WHITE PAPER AUGUST ATLANTIS HYPERSCALE The Software Defined Datacentre.

Transcription

1 WHITE PAPER AUGUST 2015 ATLANTIS HYPERSCALE The Software Defined Datacentre

2 GET IN TOUCH: AMERICAS BIOS EMEA +44(0) APAC +61(0) THE SOFTWARE DEFINED DATACENTRE Rewind a few years and take a look into the bowels of the datacentre - individual compute, individual storage, and interconnect doing its best to be the central nervous system of a Frankenstein s monster. One component for one task - an inefficient array of over-powered, under-stressed hardware whirring away 24/7. Fast forward back to today and we see an entirely different DC landscape. Over 70% of all servers are now virtualised and that figure is set to rise to over 80% by It is no secret what virtualisation can do in terms of reducing DC footprint and power consumption, the act of servers being abstracted from dedicated physical environments to virtual machines allows for automated provisioning, load balancing, and management processes. This advancement in hardware utilisation has led to innovative technology improvements to support the growing interest and uptake of virtualisation. Meanwhile, other critical data centre components have not advanced. Network and storage assets have remained relatively static, becoming bottlenecks limiting the potential of infrastructure automation and dynamic scale. Many DCs remain ill-equipped to fully support a virtualised environment, hence the dawn of the Software Defined Datacentre (SDDC). The concept of SDDC involves taking virtualisation concepts such as abstraction, automation and pooling and applies them to all components of datacentre infrastructure to achieve IT as a service. A software-defined data centre is designed to provide an additional layer of abstraction on top of the normal hardware infrastructure and public or private clouds. The idea of this kind of abstraction allows IT departments to define their own requirements and achieve the necessary levels of performance, security, and availability. The overwhelming uptake of virtualisation of servers and desktops means that the underlying hardware has become a dumb component, a host upon which resides the intelligent, value-adding software and virtualisation stack. No more vendor lock-in, no more being held ransom. Instead the freedom to choose reliable, cost-effective commodity hardware. Lowering Total Cost of Ownership is one of the primary goals of SDDC, made possible through shrinking DC footprints, reducing both power consumption and cooling, and the subsequent drop of ongoing maintenance costs. HYPERCONVERGENCE Traditionally enterprises have bought servers and either a SAN or NAS storage array separately. This approach is both complex and costly as the organisation is responsible for integrating, managing and maintaining disparate systems to deliver IT services. The first step towards resolving this issue was the introduction of converged systems, a more modern approach where enterprises bought SAN or NAS storage arrays and servers that were integrated by a third-party and delivered to the customer in a single rack. Some clever marketing and an eye-catching bezel in front of standard storage, networking and compute components, but lacking in providing much genuine value-add over traditional systems. While this approach simplifies integration of the components, it is complex to maintain, provides limited performance with disk-based storage and is costly. The next logical step along the path to ultimate DC efficiency is hyper-convergence. Local storage, servers and virtualisation are integrated into a single unified system, simplifying deployment and management and taking the concept of convergence to the next level. While converged systems present separate components engineered to work well together, hyper-converged systems bring a modular approach designed to scale out with additional simple-to-deploy modules. These modules are mainly designed around storage and compute on a single x86 server chassis interconnected by 10Gb Ethernet. Hyper-converged solutions present a simplified architecture with a simplified administration model, all components are managed via a single pane of glass, all resources are combined into a single pool allowing forward thinking IT managers to benefit from cloud economics on premise.

