Branch offices and SMBs: choosing the right hyperconverged solution - - PowerPoint PPT Presentation

Presenters: Howard Marks – Chief Scientist, DeepStorage.net Luke Pruen – Director of Technical Services, StorMagic

Branch offices and SMBs: choosing the right hyperconverged solution

Infrastructures for the Remote Office

Howard Marks - @DeepStorageNet

Your not so Humble Speaker

• 30 years of consulting and

writing for trade press

– Now at TechTarget storage sites

• Chief Scientist DeepStorage, LLC.

– Independent test lab and analysts

• Co-Host Greybeards on Storage

podcast

• Executive director The Other Other

Operation

Hmarks@DeepStorage.Net @DeepStorageNet

Remote Office IT Challenges

• Not just offices:

– Plants – Stores – Restaurants – Bank/brokerage branches

• Everything’s limited

– IT Staff – Budget – Connectivity – Space

• Outside the range of 4hr response

Let’s Send Everything to the Cloud

• Limited connectivity

– Low bandwidth – Not redundant – Now critical to mission of office

• Hardware interfaces

– Time clocks – POS terminals – Bar code/inventory

• Line of business apps not web

Conventional Infrastructure

• Typically 4-5 workloads

– Plus some batch/transfer jobs

• Two virtualization hosts

– Plenty of horsepower for failover

• Too complex

– External disk array – Fibre Channel switches

• Too expensive
• Too Fragile

Enter Hyperconvergence

• Software turns host disk into

shared volume

• Replicate for resilience
• SSD for acceleration
• Lower cost
• Major vendors in the data

center

Remote Office Requirements

• Lightweight storage VM

– Run on 1 socket server – Hypervisor, Windows etc. $5000/socket

• Scale down

– 2 nodes

• Enhanced resiliency

– 3-4 day MTTR common – Don’t expose data for that long

• Management options

Split Brains and Witnesses (go out in the noonday sun)

• In split-brain both nodes of a 2-Node

cluster remain active

• Some HCI solutions have required 3

nodes

– Any 2 nodes make a quorum

• Witness makes quorum but isn’t node

– Witness should not run on a node – Witness at HQ, on PC, other options

Summary

• Remote sites have unique needs
• Conventional infrastructure – too many too’s
• HCI could be a good solution

– Be careful of Datacenter products

• Look for:

– Lightweight Software – High resiliency after failures – Witness flexibility – Management flexibility

Luke Pruen – Director of Technical Services, StorMagic

SvSAN Overview

StorMagic SvSAN: Overview

SvSAN turns the internal disk, SSD and memory of industry standard servers into highly available shared storage

SvSAN - Features

• SvSAN VSA – Virtual Storage Appliance

̶ Lightweight software defined storage platform

• Synchronous Mirroring

̶ Synchronously mirror your storage between as little as two hosts for high availability and protection of your storage

• Stretch Cluster Support

̶ Mirror storage across separate sites to protect against major outages

• Centralized, Simplified Management

̶ Control all your SvSAN clusters from one place with simplified management tools

• Remote Shared Witness - NSH

̶ Flexible cluster witness keeps your mirrored storage in sync and highly available

• Performance Caching Features

̶ Utilized SSD and system memory to boost your performance

• Scale Flexibly

̶ Scale-Up and Scale-Out

• Tie-breaker service for SvSAN mirrors
• Prevents data inconsistency AKA ‘split brain’
• This ensures

̶ In the event of a single failure there is no interruption in service ̶ In the event of multiple failures there is no corruption or loss of data

• Local or Remote

̶ Supported as Windows service, Linux daemon, packaged VM, Raspbian (Raspberry Pi) ̶ Withstands 3000ms latency ̶ Up to 20% packet loss ̶ 9kbs bandwidth required per SvSAN mirror

• Single NSH instance for 1000s of mirrors across clusters

VSA

Hypervisor

VM

VSA

Hypervisor

SvSAN Synchronous Mirroring

VM VM VM

WAN NSH

SvSAN - Neutral Storage Host (witness)

• Tie-breaker service for SvSAN mirrors
• Prevents data inconsistency AKA ‘split brain’
• This ensures

̶ In the event of a single failure there is no interruption in service ̶ In the event of multiple failures there is no corruption or loss of data

• Local or Remote

̶ Supported as Windows service, Linux daemon, packaged VM, Raspbian (Raspberry Pi) ̶ Withstands 3000ms latency ̶ Up to 20% packet loss ̶ 9kbs bandwidth required per SvSAN mirror

• Single NSH instance for 1000s of mirrors across clusters

SvSAN - Neutral Storage Host (witness)

• Tie-breaker service for SvSAN mirrors
• Prevents data inconsistency AKA ‘split brain’
• This ensures

