HIGH PERFORMANCE COMPUTING
The software defined future
ROBERT ROE DISCUSSES THE POTENTIAL FOR SOFTWARE DEFINED STORAGE WITH EXCELERO’S JOSH GOLDENHAR
With enterprise users now picking up HPC technology and storage requirements constantly
increasing, Excelro’s vice president of products, Josh Goldenhar, believes that the future of storage technology lies in software defined architecture. In the most basic sense ‘software defined’ means to pool resources and manage them using software, but in the context of server storage this allows users to deploy non-proprietary hardware – which can be much cheaper than proprietary solutions. The use of non-proprietary hardware
also allows user’s system designers more freedom to select the hardware they want as they are not locked in to single vendor. ‘The large web-scale giants have really
woken up everybody else to say let’s go software defined everything if we can – that’s the Holy Grail,’ said Goldenhar. ‘Let’s deploy racks of systems, we would
love to get to completely homogenised servers but if we can’t, lets at least put the same kind of thing. This defined entity that we stamp out and deploy over and over again. We then use software, intelligent software to be able to have this completely software defined,’ Goldenhar added.
This allows users to opt for much cheaper standardised hardware as they do not require additional features as this will be provided by the software layer. ‘Pick your buzzword but let’s put software on top of standard/commodity hardware. It’s all the same thing,’ said Goldenhar. This approach to storage allows users
to reduce costs by making the acquisition of hardware much simpler – even down to the switches used. ‘Let’s take white box switches, Amazon is writing its own
8 Scientific Computing World April/May 2018
OS for their switches, but you could also use ICOS from Broadcom or Qumulus. There are choices out there. Not everyone can go that extreme but there is some measure that they go to in deploying the software defined datacentre,’ Goldenhar commented. Goldenhar explained that this approach is not applicable to everyone – particularly small and medium businesses that don’t have thousands of developers. This is where Execelro comes in, as it can offer software that can be used in conjunction with any NVMe drive.
Giving software to the masses The idea behind the company’s software is to take the concept of software defined storage and make it available to smaller companies or large enterprises that do not have the same capacity for application development as can be found in the big web scale giants like Facebook, Google or Amazon. ‘We take all the concepts that we talked about before that the big eight introduced, to smaller folks who do not have that army of application developers so they can get these economies of scale, use NVME better than anyone else, use all of the available IOPS and throughput as well as the capacity,’ said Goldenhar. ‘Facebook, you might argue, is a single
application – it is made up of a lot of smaller components for sure, but it was developed as this massive application to do one thing and they could customise each section of it to exactly the hardware that they are using,’ added Goldenhar. ‘If you have legacy applications you
can’t just snap your fingers and move that over to a shared nothing architecture,’ Goldenhar concluded. Excelero provide a software layer that
“The large web-scale giants have really woken up everybody else to say let’s go software defined everything if we can – that’s the Holy Grail”
uses a back end of block storage which is fully distributed across the system. It uses modern scale out techniques with no centralised bottleneck to provide a block- based storage system with a single global namespace to make data access easy for users.
Goldenhar noted that customers often
ask ‘why did you create a block device’ – or more accurately ‘do you do file and object as well?’ and the answer is ‘no, we do block!’ ‘We picked one thing and we want to do that better than anyone else and the reason is because Block is at the heart of everything else. You can put a file system on block, you can put object storage on top of block through various different measures – it is really the central common denominator,’ explained Goldenhar.
Building blocks While some HPC users may be unfamiliar with block storage, Goldenhar explains that the technology is used in many of the more well-known parallel file systems seen in HPC today such as Lustre or GPFS. ‘At the end of the day users don’t want block storage they want a single namespace. The end scientific user doesn’t care what is underneath, a lot of times they don’t even know,’ commented Goldenhar. He explained that for most users it is a
particular application, library or method that is used. Users want to submit a job and have it work but the underlying technology is not important – as long as it works!
‘Block devices are things that look like
a device in a machine (disk drives, flash devices). GPFS for example, counts on block devices in general to be a like a Storage Area Network (SAN), it counts on the fact that underneath the file system it sees what looks like a disk drive device,’ said Goldenhar. A block device is similar to a physical
device but the key point is that a physical device is only available to the host in which it is installed. Logical block devices are attached to multiple hosts (often through a fibre channel array). This is the same concept that is
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