3 ADVANTAGES OF HYPERCONVERGENCE Hyperconvergence is the epitome of the Software Defined Data Centre commoditised hardware providing a stable and reliable base upon which the intelligent software runs. This software-focussed nature provides the flexibility and scalability to meet business needs without a lift-and-shift infrastructure replacement. As software features are added, they can be rolled out across your entire infrastructure stack in the blink of an eye. Hyperconverged solutions are also immensely agile workloads can easily be moved wherever and whenever necessary, due to single pane of glass management for all resources, workload migration headaches become a thing of the past. INTRODUCING ATLANTIS COMPUTING. Atlantis Computing, with its headquarters in Mountain View, California, has long been revolutionising the industry by offering the industry s most flexible and powerful SDS (software-defined storage) platform. Having won both Best of VMWorld and Best of Citrix Synergy Awards, Atlantis boasts having the world s largest VDI deployment (130,000 users in a US-based tier-1 financial organisation) based upon its software. INTRODUCING USX Atlantis USX is a software-defined storage solution that delivers the performance of an all-flash storage array at half the cost of traditional SAN or NAS. USX allows users to pool any SAN, NAS or DAS storage and accelerate its performance by up to ten times, increasing transactions per second, reducing mailbox response time, speeding up development environment provisioning, accelerating VDI and cutting data processing time. USX does all this and more while at the same time consolidating storage to increase storage capacity by up to ten times. USX enables pooling of all types of storage (SAN, NAS, Flash, RAM, DAS and Public Cloud) and instantly delivers virtual storage volumes to any application, this enables virtual workloads to shift between storage systems, DC and the cloud a whole new level storage agility just became a reality. HyperDup Deduplication: real-time deduplication technology provides data reduction, IO acceleration, faster provisioning, data mobility, security and business continuity Policy-based storage management: enables customers to efficiently manage capacity, performance and availability across all storage in the datacentre irrespective of underlying hardware. 3

4 GET IN TOUCH: AMERICAS BIOS EMEA +44(0) APAC +61(0) Automation and QOS: automated provisioning, configuration and monitoring of storage systems and quality of service through integration with industry-standard orchestration systems. INTRODUCING HYPERSCALE The Atlantis Hyperscale is a hyperconverged appliance built on commodity hardware around the already proven and award-winning software defined storage USX platform, in effect offering the plug and play simplicity of hardware-defined platforms without the price-tag and without the hardware handcuffs. Installing this all-in-one SDDC takes under an hour, it is specially optimised for server and desktop virtualisation and delivers all-flash performance, but at 90% lower cost than traditional storage and up to 50% lower than competitive appliances. WHAT MAKES IT SPECIAL? All-flash architecture and unique in-memory technologies deliver top performance for any application: Makes VDI faster than a pc 12 second boot time Near-instant app launches Near-instant Microsoft windows and outlook search Extreme cost-efficiency: Up to 90% reduction in CAPEX compared to traditional configurations. Up to 650 users per appliance Deploy persistent VDI for under $225 per desk top (storage and compute) Makes virtualisation simple: Zero configuration, fast deployment, single point of contact for support Single pool of hardware, single pane of management Single appliance for all virtualised compute and storage needs Buy only what you need, scale performance and storage together easily Performance What does all-flash performance look like and how does it relate to real-life workloads? BIOS IT Labs put the Hyperscale through rigorous testing to find out just how fast it is. The Hyperscale presents three separate volumes of storage which we benchmarked separately and totalled the results. The benchmarking was completed using IO Meter on BIOS IT s test appliance. VCAC VVOL VCENTER OPENSTACK CLOUDSTACK IBM REST API SELF-HEALING AUTONOMICS EVENT-BASED MANAGEMENT AUTOMATION QUALITY OF SERVICE CAPACITY PERFORMANCE AVAILABILITY MANAGEMENT POLICY-BASED STORAGE MANAGEMENT DATA SERVICES DATA REDUCTION Deduplication Compression IO ACCELERATION Caching Coalescing PROVISIONING Cloning Customization DATA MOBILITY Teleport File Replication SECURITY Encryption Data Protection HYPERDUP CONTENT-AWARE DATA SERVICES BUSINESS CONTINUITY Backup & DR High Availability SAN/NAS LOCAL STORAGE CLOUD STORAGE STORAGE POOLING AND ABSTRACTION OF STORAGE HARDWARE 4