̶ In the event of a single failure there is no interruption in service ̶ In the event of multiple failures there is no corruption or loss of data

• Local or Remote

̶ Supported as Windows service, Linux daemon, packaged VM, Raspbian (Raspberry Pi) ̶ Withstands 3000ms latency ̶ Up to 20% packet loss ̶ 9kbs bandwidth required per SvSAN mirror

• Single NSH instance for 1000s of mirrors across clusters

SvSAN - Neutral Storage Host (witness)

• Tie-breaker service for SvSAN mirrors
• Prevents data inconsistency AKA ‘split brain’
• This ensures

̶ In the event of a single failure there is no interruption in service ̶ In the event of multiple failures there is no corruption or loss of data

• Local or Remote

̶ Supported as Windows service, Linux daemon, packaged VM, Raspbian (Raspberry Pi) ̶ Withstands 3000ms latency ̶ Up to 20% packet loss ̶ 9kbs bandwidth required per SvSAN mirror

• Single NSH instance for 1000s of mirrors across clusters

SvSAN - Neutral Storage Host (witness)

Witness - SvSAN vs vSAN 100 site example

StorMagic SvSAN VMware vSAN ROBO Number of remote nodes 2 2 Number of witness nodes required 1:1000 100 sites: 1 witness 1:1 100 sites: 100 witnesses Witness node vCPU 1vCPU per witness 100 sites: 1vCPU required 2vCPU per witness 100 sites: 200 vCPU required Witness node memory 512MB per witness 100 sites: 512MB 8GB per witness 100 sites: 800GB Witness latency allowance <3000ms RTT <500ms RTT Witness Bandwidth 9 Kbps per mirrored datastore 100 sites: 0.9 Mbps Per 10 VMs 0.24 Mbps 100 sites: 24 Mbps Virtual SAN CPU 1 vCPU per host 10% of hosts total CPU Virtual SAN Memory 1GB per host 2GB per host using SSD caching Optional memory for memory caching Depends on the number of disk groups. Each host must contain a minimum of 32GB to support 7 disk groups

Reference: VMware Virtual SAN Bandwidth Sizing Guide https://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/products/vsan/vmware-virtual-san-6.1-stretched-cluster-bandwidth-sizing.pdf

SvSAN - Intelligent automated read caching & tiering

Intelligent read caching algorithm

• All read I/Os are monitored and analyzed
• Most frequently used data – “Hot” data
• Cache tiers are populated based on access frequency

Tiering

• RAM: Most frequently accessed data
• SSD/Flash: Next most frequently accessed data
• HDD: Infrequently accessed data – “Cold” data

Sizing

• Assign cache sizes to meet requirements
• Grow caches as working sets change
• Use any combination of Memory, SSD/Flash and Disk

Play to the strengths

• Play to the strengths of all mediums
• Memory Highest IOPS
• SSD/Flash Magnetic drives providing lower price per GB

SvSAN - management & integration

• Centralized Management & Monitoring from the Datacenter
• vCenter StorMagic Integration

̶ StorMagic Dashboard ̶ Single/Multi VSA Deploy ̶ NSH Deploy ̶ VSA Restore ̶ Create, expand and migrate storage

• Hyper-V Integration

̶ StorMagic Deployment Wizard

• Monitoring

̶ SNMP v2 & v3 ̶ SMTP ̶ System Center Operations Manager

• Scripting tool box

̶ Powershell module ̶ Deployment, configuration, firmware upgrades ̶ Plugin script generation

SvSAN - Summary

• Lightweight Solution

̶ Architected for smallest possible footprint ̶ Minimal resources required for VSAs and Witness ̶ Powerful features to drive higher performance requirements

• Eliminate Downtime

̶ Synchronously mirrored storage across multiple servers ̶ No single point of failure or maintenance downtime ̶ Upgrade & replace hardware with no impact

• Flexible witness

̶ Run remotely or locally ̶ Supported on a wide options of platforms ̶ Lowest requirements of any solution

• Centrally Deploy, Manage & Monitor

̶ Centrally deployed ̶ Automated though scripting ̶ Central management of thousands of locations

Q&A and Next Steps

SvSAN Product Information

Product Options SvSAN license 2, 6, 12 and unlimited TBs License entitlement 2 mirrored servers Maintenance and support Platinum - 24x7 / Gold - 9x5

For further information, please contact: sales@stormagic.com Further Reading: An overview of SvSAN - http://stormagic.com/svsan/ SvSAN Data Sheet - http://stormagic.com/svsan-data-sheet/ SvSAN White Paper - http://stormagic.com/svsan-6/ Download your free trial of SvSAN

stormagic.com/trial