Disruptive innovations:
How storage is changing in the enterprise
Scott H. Davis
CTO, Infinio
Welcome!
Scott H. Davis:
• CTO, Infinio
• 25+ year IT veteran
• Former VMware EUC CTO & Chief Data
Center/Storage Architect
• Founder, President, CTO of Virtual Iron
• 16 Patents for Virtualization, Storage,
Clustering, and EUC technologies
www.TalkingTechwithSHD.com
@shd_9
Agenda
• Storage overview
• Technology disruptions
• Storage landscape
• All-flash arrays
• Hybrid arrays
• Hyper-converged infrastructure/SDS
• Decoupled infrastructure (capacity and performance)
• Infinio’s storage acceleration platform
3
Storage circa 2004
Traditional Storage Array
Innovation:
• Unified block and file
• Storage tiering
4
Storage in 2015
VM
VM
VM
VM
VM
Hypervisor
Server
Server
Storage-side
processing
All-flash
arrays
SSDs
VM
VM
Hypervisor
Controller software
Server-side
processing
VM
VM
VM
Hybrid
arrays
Controller software
Write log /
Read cache
Disk pool
SSDs
HDDs
VM
Hypervisor
Controller VM/software
Hyper-converged
(Software-defined)
I/O Optimization
Server
SSDs
VM
HDDs
HDDs
Decoupled
Infrastructure
Technology Disruptions
6
Disruption: Desktop Virtualization
• Extreme workload consolidation necessary for
economics to work
• More workloads on fewer drives
• Workload mobility
• Blender effect, mix of read/write ratios
• Impact of client OS-specific caching
• Impact of synchronized peaks (e.g., boot
storms, login storms, virus scans)
7
Disruption: Hardware advances
DRAM
IOPS
Networking
Flash
Hard drive
Latency
The complexities of flash
Reads vs writes
Write amplification
Garbage collection
Endurance / wear-out
Consumer grade vs. Enterprise
Traditional RAID / Filesystem
applicability
Tiering with storage system
9
Disruption: Hardware advances for performance
Memory channel storage
e.g., NVDIMM
DRAM
IOPS
Speed comparison
Networking
Flash
Hard drive
Memory
5 μsec
PCI-e
50 μsec
SAS SSD
300 μsec
Non-volatile characteristics of classic flash
Latency
Interface challenge for OS/Hypervisor
NVMe
e.g., PCI-e solid state drive
replaces the AHCI stack – 1/3 CPU utilization
Disruption: Hardware advances for capacity
Capacity-optimized drives
“Shingled Magnetic Recording” (SMR)
DRAM
IOPS
e.g., Seagate’s 8TB SMR drive at $.03/GB
(1/500th that of flash!)
Networking
Non-symmetric read/write characteristics
Flash
Hard drive
Cloud
Network speeds making it possible
Latency
Can be as inexpensive as $.03/GB/month
Disruption: Hardware advances in networking
Networking speeds continue to
improve – 10GbE typical; 40GbE
and 100GbE coming soon
DRAM
IOPS
Networking
Inter-node communication clocked
at 50 μsec, including TCP/IP stack
Flash
Hard drive
More predictable speed than flash
Latency
Enables scale-out storage
architectures
12
Disruption: Scale-out application architecture
Scarcity vs. Abundance
Scale-out
Node A
Node B
Node C
Consequences:
Object storage
Replicas instead of updating in place
Minimized synchronization
I/O performance should scale out with
the application
13
The storage landscape
14
Storage in 2015
VM
VM
VM
VM
VM
Hypervisor
Server
Server
Storage-side
processing
All-flash
arrays
SSDs
VM
VM
Hypervisor
Controller software
Server-side
processing
VM
VM
VM
Hybrid
arrays
Controller software
Write log /
Read cache
Disk pool
SSDs
HDDs
VM
Hypervisor
Controller VM/software
Hyper-converged
(Software-defined)
I/O Optimization
Server
SSDs
VM
HDDs
HDDs
Decoupled
architecture
Storage in 2015: All-flash arrays
VM
VM
VM
VM
Hypervisor
Server
Controller software
SSDs
All-flash arrays
“Porsche” of storage array
performance
Consistently high performance for all
connected applications
Comes at a steep price premium
All drives are flash, plus the
proprietary upcharge:
Dell server SSD = $3K
EMC storage SSD = $15K
Storage in 2015: Hybrid arrays
VM
VM
VM
VM
Hypervisor
Server
Controller software
Write log /
Read cache
Disk pool
SSDs
HDDs
Hybrid arrays
Better price/performance calculation
than all-flash
Most market share is from existing
vendors; the next “status quo” ?
