Hello, I'm Laura Guerreiro, and I'm here today to talk with Aviv Kaufmann, an ESG lab analyst,
about SolidFire Storage Solution for the next Enterprise Data Center. Hi Aviv, thanks for
joining me today. Aviv: Grea t to be here.
Laura: Aviv, are public cloud services having an effect on Enterprise IT organizations?
Aviv: Absolutely. Enterprise Organizations were quick to adopt public cloud services,
and they realized great benefits. Mainly around cost savings, but also around reducing complexity
and just making people more productive. But now, people have become accustomed to the
cloud experience, and have begun to demand the same level of service and functionality
from the internal IT departments. Traditional architectures just can't do it. To get there,
Enterprises will need to leverage next generation technologies.
Laura: What is SolidFire? Aviv: SolidFire's an all flash scale out i
scuzzy and fiber channel storage array. Each SolidFire node runs at element OS and contains
10 2-1/2" flash drives. Node models vary in capacity and performance. The system was designed
from the ground up with a goal of creating a storage system that's agile, automated,
and scalable to meet the unpredictable demands of the Next Generation Enterprise Data Center.
SolidFire offers guaranteed performance, high availability, and a low total cost of ownership.
Laura: Tell me a little bit about your testing. Aviv: Sure. After a simple installation, we
tested SolidFire's automated management and provisioning capabilities. The SolidFire's
[gooey 00:01:35] is simple and easy to use, and an open restful API makes it simple to
integrate and automate self-provisioning of storage from nearly any application. We were
able to quickly and easily provision volumes with advanced performance QOS settings from
the SolidFire gooey, as well as from within VMWare View, V Center, and Open Stack.
We were able to simply and non-disruptively grow a SolidFire array by adding a node to
a mixed node cluster. The data was automatically redistributed across the nodes, according
to the capacity and performance capabilities to ensure the proper balance. We then used
a 4 node cluster to simulate a node fault when running a mixed workload. There was minimal
impact to the workload as the system's self-healing capability rebuilt the data across the surviving
3 nodes. When the node is reinserted, the data was
automatically rebalanced across all 4 nodes. Data that is stored on a SolidFire array is always
thin provisioned, compressed, and globally de-duplicated. This means you can deploy less
raw storage capacity to meet your storage requirement. While your mileage will vary,
we looked at some real data from real world deployments. Over the past month, this production
VMWare deployment was consistently able to improve the effective capacity of the storage
by more than 12X. This efficiency helps in SolidFire's semi-synchronous
replication solution as well. Because the data is stored efficiently at both sites,
the actual data that must be replicated is kept to a minimum. We saw this in action.
Failing over and failing back between replication partners was very quick and very easy. SolidFire
gives you the ability to set minimum and maximum performance levels per volume, and a credit
based burst mechanism allows for a little extra performance when you need it. While
other solutions may simply give a higher priority to one volume over another, SolidFire's QOS
guarantees that each volume will receive the minimum number of IOPS required.
We saw this in our testing by measuring the impact of a VDI boot storm on a mission critical
database. With no QOS, the database volume was greatly impacted by the boot storm. While
using QOS guaranteed the database the appropriate level of performance with no impact.
Laura: That's great. Can you tell us why all of this matters to the business?
Aviv: Sure. SolidFire's been anticipating the needs of the Next Generation Enterprise
Data Center since its inception. They bring the public cloud experience to an Enterprise
organization with a focus on agility, guaranteed performance, automated management, high availability,
and inline efficiency. This translates to lower capital expenses, lower operational
expenses, and the ability to dynamically adjust to meet the changing demands of the business.
In the end, SolidFire technology enables the transformation of Enterprise IT from a rigid
cost center into an agile service center. If your organization is frustrated with the
limitations of traditional storage for scale out workloads, and you're striving to deliver
IT as a service from the Next Generation Enterprise Data Center, ESG Labs strongly recommends
that you consider SolidFire for the enterprise. Laura: This has been very informative. Thank
you again for your time. If you'd like to learn more, you can download the full ESG
Lab report from the SolidFire website.