. These systems are protocol-agnostic and support consolidation efforts for both block and file data, tiering across nodes with different price/ performance profiles, and pooled storage that allows IT to manage storage as a shared IT resource along with features such as remote replication, thin provisioning, and snapshot.’
The answers are coming This problem is well known and storage manufacturers are taking a generally similar approach, albeit with slight differences. Let’s take a look at some recent products addressing the issue. Traditional storage clusters, states Xyratex, are made up of a number of disparate building blocks
www.scientific-computing.com
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