Not Iron One: IBM Software Defined Storage

    The concepts and causes of the emergence of SDS (Software Defined Storage) - storage systems based on software functionality, sometimes without reference to a specific architecture or hardware platform, lie primarily in the requirements of companies. Today’s business of any company is moving more and more towards the development of analytics, BigData, clouds and social media, which are not mutually exclusive, but complement the overall solution architecture with their requirements. So for example, the most effective implementations of BigData are not complete without the use of analytics. Social media can no longer exist without cloud services and their close integration with the interfaces of social platforms.





    As a result, we come to the conclusion that the influence of technologies and consumer requirements affects the business as a whole, requiring faster access to insights, leading to increased requirements for the development of new applications and the emergence of new competitors. And all this against the backdrop of a huge increase in information volumes, the emergence of new tasks and the introduction of the cloud as an element of infrastructure.

    Against the background of all this, it becomes harder to describe the requirements for the use of storage systems for the whole range of new tasks and conditions. There is a need to free data from the limitations of the hardware platform and rebuild it to work with new business processes and applications. The levels of service requirements mislead IT managers who are accustomed to standard storage methods, creating situations of “blind” adding volumes, isolating data in the “islands” of storage, unreasonable duplication of information, which, in turn, leads to an increase in the cycle of servicing storage networks, the increase in the price of solutions, the complexity of processes within companies and the lack of infrastructure flexibility.

    It is because of the appearance of such problems and tasks that the concept of SDS arose. According to IDC, Software Defined Storage is a bunch of storage software that can be installed on any commodity server (x86 platform, hypervisor or cloud) or other computing platform, and provide a full range of services for storing and combining existing data storage resources, allowing Mobilely move and redistribute storage capacity between these resources depending on requirements.

    The main attributes of SDS are:

    - work on a commodity platform - without specialized hardware platforms or components;

    - A full range of storage services - equivalent to traditional hardware systems;

    - Association (federation) of many existing storage resources: internal drives, cloud, other external storage systems or cloud \ object platforms.

    SDS uses:

    - “Shared nothing” architecture - a distributed computing architecture in which any node of a computing node is self-contained;

    - Horizontally or vertically scaled model.

    Software Defined Storage is divided into three groups: based on file access, object access and block access.

    IBM identifies three key features of SDS in addition to those outlined above:

    Flexibility :

    An enterprise-class, automated solution that enables you to deploy a cloud-based storage infrastructure in minutes.

    Control :

    The most in-depth analysis and optimization of “on permise” (at the customer’s sites) storage systems and cloud storage systems - security, price, performance - using analytics.

    Efficiency : The

    best automation of the processes of placing and managing data between storage media, storage systems, clouds to achieve both levels of service agreement and reduce the cost of the solution.

    IBM has announced a new line of software that covers certain tasks solved by SDS. Common name - IBM Spectrum Storage . It includes a set of well-known technologies, as well as the latest developments.

    Among the well-known, it is worth highlighting the IBM SAN Volume Controller, which has been on the market since 2004 and successfully helps customers consolidate storage volumes and get rid of the problems of simultaneous storage management from different vendors and different classes within the same infrastructure, and also simplifies volume allocation, moving data between different hardware platforms without stopping hosts, adding storage levels and automating the processes of moving and migrating between them. SVC allows you to “hide” essentially any Fiber Channel storage system behind the interface of the appliance itself, and add functionality to virtualized storages, including data compression functionality on the fly, even those storage systems that never knew how to do this.

    In the context of the new family of software, SAN Volume Controller will be calledSpectrum Virtualize the IBM .

    IBM Spectrum Controll - software for automation of management and optimization of storage infrastructure with the ability to provide self-service portals, in-depth analytics and tuning recommendations. It was formerly known as the Virtual Storage Center, which includes the significantly redesigned and improved Tivoli Productivity Center.

    IBM Spectrum Protect is an advanced version of Tivoli Storage Manager that provides a backup and archiving system for schedules, load intensity, and criteria. Of course, there were some data verification algorithms and recovery technologies. Full collaboration support is built into the very concept of the Spectrum Storage product family. So in the case of the modifiedIBM Spectrum Archive , which is based on the Liner Tape File System, which allows you to access data on tape media as a network folder or network mounted drive.

    In addition to the above products, the family includes two more "newcomers" - IBM Spectrum Scale and IBM Spectrum Accelerate. The first is based on GPFS and is a ready-made platform with open APIs for tight integration with Social Media, Hadoop, IBM BigInsight. Allows you to combine both storage and local server drives. It has the ability to consolidate volume from different sources up to the creation of a multilevel storage based on volume pools consisting of local disks, a storage network, file or object storage, and cloud resources. Spectrum Scale interfaces allow you to create files in a single namespace and at the same time store data depending on type, date, user or group at different levels. Automatically transfer information between physical resources until the transfer to the cloud or to the Spectrum Archive after the expiration of the storage period.



    The architecture of the solution today allows you to scale to values ​​in Yottabytes and does not have a physical restriction on the location of hardware elements, allowing you to assemble geographically distributed systems into one control interface with the same set of policies and rules.

    The second product, IBM Spectrum Accelerate, is a software implementation of the unique GRID architecture that underlies the XiV system. It supports the full range of XiV storage system functions and can act as a full-fledged partner when setting up remote mirroring. Just like the hardware platform, it comes in useful volume. The user will not need to think about the type of raid, the number of disks in the raid group, or how to properly configure the system to work with a particular load. IBM Spectrum Accelerate uses any server at the customer site as a hardware platform. This means that you do not need to buy disks or a storage system, just select at least three servers that meet the minimum requirements and get a full-fledged storage system that has all the characteristics of a hardware analog.



    Two new products in the Spectrum Storage line are just part of a future development strategy. All of the above functionality and all the products mentioned above are available to one degree or another in the IBM SoftLayer cloud and are ready for use by customers. IBM has also launched a new product based on PCI-E Flash technology Flash System 900 and a system with integrated management and a wide range of features Flash System V9000. The previous generation of such systems showed the highest results in independent tests and with a number of Ukrainian customers.

    Software Defined Storage Strategy and Steps for Development are one of the most promising IT markets. Today's businesses are more or less susceptible to the problems of management, control and analytics of infrastructures, which is greatly complicated by the large number of independent hardware platforms that perform the same function, but for different tasks. The ability to simplify, automate, optimize and analyze such infrastructures plays an important role in the performance of CAPEX and OPEX of any company.

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