Software Defined Storage - Techtalk 42
Transcript
hi this is Keith Townsen and you're watching episode 42 of virtualized Geeks Tech talk we're going to try and tap tackle a really tough topic software defining storage there's a lot of confusion about what software defining storage how is that different from regular sand management software every storage array has software so by definition isn't that software defined storage so let's move away from kind of the marketing term of software defined storage and tackle it from practically a set of capabilities you're trying to achieve and then
we can tie that back into why we call it software defined or what i' like to call abstracted Storage I think software defined is a good definition for what it is you're practically trying to achieve so just like everything that we call software defined we're trying to abstract one thing from another and the data center we call it the software defined data center because we're abstracting the control of the data center away from Individual pie the individual components into one centralized uh unit such as uh
uh storage computer network into open stack to manage your entire infrastructure the same thing with software defined networking and software defined networking we're not necessarily trying to just virtualize the network or even virtualize the network at all we're trying to control the network via software the underlying Network again can be a subset of a bunch of different components from a bunch of different vendors but we give an abstracted view of that to some type of system for centralized management there's no difference when it comes to
software defined storage so I think one of the complex things when it comes to software defined storage is that we get software defying compute you virtualize a bunch of uh x86 Hardware you put a wrapper such as Venter uh s uh secm around that and then you're able to manage uh your compute in a way that you haven't been able before very mature uh softwar defined subsystem networking we're starting to understand that a bit we look at NXX took a while took us a while to
kind of understand what virtualized networking is but we could take the concept of of a router and virtualizing the router we could take the concept of a switch and virtualizing a switch and then adding control around that to make it software defined so NXX provides that software control around it or open daylight or open floor whatever you want to use to uh decouple the control plane from their physical device so we get those things but Storage storage is really tough to think of in a virtual
sense you have dis you have software that manages the disc decoupling those two kind of doesn't make sense you know we have a storage array how can you manage a storage array and take away the software that manages the storage array and and put that somewhere else that doesn't make sense even when you take a look at new mechanics when we take a look at uh vsan the software is tightly coupled with the storage at some point uh so virtualizing the storage really doesn't make a
whole lot of sense we'd have to look at an example such as Amazon's uh various storage products that take a bunch of storage and kind of hides the back in of what's the underlying components of that storage really understand and software defined storage so Amazon's AWS is a perfect example of software defined storage in general it's the abstraction of the control plane not the virtualization of the data plane so you know when we look at a VMware V switch that's a virtualization of the data plane
when we look at uh Amazon AWS storage that's a virtualization in an extraction of both the data plane and the control plane we don't know if Amazon and we know they don't but we don't know if Amazon uses EMC Storage aachi storage a bunch of white Box Storage to provide uh the actual data plane to us all we know is that there's a bunch of pool storage we contract AWS to provide a CL an amount of storage and the class of storage we they abstract that
that storage from us and they abstract the control of that storage from us so let's bring that back to the Enterprise and what does it mean for the Enterprise the abstraction of the control plane for service providers software Define looks different than it does for the Enterprise for the enterprise we have different drivers our drivers are we have a bunch of different storage arrays from multiple vendors we need to put a overlay the software Define on top of those multiple uh storage systems in order to
provide a interface to either applications or orchestration Tools in order to manage and provision the underlying storage that in a nutshell is software to find I don't need to change my EMC array I don't need to add software to it I don't need to take my Hatachi array bolt on some EMC add-on Appliance to virtualize that control plane I can take a solution such as openstack or uh vcac and put and enable that software layer to abstract the underlying control plane uh from my clients I'm
not again virtualizing the data plane what I'm doing is saying from a practical sense I'm putting the overlay on top of my control software that says if client a needs storage from a or C that client doesn't know or care where it's getting storage from My Control software and a great example is emc's Viper does this it takes the it takes that request and says to storage array a which may be a uh net app net Filer and says provision uh and this is the the
Nirvana provision uh a 3 terabyte lung uh from this type of storage and Zone it to this host so the communication from uh the overlay doesn't take over the communication of the data plane it just D directs traffic similar to open Flow open Flow doesn't take over the communication of of the or virtualizes the communication from host a to host B it just does a it just controls the flow of the data and tells host a how to get to host B same thing with software
defined storage so that's our definition or specifically my definition of software defined storage is my view of what software defined storage practically adds to the Enterprise if you have questions comments or if I'm wrong you know what it's my video we'll talk to you next episode of virtualized Geeks Tech talk thanks for tuning in
