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  1. #1
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    "OnApp Storage": bullet-proof software SAN?

    Quote Originally Posted by The Register
    UK-based cloud infrastructure supplier OnApp says it has created a scalable and resilient SAN for cloud service providers by using the provider's virtualised application server's local storage and aggregating it with virtual smart controllers running in the same servers.
    http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/04...cloud_storage/

    is this a real game changer for the SAN hardware as we know it?
    http://onapp.com/storage/
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  2. #2
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    Heard about this being in the pipe for a while... we shall see how it pans out.
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  3. #3
    Quote Originally Posted by cwl@apaqdigital View Post
    http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/04...cloud_storage/

    is this a real game changer for the SAN hardware as we know it?
    http://onapp.com/storage/
    Absolutely. A huge portion of the cost premium of "cloud" is having to have a SAN built in. Good SANs cost $$$$ (absolutely essential to performance and reliability), and bad SANs cost $$ while also hurting reliability and performance compared to on-node storage.

    Essentially, you've got all these hypervisor servers that could have 2-6 hard drives attached for next to nothing, but instead you have them all sit empty, and then you have to set up a separate SAN box. That gets expensive. This solution lets you take advantage of the 2-6 disks you can be putting into each server already, and still get the benefits of SAN in terms of redundancy and failover. To me, that's huge. Also, this could potentially reduce network costs, as, instead of having one big SAN box that needs multiple 10gbe connections, if you have 10 boxes that all share the disk load, a 1gbe connection from each would be sufficient in a large number of use cases. The cost benefits of having 1 or 2 gbe connections per server for SAN instead of a 10gbe connection is huge. When you consider that most workloads are not sequential-heavy and are random i/o heavy, the 120MB/s or so you can get over 1gbe per server is actually pretty good for 4 hard drives per server. There are cases where this could be a bottleneck, but my feeling is that this would be sufficient the majority of the time.
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  4. #4
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    looks interesting.

  5. #5
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    I agree its important, could be as huge breakthrough. In addition to reliability this also gives you much more accessible live migration functionality, which is completely lacking in most public clouds.

  6. #6
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    Hmmm... could give AppLogic a run now that they have a solution to storage performance / redundancy...
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  7. #7
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    Looks promising for sure. OnApp was a bit bumpy at first, but things seem to be rolling now.

  8. #8
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    I am sure it will be a great product, especially when you look at other things from OnApp, and the people they have working on this.

    However it will be interesting to see how many providers go with the solution, at least in the beginning, as you need a lot of trust with your hardware/software when there are that many 'eggs in one basket'.
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  9. #9
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    Looks interesting, though their website doesn't really explain how it applies in a real world scenario necessarily. It gives features without explaining how it works.
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  10. #10
    Quote Originally Posted by MikeTrike View Post
    Looks promising for sure. OnApp was a bit bumpy at first, but things seem to be rolling now.
    I have to second that comment - OnApp basically was a beta test with its 'free intro offer' to so many last year, and while it worked out some/most of the issues - it's not the type of product/company I'd jump on their next big product with production grade level clients for a while on this new SAN concept.

    That said, I think its a great idea, I believe it was really first pushed commercially by a company doing web based storage (a bit popular on Pingzine and Hostingcon 2 years ago, but the name escapes me). They basically had a customized linux kernel to spread the file storage over many servers across a network (similar to what OnApp is doing). OnApp's difference is its got some commercial teeth to it now i think, and commercialized it to leverage SAN versus just web based file access.

    We are signed up and planning to trial it though internally, but unlikely to place live data on it until at least version 3 is out
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  11. #11
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    it seems a great product for migrating existing VPS nodes to hypervisors plus software "virtual" SAN.
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  12. #12
    Just got accepted to beta:

    OnApp Storage requires additional local disks in hypervisors, beyond those normally required for an OnApp Cloud. These disks must be unused – you cannot use drives that are used for existing LVM storage, or for the hypervisor’s primary OS.
    So what exactly should I be using for the hypervisor's primary OS? Really don't want to tie up a lot of storage on the OS if I need additional separate disks for the cloud storage portion.
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  13. #13
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    The idea is great, but the proof will be in the pudding so to speak.
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  14. #14
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    Quote Originally Posted by funkywizard View Post
    So what exactly should I be using for the hypervisor's primary OS? Really don't want to tie up a lot of storage on the OS if I need additional separate disks for the cloud storage portion.
    If it's just a hypervisor, then an SD Card/Drive or other small /onboard bootable media.

