Cost Study: 4 Node Scale vs. 4 Node VMware IPOD
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@scottalanmiller said in Cost Study: 4 Node Scale vs. 4 Node VMware IPOD:
@Dashrender said in Cost Study: 4 Node Scale vs. 4 Node VMware IPOD:
@scottalanmiller said in Cost Study: 4 Node Scale vs. 4 Node VMware IPOD:
We get five nines from a normal server, so the VNXe doesn't have the "order of magnitude" improvement that you should be getting from an HA solution.
Did I miss a part where 6 nines was the goal? or HA was the goal?
That's a core focus of a cluster in general. If you were to not be focused on HA everything would change. You would need fewer nodes, no failover licensing, etc. While there is no guarantee that HC means HA, all HC clusters made today focus on HA as a core feature. A major feature. And unless you specifically over-provision your cluster, HA is a natural byproduct of the safer architecture. So to do apples to apples you always have to consider HA because it's just one of the components of the original design.
OK great - thanks for adding that to the post
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Removing HA would also be complex because if we kept a high quality SAN (or NAS) the cost difference would go crazy towards the HC cluster (the IPOD cost would go down by almost nothing while the HC would drop by 25%) or if we went with a commodity SAN (like Synology or ReadyNAS) the reliability of the IPOD would plummet so precipitously that we wouldn't be apples to apples at all.
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@scottalanmiller said in Cost Study: 4 Node Scale vs. 4 Node VMware IPOD:
@John-Nicholson and I have been talking about the death of RAID for years. RAID pretty much exists as a vestige for very small environments that still see their infrastructure in terms of "a single server" and not as clusters and clouds. Once you get beyond the "each node handles its own storage" point (which only applies to one or possibly two host clusters) RAID has no value. Gluster, CEPH, and anything perceived as "cloud storage" and anything like VSAN, Starwind or hyperconvergence are all RAID-less. We've long been in the post-RAID world, RAID remains almost solely for the smallest SMBs.
We have a Starwind cluster of two all-flash nodes that runs on top of hardware RAID5 making a redundancy over redundancy like RAIN1 on top of RAID5 which is quite awesome since there is a consistent set of data on each host in the cluster which is impossible with RAIN stuff like VMware VSAN or S2D does. I treat it like additional hardware offload for storage managing and it performs better than pure software RAID for sure.
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@scottalanmiller And Starwind ships their ready nodes armed with RAID https://www.starwindsoftware.com/starwind-hyperconverged-appliance so i think they still keep doing RAID and i am sure it is for a reason some of them I've mentioned above.
