UPDATED 13:35 EDT / MARCH 17 2014

From packing crate to productivity in 90 minutes with guaranteed IO QoS, SolidFire solves service provider’s problems

SolidFire_Noisy_Neighbors_GraphicCloud service providers like ServInt have two major problems with their storage: Guaranteeing quality-of-service to customers and the major effort required to migrate to new storage boxes. So when ServInt VP of Innovation Kevin Nicastro started investigating solid state options for augmenting and eventually replacing its existing DAS spinning disk and heard stories of guaranteed IO with SolidFire, he didn’t believe it. Until he tried it.

“In our industry there’s a big problem with guarantees,” he says. In particular, “the ability to guarantee IO resources is a problem none of our competitors have succeeded in solving, particularly when done on a hypervisor. We’ve had a lot of problems with that.”

But when he tested a SolidFire array “we’ve actually found their QoS to be spot on.” After five months of load testing and two months of using SolidFire in production environments, “We can’t break it. We’re really impressed.”

So impressed that ServInt is developing a new customer-facing tracking service that will show customers that they are consistently getting exactly the performance they were promised 24X7X365 on ServInt’s SolidFire-based service. That is unheard of among service providers because they know that their IO QoS slips despite their best efforts.

Noisy Neighbors

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SolidFire_All-Flash_ArrayOne of the big issues with maintaining QoS is the “noisy neighbor problem” where one high-demand application hogs the available IO resources, degrading service for other applications on the same machine. In IT shops this creates resource conflicts between large databases. For service providers like ServInt this generates complaints from customers.

“The largest department in our company is tech support,” Nicastro said. “They were devoting a high percentage of their time to the noisy neighbor problem and basically trying to save the problem that engineers should be providing a solution for. With SolidFire they just don’t have to do that. We don’t have those problems.”

Most vendors try to solve this problem by throwing IO at it and isolating large, transactional databases from the rest of the environment, an expensive option. But even with the high IO of solid-state devices, that does not guarantee consistent performance for all applications or, in ServInt’s case, customers. SolidFire’s difference, says SolidFire Marketing VP Jay Pressl, is a unique feature that allows storage managers to set IO QoS individually for separate applications or databases. This allows users, whether cloud services or traditional enterprises, to run several high demand databases on the same SolidFire array.

Unexpected benefits

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That was what convinced ServInt to buy SolidFire and, in the process, start moving away from DAS to a SAN architecture. Another unique feature of SolidFire is its scalability – while other solid state vendors measure their capacity in Tbytes, SolidFire uses Petabytes – up to 3.4 Pbytes to be exact for its largest array. And that is the scale-up capacity; SolidFire also has completely automated the process of adding arrays to a cluster, making the process completely plug-and play. And that was a second major benefit that Nicastro did not initially appreciate.

“Right now with our DAS model, adding storage capacity, replacing old storage boxes with new ones, or changing storage flavors, requires moving customers to another server, replacing the hardware, and moving the customers back, which is often a multi-day process requiring a lot of engineering time,” Nicastro says. “And we have that issue times several thousand servers.”

In contrast, ServInt’s engineers found that adding a new SolidFire array to their cluster took one person 90 minutes, from delivery at the loading dock to full production. “Configuring a SolidFire server is pretty much put the IP addresses on it, put the cluster name on it, then click ‘add drives’,” he says. “Quite honestly we didn’t fully understand the benefits of that when we were evaluating SolidFire initially.” But those benefits come down to major operational savings. It is for that reason that ServInt is starting a marketing campaign to convince its customers to move off their DAS-based services to SolidFire.

This ability, Prassl says, is designed to protect customer investments in its systems. “Maybe I want to add the most dense and newest storage platform from SolidFire. Why should I have to set that up separate from the systems I already own,” Prassl says. “The answer is I don’t. I just add it in.”

That means the end of forklift upgrades every few years as old arrays wear out or run out of capacity and need replacement. Instead users can simply add a new array, incorporating the latest technology, into the existing cluster and migrate to it without ever having to shut things down and restarting. Nicastro says that he can move applications from one SolidFire node to another so quickly that customers never notice. Also incremental addition of nodes allows customers to expand capacity in 1U increments with a very linear progression of both performance and capacity.

Announcements

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SolidFire_Scale_OutThursday SolidFire announced four new features:

·         First it is adding 16 Gigabit active/active failover Fibre Channel functionality. “This allows enterprises to take advantage of the scale of SolidFire, the quality of service capabilities and the automation, without having to change the protocol of their applications if they are using Fibre Channel today,” Prassl said.

·         Second, it has added the ability to mix different types of nodes in a cluster, so users can add new nodes and even can mix iSCSI and Fibre Channel in one cluster.

·         Third it has announced native real-time remote replication. This is unique among solid state drive systems. “So I can have one cluster that can replicate to three different clusters all at the same time and volumes from other systems replicating in the opposite direction,” Prassl says.

·         Fourth, it is announcing integrated backup and restore to any large object store that supports the SWIFT and Amazon S3 APIs. This means that SolidFire customers can do remote back ups automatically either to another data center or to an online service and to any media, not just to another SolidFire array.

The final piece of the picture is price. Solid state drives are famously expensive, often in the $10 per Gbyte range. But SolidFire can sell its servers at prices as low as $3 per Gyte, Prassl said, depending of course on volume and other variables (see embedded video below). At that price range, it can compete on price against traditional spinning disk.

Wikibon Cofounder and CTO David Floyer said on theCUBE last year that “If you’re talking about a performance system, then the cost is very competitive [with high performance disk systems] indeed, presuming that the data is compressible and deduplicate-able, which most of it is. So it’s very, very cost effective.” (See embedded video below).

SolidFire has found a strong market among very demanding users, most of them online services such as ServInt. However, it also has large enterprises such as Sears on its customer list, and SolidFire is interested in expanding its presence in the enterprise market. Enterprise CIOs should seriously consider this vendor as they move their storage infrastructure to solid state.

Graphics courtesy SolidFire


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