Kingston Software-Defined Storage User Manual

IS NOW THE TIME FOR SOFTWARE - DEFINED STORAGE?

Software-Defined Storage (SDS) is the process of abstracting the storage software from the storage hardware. SDS, on paper, has an undeniable appeal. It should reduce costs by enabling organisations to separate the storage software purchase from the hardware purchase. With SDS, customers should be able to leverage commodity server and storage media pricing to create a far less expensive storage infrastructure.

Although the SDS concept has been available for decades, it has failed to live up to expectations. Both sides of the SDS equation are to blame. The software hasn’t fully exploited the potential of being hardware independent.

At the same time, the storage hardware didn’t have the performance profiles to support it. Thanks to the advent of affordable, high-performance flash, powerful CPUs and high-speed networking, off-the-shelf hardware is now more than ready for SDS.

S D S R E A D I N E S S

For the SDS concept to work, several components within the storage ecosystem must be true. SDS runs on standard Intel servers. Today, there are plenty of servers explicitly designed to be storage servers. A storage server typically has plenty of room for storage media and plenty of available slots for network interface cards to support storage IO. This type of server configuration is now commonplace. These servers also have the CPU horsepower that SDS requires to perform

its functions.

Another critical component of the storage ecosystem is the storage medium, which has undergone a significant improvement thanks to the introduction and advancement of flash technology. When the data centre was mostly hard-disk drives (HDD), SDS software needed to carefully consider the features it delivered because of the latency of HDD. SATA SSDs helped alleviate the HDD bottleneck but still required the use of a performance-robbing SATA host controller. Today, NVMe SSDs provide high performance and very low latencies because a host controller is not required thanks to the direct connection to the CPU. SDS vendors can implement features such as deduplication, erasure coding and compression with almost no noticeable impact to the user.

Networking is another critical component of the storage ecosystem. All SDS solutions are most typically shared storage solutions, and much of the solution’s return on investment (ROI) counts on the utilisation efficiencies of shared storage over direct-attached storage. Without a high-performance, low-latency network, those efficiencies are outweighed by the need for performance. The good news for SDS, and customers, is that modern networking technology can deliver IO performance that rivals direct-attached storage, making a shared storage solution ideal for many storage use cases.

A final factor is that each of these components is available from multiple hardware vendors. Customers are relatively free to shop between these vendors for the best technology and the best price. The competitive nature of SDS forces hardware vendors to innovate while being price competitive.

Kingston, for example, innovates on several fronts. It fines tune its drives for specific use cases – some of its SSDs target high-transaction workloads like databases and other more read-intensive workloads. The ability to customise drives to the use case enables Kingston to balance cost and performance to bring the most value to its customers. Kingston also engineers its drives to deliver consistent performance and high reliability through finely tuned firmware to deliver industry-leading Quality of Service (QoS).