Watch now the recording of the session “High-Performance Storage for CloudStack” by Alex Ivanov, Product Manager at StorPool Storage, from this year’s CloudStack Collaboration Conference! StorPool was a gold sponsor at the virtual event and we had 3 speakers that shared their knowledge and experience with the audience.
About CloudStack Collaboration Conference 2021
Taking place over 5 days (November 8 – 12), the CloudStack Collaboration Conference 2021 was the first virtual annual get-together of the Apache CloudStack community. It was attended by over 420 people from over 25 countries, from leading enterprises, cloud and IaaS providers, managed service providers, software providers and telcos. The Conference proved to be a resounding success for our community, attracting not only those with extensive experience with CloudStack but many cloud engineers and IaaS architects new to the technology.
About the talk “High-Performance Storage for CloudStack” – CloudStack Collaboration Conference 2021
StorPool is a leading software provider that develops the most reliable and speedy storage platform on the market. The software comes as an utterly hands-off solution – we architect, deploy, tune, monitor, and maintain your StorPool Storage system so that your users experience a speedy and reliable service. StorPool has a native plug-in for CloudStack and it is the ideal solution for companies that aim to optimize and grow their business, eliminate data storage issues, or secure fast and reliable access to data to achieve their business goals.
Alex Ivanov is the Product Manager at StorPool Storage and is responsible for the product strategy and management at the company. He has a lot of experience working on the storage market and a deep understanding of the storage needs of today’s businesses managing large-scale clouds running diverse, mission-critical workloads. His focus for the past two years has been working closely with StorPool’s development team to evolve the storage platform and help expand its features and capabilities so that it can deliver above and beyond what is possible with other primary storage products in terms of reliability, agility, speed, and cost-effectiveness.
Recording of the talk “High-Performance Storage for CloudStack” – CloudStack Collaboration Conference 2021
Transcript of the talk “High-Performance Storage for CloudStack” – CloudStack Collaboration Conf 2021
“Тhank you for joining me for this talk on high-performance block storage for CloudStack. Тoday we’re gonna be covering a topic that’s quite popular nowadays in IT circles: Is storage a commodity for cloud infrastructure deployments, or is it an opportunity to differentiate?
For StorPool, we believe that storage is definitely an area where having the best, the fastest and the most reliable storage can allow you to differentiate and be more competitive in the market. Whereas some of the other players in our industry see it as just a commodity, you swap anything in and it will just keep working.
So today we’re going to go over: what the next generation of IT services providers is doing – what are their goals, what are their use cases and how we’ve been helping them for the last 9 or 10 years already. Then we’re going to cover one of the reference customers of StorPool – a company based in the United Kingdom called Amito.
We’ll show you the project that they’ve completed with StorPool Storage and the reasons they selected us as their provider. After that, we’re going to have an overview of the StorPool Storage solution for CloudStack environments. It will be a general introduction to our software and how it can help you, especially if you are a managed services provider that matches the profile in the previous 2 sections.
The next generation IT services provider
Typical Situations
The next generation IT services provider – typically what we’ve seen that they’re doing, what we have been helping them do is that: the typical situation is that they aim to follow modern multicloud infrastructure practices.
So these service providers that we’ve been helping are doing largely automated API driven deployments with lots of DevOps practices being applied. Proper site reliability planning is often а topic that needs to be covered and we helped them with it. They are offering public cloud services, so this is either infrastructure as a service, platform as a service, different kinds of hosted software as a service or cloud hosting. Or they’re offering private cloud services – tailored solutions for small and medium businesses and enterprises.
Sometimes they have hosted private clouds in their own data centers. Whereas other times they have managed private clouds that are managed in the location owned by the particular business.
Use cases
In terms of use cases, we are seeing a lot of all-NVMe deployments where these NVMe SSDs are used only for storage, as well as hybrid deployments, where part of the cloud is with an all-NVMe SSD setup. And a part of the cloud deployment is hard disks and all of those are serving data to virtualized container-based or bare-metal environments.
The workloads that we’re helping them manage are databases, different infrastructure types like virtual desktop infrastructure, large applications in particular customer relationship management, enterprise resource planning apps, Cloud gaming applications and, in some cases, persistent Kubernetes volumes. The scale that we’ve seen in the market is about a hundred terabytes plus to tens of petabytes of stored data across the whole business. And that’s typically anywhere from one to 30 plus data centers around the globe being managed by a given services provider.
The typical projects are converging legacy IT stacks to software-defined data center designs, consolidating multiple IT systems to one stack. This is the kind of stuff that we’re seeing as emerging tendencies in the market.”
Learn more about the Amito project and how Amito built a large-scale multi-terabyte storage deployment with CloudStack and StorPool in the video and read the Amito success story.