We trust computers to fly jets... why not trust them with our petabytes?
Wait, hold on, software-defined storage ain't so crazy
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Storagebod blog Listening to The Register's latest Speaking In Tech podcast got me thinking a bit more about the craze of software-defined networking, storage and whatever next. I wondered if it is a real thing as opposed to a load of hype.
For the time being I’ve decided to treat software-defined stuff as a real thing, or at least as something that may become a real thing.
So, software-defined storage?
The role of the storage array is changing; in fact, it's simplifying. That box of drives will store stuff that you need to have around just in case or for future reference. It's for data that needs to persist. And that may sound silly to have to spell out, but basically what I mean is that the storage array is not where you are going to process transactions. Your transactional storage will be as close to the compute nodes as possible, or at least this appears to be the current direction of travel.
But there is also a certain amount of discussion and debate about ensuring quality of service from storage systems to guarantee performance and how we implement it in a software-defined manner: how can we hand off administration of the data to autonomous programs?
Bod’s thoughts
This all comes down to services, discovery and a subscription model. Storage devices will have to publish their capabilities via some kind of software interface; applications will use this to find out what services and capabilities an array has and then subscribe to them.
So a storage device may publish its available capacity, IOPS speeds and latency but it could also reveal that it has the ability to do snapshots, replication, and thick and thin allocation. It could also publish a cost associated with this.
Applications, application developers and support teams will make decisions at this point as to what sort of services they subscribe to; perhaps a required capacity and IOPS performance, perhaps take the array-based snapshots but do the replication at an application layer.
Applications will have a lot more control about what storage they have and use; they will make decisions whether certain data is pinned in local solid-state drives or never gets anywhere near the flash; whether it needs something brilliant at sequential storage or random access. It may have requirements for recovery time objectives (RTO) and recovery point objectives (RPO); thus allowing it to make decisions about which transactions can be lost and which need to be committed now.
And as this happens, the data centre becomes something that is managed as opposed to a brainless silo of components. I think this is a topic that I’m going to keep coming back to over the months. ®
COMMENTS
"We trust computers to fly jets..."
But we do not trust them to fly without human back-up, do we?
And even then, if the humans misunderstand what the computer is telling them or get the settings wrong, we get disasters like the Air France crash off Brazil.
Indeed..
<< Nothing wrong with software in theory, just in practice its out-sourced to muppets to do for cheapness and speed (yes, right!)>>
You beat me to it.
I really didn't realise just how bad it can be until I started on my latest contract; I have had to deal with out sourced programming work before and was fairly non-plussed by the quality and speed of their work, but these people take it to a whole new level below the basement car park.
When you look at it, the company really have not saved anything; the inefficiencies of the current system are costing them serious amounts of money. Getting the right people in house, even at a realistic wage for the UK would cost a bit more, but the work would be done properly and within the right time frame and this would save a great deal of time and effort (i.e. money!) across the whole business.
But it won't happen - why? Because the senior management only look at the single figure of cost and despite the fact that they are supposed to be taking a strategic view are so myopic that they make Mr. Magoo look like Hawkeye.
"We trust computers to fly jets... why not trust them with our petabytes?"
Cost and safety/mission criticality.
90% of the code used in aircraft is there to detect when something goes wrong, this code is also implemented in different ways across different platforms with the results analysed and double checked.
There are very strict standards that must be adhered to for the code to be even allowed to go anywhere near a plane and then it needs to be further tested before it is allowed to fly.
As stated above, this is not infallible and still subject to human error.
The cost and time to implement these systems is astronomical compared to a PC operating system based application.
Is it possible to do it? Yes. Will a business do it, probably not, simply as the cost and timescales would put them so behind the market that the business would be bankrupt before they sold license 1.
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