Buyer Beware:
SSDs as a tier in legacy arrays
vs.
purpose-built hybrid array
(handling of flash & architecture of
write log/read cache)
Storage in 2015: Hyper-converged
VM
VM
VM
VM
Hypervisor
Controller VM/software
Server
SSDs
HDDs
Hyper-converged
(Software-defined)
Integrated building block for an entirely
new datacenter architecture
Commitment to scale everything
together
Inefficient with storage space because
of data protection schemes
More appropriate for greenfield (new)
deployments because of new mgmt
tools and processes
Typical in ROBO and SMB
Storage in 2015: Decoupled Architecture
Splits storage into capacity layer and
performance layer
I/O Optimization
HDDs
Decoupled
Architecture
Performance layer benefits from:
• Hyper-locality
μsec vs. msec
• Commodity pricing
Dell Server SSD = $3K
EMC Storage SSD = $15K
Capacity layer can be any storage
platform – keep existing tools and
reporting
Infinio’s storage acceleration platform
20
Infinio’s storage acceleration platform
Software-based performance layer; optimized for RAM
• Globally deduplicated
• Operationally transparent
• Simple to evaluate, implement, and use
“We noticed the results almost instantly, with a visible reduction of storage latency on
the VDI desktops and decreased workload on our filers.”
--Nathan Manzi, Systems Engineer at Minara Resources
Infinio architecture
No changes to
guest VMs
1 Accelerator VM
and 8GB RAM per
ESX host
One solution for virtual servers
and virtual desktops
Kernel
module
1 Console VM
per vCenter
Kernel
module
Kernel
module
LAYER FOR STORAGE ACCELERATION
Communication
runs over the
vMotion network
“By better utilizing the existing infrastructure, I/O optimization can
improve performance, and help control costs.”
–Gartner Hype Cycle 2014
Infinio’s content-based architecture
Global:
Deduplicated:
All nodes share a
single address space
Inline deduplication
across VMs and hosts
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Using a 5:1 dedupe rate, an 8-node Infinio cluster starts with an effective
size of 320GB and can grow much larger.
Infinio’s distributed cache architecture
A
1-33
B
34-66
C
67-99
A
1-33
B
34-66
C
67-99
A
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B
34-66
C
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Node C
Node C
A-D
Node B
Node B
A-D
Global
D-C
Node A
Node A
A-D
24
Infinio’s global deduplication in action
General Enterprise mix
• Common applications
• Application data
 OS files
 Boot images
Infinio’s global deduplication in action
VDI
DevOps
Gold images
Source code for slightly different
versions
Common application executables
Test automation on the same code
Common user files
Exemplar data
Customer National Specialty Alloys saw
sustained offload rates of 61%
A large consumer goods company saw build time
drop from 2 hours to 15 minutes
Operational transparency
Datastore
configuration
ESXi
ESXi
Snapshots and
replication
Backup
scripts
VM
Patching
VM
vMotion
DRS
Maint Mode
VM
Infinio
VM
"Installing Infinio was fast and easy. You install it live, and you can start or stop
accelerating without affecting production. There’s no rebooting either."
--Doug Soltesz, Vice President and CIO - Budd Van Lines
Simple to evaluate, deploy, and manage
Install to results
in 30 minutes
Change the cache size
Accelerate a new datastore
What’s new in Infinio version 2
Extension of award-winning storage acceleration platform into SAN
environments to support Fibre Channel and iSCSI.
VM-level statistics for a granular view into performance; choose specific
applications to accelerate*
Easily see
performance
improvements for
up to two weeks
of history
Note the benefit
of deduplication
with effective
cache size
Continued operational transparency, with no changes to storage tools, backup or reporting scripts;
complete integration with VMware VAAI
*v2.1
Learn more about Infinio today
• Accelerate response time by 10X
• Reduce reads 65-85% from storage
• Achieve better user experience from applications
• Extend life for storage systems
VISIT US AT BOOTH #3
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