Scale Radically Changes Price Performance with Fully Automated Flash Tiering
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Also, a more informal posting from our blog:
Turning HyperConvergence Up to 11
People seem to be asking me a lot lately about incorporating flash into their storage architecture. You probably already know that flash storage is still a lot more expensive than spinning disks. You are probably not going to need flash I/O performance for all of your workloads nor do you need to pay for all flash storage systems. That is where hybrid storage comes in.
Hybrid storage solutions featuring a combination of solid state drives and spinning disks are not new to the market, but because of the cost per GB of flash compared to spinning disk, the adoption and accessibility for most workloads is low. Small and midsize business, in particular, may not know if implementing a hybrid storage solution is right for them.
Hyperconverged infrastructure also provides the best of both worlds in terms of combining virtualization with storage and compute resources. How hyperconvergence is defined as an architecture is still up for debate and you will see various implementations with more traditional storage, and those with truly integrated storage. Either way, hyperconverged infrastructure has begun making flash storage more ubiquitous throughout the datacenter and HC3 hyperconverged clustering from Scale Computing is now making it even more accessible with our HEAT technology.
HEAT is HyperCore Enhanced Automated Tiering, the latest addition to the HyperCore hyperconvergence architecture. HEAT combines intelligent I/O mapping with the redundant, wide-striping storage pool in HyperCore to provide high levels of I/O performance, redundancy, and resiliency across both spinning and solid state disks. Individual virtual disks in the storage pool can be tuned for relative flash prioritization to optimize the data workloads on those disks. The intelligent HEAT I/O mapping makes the most efficient use of flash storage for the virtual disk following the guidelines of the flash prioritization configured by the administrator on a scale of 0-11. You read that right. Our flash prioritization goes to 11.
http://blog.scalecomputing.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/Screenshot-2016-04-19-13.07.06.png
HyperCore gives you high performing storage on both spinning disk only or hybrid tiered storage because it is designed to let each virtual disk take advantage of the speed and capacity of the whole storage infrastructure. The more resources that are added to the clusters, the better the performance. HEAT takes that performance to the next level by giving you fine tuning options for not only every workload, but every virtual disk in your cluster. Oh, and I should have mentioned it comes at a lower prices than other hyperconverged solutions.
If you still don’t know whether you need to start taking advantage of flash storage for your workloads, Scale Computing can help with free capacity planning tools to see if your I/O needs require flash or whether spinning disks still suffice under advanced, software-defined storage pooling. That is one of the advantages of a hyperconvergence solution like HC3; the guys at Scale Computing have already validated the infrastructure and provide the expertise and guidance you need.
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What's the TL:DR version?
When is it? Why should we be excited? What is it?
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@Breffni-Potter TL:DR - We (Scale) introduced SSDs next to NL-SAS drives in our HC2000 and HC4000 platforms with some awesome new tiering functionality.
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@Breffni-Potter said in Scale Radically Changes Price Performance with Fully Automated Flash Tiering:
What's the TL:DR version?
When is it? Why should we be excited? What is it?
When is it: Today (SAM has one already, so it's not theory, it's really on the market.)
Why Should You Be Excited: Simple GUI (just a slider) that makes high capacity spinning disk and high performance SSD tiering as easy as setting your desired performance priority.
What is it? Hyperconverged, Fully Automated Spinner / SSH Tiering system!
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These guys do an excellent job with their product as well. My last job got a 4 node cluster back when they were still doing the HC3x units, and it blew us out of the water how well it worked!
IIRC, They just added a 5th node not too long ago.
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@dafyre said in Scale Radically Changes Price Performance with Fully Automated Flash Tiering:
These guys do an excellent job with their product as well.
= blushes =
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@scale said:
What is it? Hyperconverged, Fully Automated Spinner / SSH Tiering system!
SSD? If SSH I'll need that acronym explained.
@scale said
Why Should You Be Excited: Simple GUI (just a slider) that makes high capacity spinning disk and high performance SSD tiering as easy as setting your desired performance priority.
Hmm, ok.
Let's assume I have zero IT knowledge or experience, how long would it take for me to go to 0, to deploying Scale in production. I'm guessing the whole product is built around click click and go rather than trawling through config settings?
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This is the post that I made about ours: http://mangolassi.it/topic/8983/new-scale-hc3-tiered-cluster-up-in-the-lab
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@Breffni-Potter SSD, not SSH (good catch). The product is designed for the IT generalist of small to mid-size businesses who doesn't have the time to specialize in every aspect of the infrastructure necessary to stand up a traditional virtualization environment. You can go from unboxing to spinning up new VMs in < 1 hr. Very "click click and go" as you guessed.
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I'm intrigued. How much of a presence does Scale have in the UK? Anyone based over here or any decent re-sellers? (not box shift distributors)
Is there a place I can go to see one
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@Breffni-Potter We have a UK office with a number of local resellers (who actually provide value beyond pushing boxes
). I have reached out to some of our local Systems Engineers to jump into the thread to make an introduction. They should be able to coordinate a time/place for you to see one. In the meantime, we do offer a weekly demo as well (http://bit.ly/HC3LiveDemo). -
@craig.theriac , thanks Craig. Hi @Breffni-Potter , I'm part of the technical team in the UK. As Craig mentions, we have kit here in the UK for on-site customer POC's. We are also at a few events this month, Spiceworld - London 10-11 May and IPEXPO - 18-19 May, where we will have live kit on display. If these events don't suit we would be happy to arrange a direct meeting(onsite or webex), whichever you would prefer?
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Nice! Sadly NOT the first HCI vendor to have a go to 11 option! (Although the first to put it in the GUI).
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Thanks for the quick response Ian.
@ian.smith said
We are also at a few events this month, Spiceworld - London 10-11 May
I'll be there! Will be interesting to look at it.
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@Breffni-Potter One of our founders - Jason Collier is on the floor at Spiceworld London as we speak
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@Aconboy said in Scale Radically Changes Price Performance with Fully Automated Flash Tiering:
@Breffni-Potter One of our founders - Jason Collier is on the floor at Spiceworld London as we speak
Oh cool. I'll try to steal some time
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@Breffni-Potter Yes, you can look for Jason Collier, Simon Marrion or Kevin Holmes who are all three present at the show.
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@scale - Suitably impressed at Spiceworld London. Jason Collier was very helpful.
Definitely on the books to consider for server installs.