  15. #15
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    Quote Originally Posted by funkywizard View Post
    Just got accepted to beta:



    So what exactly should I be using for the hypervisor's primary OS? Really don't want to tie up a lot of storage on the OS if I need additional separate disks for the cloud storage portion.
    With a RAID card you can create logical volumes to put the OS on say a 10GB volume /dev/sda and the rest for /dev/sdb. Should be able to do something similar with mdadm as well.
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  16. #16
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    It's definitely needed to bring more people onto the cloud. Low upfront investment is what's needed in this industry and I think this is a viable way of doing it. AppLogic has been doing it for years, but it would be interesting to see what onApp is doing different to better itself in the marketplace.
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  17. #17
    With a RAID card you can create logical volumes to put the OS on say a 10GB volume /dev/sda and the rest for /dev/sdb.
    The idea of using a h/w raid card to present one disk as more than one disk to the host OS, I would certainly expect would work, but is not something I'm interested in doing.

    Quote Originally Posted by FastServ View Post
    Should be able to do something similar with mdadm as well.
    I would expect you couldn't do this in software otherwise they wouldn't have explicitly said you can't do it. I believe they do want to use an entire raw disk for their storage and so it shouldn't be possible to split it up and use part for the hypervisor OS, otherwise they wouldn't have gone out of their way to say not to do that. Maybe it's possible you can do it and they're telling you that you can't anyway, but for the time being I'll assume that they're being honest that you can't.

    Looking at it, they say they only need 30gb of storage for the hypervisor OS, so I guess I could put a 40gb SSD in there. Shouldn't increase the cost too much or use up valuable chassis space.
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  18. #18
    any idea on what the cost of this is going to be? They make it sound like the cost will be tied to the size of your storage in GB, but no actual prices are presented. If the cost is per-gb, then I would imagine this would tip the scale in favor of SSD, since the storage itself is pretty expensive, it would be easier to stomach a per-gb license cost. We're already looking at this from an SSD point of view in general, since thin provisioning and deduplication is far more useful for SSD than for regular storage, as well as, a big bottleneck for VPS or Cloud is disk i/o, and just going ahead and saying "we're doing SSD-only" neatly solves that problem. If you're going to charge "cloud" pricing, SSD seems like a good way to justify that cost to people. "Sure it may cost similar to a dedicated server but everything, I mean everything, is stored on replicated SSDs, and you get full failover, elastic cloud storage, etc."
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  19. #19
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    Quote Originally Posted by funkywizard View Post
    Just got accepted to beta:



    So what exactly should I be using for the hypervisor's primary OS? Really don't want to tie up a lot of storage on the OS if I need additional separate disks for the cloud storage portion.
    there are many small size mSATA PCIe SSD drives on the market now can be plugged into PCI-E slot directly as OS boot drive.

    also, most socket 2011 server boards now come with 10x on-board SATA ports, thanks to C602 chipset, so that you can have 8-10 inexpensive large-capacity non-enterprise SATA-II/SATA-III drives per hypervisor, directly connect them to on-board controller, then dedicate them to the "virtual" SAN.

    the new dual socket 2011 2U twin2 quad-node (SYS-2027TR-HTRF) from SM is also looking good for this type of platform. it can be 4x high capacity hypervisors, then put 24x 2.5" SATA/SAS/SSD drives contributed to virtual SAN, sorta killing two birds with one big stone!
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  20. #20
    Quote Originally Posted by cwl@apaqdigital View Post
    there are many small size mSATA PCIe SSD drives on the market now can be plugged into PCI-E slot directly as OS boot drive.

    also, most socket 2011 server boards now come with 10x on-board SATA ports, thanks to C602 chipset, so that you can have 8-10 inexpensive large-capacity non-enterprise SATA-II/SATA-III drives per hypervisor, directly connect them to on-board controller, then dedicate them to the "virtual" SAN.

    the new dual socket 2011 2U twin2 quad-node (SYS-2027TR-HTRF) from SM is also looking good for this type of platform. it can be 4x high capacity hypervisors, then put 24x 2.5" SATA/SAS/SSD drives contributed to virtual SAN, sorta killing two birds with one big stone!
    Thanks for the feedback. mSATA PCIe certainly sounds good (or even regular sata ssd if the cost is acceptable) if they're OS bootable.

