Software Defined Storage Solutions

[CougTek]

There are a lot of SDS solutions out there. What's your favorite and why?

Listing a few :

Home - BeeGFS - The Leading Parallel Cluster File System

The leading parallel file system BeeGFS is a hardware-independent POSIX parallel file system (a.k.a Software-defined Parallel Storage) developed with a strong focus on performance and designed for ease of use, simple installation, and management. BeeGFS is created on an Available Source...

www.beegfs.io

Longhorn

Cloud native distributed block storage for Kubernetes

longhorn.io

Mayastor | OpenEBS Docs

In this document you will learn about Mayastor and it's design goals.

openebs.io

MinIO | S3 & Kubernetes Native Object Storage for AI

MinIO's High Performance Object Storage is Open Source, Amazon S3 compatible, Kubernetes Native and is designed for cloud native workloads like AI.

min.io

https://www.quantum.com/en/products/file-and-object/ (still in development)

OpenDrives | Custom Media Storage Solutions

OpenDrives empowers innovators with unimpeded and unlimited access to content and data. Access your content more easily with OpenDrives.

opendrives.com

100% Software Storage - Quobyte

Quobyte's scalable file and object storage is so easy that you can download and install it in minutes.

www.quobyte.com

StorPool Storage-fastest and most efficient block storage for cloud builders

StorPool is designed from the ground up to provide cloud builders, shared hosting providers and MSPs with the most resource efficient storage software on the market. It is faster, more reliable and scalable. Our systems starts from 500 000+ IOPS and 0.2 ms of latency! High performance, low...

storpool.com

Compare TrueNAS Editions - Powerful Storage Platform

TrueNAS is the ultimate Open Source storage platform. Choose from CORE, Enterprise, or SCALE to get the best performance and reliability.

www.truenas.com

Also Ceph/Rook and GlusterFS, although I feel there are better alternatives nowadays.

I left out WekaIO, Portworkx, Datacore (which acquired MayaData) and Spectrum Scale, but all have interesting features.

StorageOS became Ondat and has since been acquired by Akamai last Spring.

Not all of them are equal. Not all of them have the same purpose.

 

[Mercutio]

I have a TrueNAS back-end for the primary storage I have at my datacenter. It's easier to apportion file services for that than try to resize virtual drives. Since my native systems are all on the same 10Gbps switch, it's really hard to complain about performance with the TrueNAS VM mostly running 6x Intel S4510 2TB or 4TB SSDs. The largest consumer of data on an individual basis among my tenants needs just over 3TB of data for their unbelievably poorly designed database full of BLOBs (PDFs, in their case and no I do not know why it is like that).

I really just deployed TrueNAS as a product I'm familiar enough to use for my needs. I have a couple tenants on each physical system plus whatever storage pools they need and it's been OK. My oldest production system is Windows 2016, but all 32 threads and 256GB RAM are used by the same customer and they're pure Windows anyway.

I'm acting as an MSP for these people, because Azure and even Amazon are absolute garbage for SMBs. Seven grand a month for software, network and storage rental for somebody who only has eight full time employees? How about no?

 

[CougTek]

The thing with Azure and AWS is that the price includes a level of redundancy and versatility that would otherwise be unachievable for a small customer. If the company's management assesses that it doesn't need a very high level of availability for it's IT services and/or that it won't need the flexibility to deploy services in distant geographical regions, then a more basic on-prem architecture might be a better alternative for them.

 

[Mercutio]

Cloud makes more sense than rolling out a private datacenter for companies that have scores or hundreds of employees. I agree at that scale. I can't remotely justify those costs when a shop is small enough that hosting costs could pay salaries that would meaningfully impact the head count of the company.

I really feel like Microsoft in particular is pushing hard to eliminate on-prem servers entirely. In the space where I operate, this looks like a huge mistake, although I do appreciate the utility of having my IT gear centralized in a public colo where I know what's going on with power and network as far as redundancy.

I probably will take some time next year to look at some alternative approaches to storage management. BeeGFS looks potentially interesting

 

[sedrosken]

The problem with eliminating on-prem FS stuff is that a lot of the businesses I run into simply don't have the bandwidth to make using a cloud service across however many computers feasible. Whether that's because of their positioning and the lack of options from the area ISPs, or they just plain don't want to pay more for their internet bill (in their defense, Cox at least seems to decide "business-grade" internet is worth some 6-7x what a residential connection would cost) the end result is the same. They'd get acceptable if pedestrian speeds out of everything connecting to a central server over GbE, but they couldn't even get a tenth of that to a cloud service. That's what's keeping a lot of our customers from making the jump just yet. As for on-site domain controllers, I think their days are numbered. We personally don't even use on-prem AD anymore, we have all our stuff joined to Azure AD and managed by Intune.

As for my personal file server, I just don't want to be bothered paying a monthly fee to keep my data on someone else's computer when they might not make the same decisions with it as I would since I know how to maintain my own.

 

[CougTek]

I'll have to look at Intune for a customer soon. It could help simplify the management of their assets. I'm not very familiar with it.

 

[Handruin]

Since this is for a customer, have you also considered or looked into PowerFlex, formerly called ScaleIO? My former product I developed support for using this as block storage and setup a few cluster nodes running it in a test environment.

Dell PowerFlex – Flexibility Unleashed

Flexible high-performance software-defined foundation for agile enterprise.

www.dell.com

 

[CougTek]

I didn't start the thread for a project with a particular customer. Intune is for something unrelated to SDS. I was helping Sedrosken to derail my own thread...

However, I have a customer with a need to simplify, modernize and enhance its current IT infrastructure. I did look at Dell PowerFlex for this, but the switch model requirements were not compatible with the customer. The list of certified switches for Dell PowerFlex only includes Cisco and Dell campus/datacenter switches.

Thanks for mentioning it though.