5 FIGURE 1 Figure 1 shows the performance from one Hyperscale using IOMeter, this was measured using 70% read, 30% write, 4K random. We ran 3 of these tests simultaneously and achieved around 75,000 IOPS in total. In the BIOS IT Labs, we also put the Hyperscale Deduplication to the test to see if it stacked up as well as advertised. We managed to squeeze over 200 virtual machines onto the box all cloned from a single image, giving us a very impressive deduplication percentage. The storage volume is 1TB in size and we managed to store more than 2.5TB of virtual machines, resulting in 96% of our storage capacity free which is very impressive. We didn t have to stop there! Atlantis boasts the hyper scale can safely handle up to 400 persistent VDI seats on its CX- 12 model and up to 650 on the CX-24. FIGURE 2 We can see in Figure 2 that with 201 virtual machines on the host and 18.70TB provisioned, we still had 996GB free of 1.01TB. Atlantis USX recognises this as 100% deduplication. 5

6 GET IN TOUCH: AMERICAS BIOS EMEA +44(0) APAC +61(0) VIRTUAL DESKTOP DENSITY (CX-12 / CX-24) Maximum Number of Virtual Desktops (Per 4-Node Appliance) Task Worker (20GB, 1vCPU, 1.5GB RAM LoginVSI Task Worker) Knowledge Worker (50GB, 2vCPU, 2GB RAM LoginVSI Knowledge Worker) Power User (100GB, 2vCPU, 4GB RAM LoginVSI Storage Workload) Stateless VDI 450 / / / 250 Persistent VDI 400 / / / 250 FIGURE 3 We can see from figure 3 that the Hyperscale can handle up to 250 persistent Power User VDI seats on a single appliance! FIGURE 4 For database workloads - Using HammerDB, an open source database load testing and benchmarking tool for Oracle workload tests, we saw a TPM count of well over 3.9million. AS MORE AND MORE OF OUR APPLICA- TIONS ARE VIRTU- ALISED, IT LEAD- ERS MUST NOW CONSIDER A FRESH APPROACH TO IN- FRASTRUCTURE PROCUREMENT AND DEPLOYMENT HY- PERCONVERGENCE MAKES SENSE, IT IS HERE AND IT IS HERE TO STAY. 6

7 CONCLUSION There is no denying that the way we use IT infrastructure has changed, with an overwhelming majority of workloads being virtualised there is no longer a need for specialist systems for individual tasks. Despite this, however, many of these virtualised applications are being run on legacy equipment in an inefficient attempt to keep up with this shift. The dawn of the Software Defined Datacentre is upon us, and these inefficiencies have become a thing of the past. The principals of compute virtualisation have been applied to the DC components which had remained a bottleneck storage and interconnect. Hyperconvergence brings a simplification of deployment of the underlying infrastructure for virtualisation and applications, a scalable appliance that allows for predictable investment and ease of procurement ($X delivers Y virtual workloads). The Hyperscale hyperconverged virtualisation platform provides a single pool of underlying hardware managed through a single pane of management, enabling DC managers to concentrate wholly on management of the virtualised layer. Based on performance tests by BIOS IT, it is evident that the Hyperscale stacks up to its claims. With impressive deduplication/compression results and high IOPS, the appliance proves its worth in the modern datacentre. As more and more of our applications are virtualised, IT leaders must now consider a fresh approach to infrastructure procurement and deployment hyperconvergence makes sense, it is here and it is here to stay. ABOUT BIOS IT BIOS IT delivers global first-to-market technology together with High Performance Computing products and techniques, previously exclusive to academia and scientific research, into the real world. With a number of key hardware and software partners, BIOS IT are able to design and develop unique and manageable compute and storage clusters with industry leading value/performance ratios. Privately held since inception, we have grown from humble beginnings to become a global leader in enterprise information technology with over 20 years experience. Although during this period technology architectures have evolved, our mantra for delivering high quality, first to market products and services has always been the same. This set of core values has allowed us to grow organically to a turnover of over $60million with a foot hold in the world s leading economies. As a dedicated division, BIOS IT has then taken this innovation a step further to enable constant investment in new technologies and subsequently allowed us to design and manufacture our own HPC systems, the first of which was the micro-server Viridis platform, the world s first ARM server for the enterprise. This revolutionary architecture has enabled us to deliver supercomputing performance from as little as 5W per server, paving the way to exascale computing. CONTACT US sales@bios-it.com AMERICAS: BIOS EMEA: +44 (0) APAC:: +61(0) BIOS IT 7