Say Hello to the Future in Flash Storage
Datrium delivers "open convergence," which is what they call the next generation of converged infrastructure. There may be as many riffs on convergence as there are vendors in the enterprise IT space, and for their part, Datrium isn't shy about promoting their vision of what infrastructure can look like. Datrium's view sees compute, primary storage, secondary storage and cloud coming together in a highly resilient configuration that is scalable and easy to manage without a silo for each class of storage. Furthermore, because most data calls will hit compute nodes with on-board flash cache, Datrium can deliver tremendous performance without having to go to the data nodes in nearly all cases. This translates to 200GB/s and 16GB/s in peak 32K read and write bandwidth and 18M IOPS 4K random read.
Move to the Next Level in Storage
Fundamentally, Datrium is made of compute nodes and storage nodes that make up the DVX system. Compute nodes can be supplied by Datrium, or customers may leverage their own existing server infrastructure. Compute nodes handle IO processing, keeping a cache locally on flash. Flash can be just about anything, from lower-cost, high-capacity SATA drives, to high-performance NVMe. The decision on flash is entirely workload dependent and can be tuned to meet customer needs. Because persistent data resides on the data nodes, compute nodes are stateless and can go offline without risking data loss or corruption, maintaining n-1 availability. Datrium supports a variety of environments including vSphere 5.5-6.5, Red Hat 7.3, CentOS 7 1611, and bare metal Docker 1.2.
Data nodes maintain persistent copies of data and are available in either disk or flash configurations. Within Datrium DVX, data is always compressed, globally deduped, and erasure coded with double fault tolerance. Datrium also offers encryption, snapshots and replication within DVX. The data nodes rely on the compute nodes for all of the processing, keeping the storage system free to deliver IO via dual hot-swappable controllers. Data nodes include mirrored, battery-backed NVRAM for fast writes, and high-speed Ethernet networking with load balancing and path failover. The latest nodes by Datrium includes DVX with Flash End-to-End. This means there is flash in the compute nodes, along with all-flash DVX data nodes. The F12X2 data node has 16TB usable storage (12x1.92TB SSDs), with up to 32-96TB effective capacity with 2-6x data reduction and support for 25GbE networking. The latest compute node, CN2100, adds new Skylake CPUs, NVMe support and up to 25GbE networking.
This review is somewhat unique in that we had access to a Datrium test environment remotely, configured with 32 Dell PowerEdge C6320 compute nodes and 10 Datrium DVX all-flash data nodes.
32 x Dell PowerEdge C6320 Servers
VMware ESXi 6.0 Update3 installed
Dual Xeon CPU E5-2697 v4 CPUs
128GB memory
4 x 1.92TB Samsung PM863a SSD as data cache
2 x 10Gb/s NIC (management/data)
Networking Configuration
10 F12X2 Data-nodes on core switch
32 Compute-nodes on 8 TOR switches
Each TOR switch has 160Gbps uplink to the core switch
Management
The DVX is managed with a HTML5-based user interface via the browser, or as a VMware vCenter plug-in. The entire premise of the DVX UI relies on simplicity, removing the need to manage storage in the traditional way. Everything happens from the same UI from storage provisioning to replications management.
Schedule a Demo at info@acsmartech.com 7872036503 www.acsmartech.com
Keep it Simple for Your Servers
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Alberto Candelario
acsmartech@gmail.com