    The supermicro solution there also looks compelling for this use case. If you're sticking to SSD-only storage, then having that many 2.5" slots is perfect. That said, the official spec requires / strongly encourages 4x1g ports or at least 1x10g ports. I know there were some reasonably priced 4x1g supermicro boards for the X8 series / x34xx cpus, but I haven't looked into it for the X9, and definitely with that twin squared it looks like that only has 2 ports each.
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  21. #21
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    Quote Originally Posted by funkywizard View Post
    Thanks for the feedback. mSATA PCIe certainly sounds good (or even regular sata ssd if the cost is acceptable) if they're OS bootable.

    The supermicro solution there also looks compelling for this use case. If you're sticking to SSD-only storage, then having that many 2.5" slots is perfect. That said, the official spec requires / strongly encourages 4x1g ports or at least 1x10g ports. I know there were some reasonably priced 4x1g supermicro boards for the X8 series / x34xx cpus, but I haven't looked into it for the X9, and definitely with that twin squared it looks like that only has 2 ports each.
    yes, on twin2 quad-node, you can install low-profile dual GbE or quad GbE or dual 10GbE NIC on riser card in each node so that you can have 4-6 GbE ports or 2x GbE + 2x 10GbE ports per node.
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  22. #22
    Quote Originally Posted by cwl@apaqdigital View Post
    yes, you can install low-profile dual GbE or dual 10GbE NIC on riser card in each node so that you can have 4x GbE ports or 2x GbE + 2x 10GbE ports per node.
    That's certainly interesting then. Is the dual gbe a supermicro part, or requires the typical riser + low profile pcie card?
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  23. #23
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    Quote Originally Posted by funkywizard View Post
    That's certainly interesting then. Is the dual gbe a supermicro part, or requires the typical riser + low profile pcie card?
    AOC-SG-i2 (dual Intel 82574L GbE)
    AOC-SG-i4 (quad Intel 82576 GbE)
    AOC-EXPX9502FXSR (dual Intel 82598EB 10GbE)

    they all can fit the riser comes with the twin2 quad-node already.
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  24. #24
    Quote Originally Posted by cwl@apaqdigital View Post
    AOC-SG-i2 (dual Intel 82574L GbE)
    AOC-SG-i4 (quad Intel 82576 GbE)
    AOC-EXPX9502FXSR (dual Intel 82598EB 10GbE)

    they all can fit the riser comes with the twin2 quad-node already.
    Nice. The AOC-SG-i2 is actually pretty affordable too. Provantage has it for around $75 and wiredzone for around $80. If the twin squared already comes with the riser installed, that's a plus as I had a heck of a time finding compatible risers that actually worked properly back when I needed to do that.

    The price on the AOC-EXPX9502FXSR hurts ($2200 or more), but what can you expect for dual 10gbe
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  25. #25
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    Beta is not open yet, but from the screenshots I've seen I am fairly confident it is gluster based. With gluster you can set the number of copies of data to keep, ie. 2, 4, 6, etc. When dealing with dozens of head nodes and hundreds of disks it is considered a "bad idea" with gluster to only keep 2 copies of data, 4 is preferred. So there is thin provisioning and dedupe, but at the cost of maintaining 4 copies of everything. My other concern is that we've been able to make a SATA SAN scale really well by using minimal SSD caching, but with this type of system there is no cache so you'll most definitely need to watch your SATA storage and need the ability to offer SAS/SSD storage. This all being said, we're super eager for the beta to open up to verify/test all of this
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