A joint webinar by StorPool and Intel took place on September 27th, on the topic “Power-up Your Cloud with Insanely Fast Storage”. StorPool’s CEO, Boyan Ivanov took the mic to share insights about building storage solutions, which have profound positive impact for companies which build or run clouds.
How to build a better cloud?
The key element to building a better cloud is innovation. And a lot of it happens in the storage layer, which heavily impacts all other components of a cloud – compute, network, even the software stack, running on the cloud.
Firstly, high speed is one of the main goals when building a cloud. This immediately results into less support time and effort, more word of mouth growth and, of course, happy customers. In addition low latency is a key element, since the lower the latency the more CPU & RAM are spared, which increases the overall hardware utilization of the entire cloud. StorPool considers latency of <1 millisecond (ms) to be the absolute minimum in this case. Target is 0.2-0.5 ms at a affordable price point, of course.
Secondly, crucial for the customer’s satisfaction and online success is eliminating downtime. Which can only happen by using a shared storage system. Nowadays the norm is to have all the maintenance and upgrades online, so the customers wouldn’t even know when an upgrade is taking place. This means also high availability of the entire cloud and full data redundancy. And all these things are achieved by live migration and HA features, which are only possible with a shared storage system.
Thirdly, you should be able to scale the system both in capacity and performance, which is again an online process. In this way you build a cloud fabric, which serves as a solid foundation, but also allows your business to scale seamlessly.
The solution: Extremely fast storage system
StorPool uses standard hardware which brings a substantial reduction in the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO), removes vendor lock-in, and gives you a competitive advantage to competitors, who run a SAN, hybrid or All-Flash Array (AFA). StorPool’s unique architecture and implementation, makes it the fastest and most efficient block-storage solutions on the market today.
StorPool distributed storage
StorPool is a next-generation, data storage software for clouds and enterprises. It runs on a cluster of standard x86 servers in a fully-distributed, shared-nothing architecture. StorPool then manages all drives in these servers and presents them as one large virtual SAN array. It simply creates a single pool of data storage (global namespace), that utilizes the full capacity and performance of a defined set of commodity drives.
Test results
Tests were performed from five initiators in parallel on five 100 GB volumes. Meanwhile, performance was measured using FIO version 2. 0. 13, AIO. StorPool’s all-flash software-defined storage solution, powered by Intel technologies achieved easily 468,000 IOPS, 3.5 GB/s and delivered up to 8.7 TB of usable storage at sub-millisecond latency. The performance was limited by the number of clients of the system, i.e. this 3-server storage system could deliver more IOPS, provided that the clients of the system were more than the available 5 hypervisor (client) servers.
Recommendations
For building a fast and cost-efficient stand-alone storage system, StorPool recommends that customers use Intel® Xeon® processor E3-1230 v5 (or newer). On the compute side, StorPool recommends using powerful Intel® Xeon® processor E5-2620 v4-based two-socket servers (or newer), which increases the efficiency of the compute side of the cloud.
The benefits for cloud service providers
StorPool’s Software Defined Storage solution can help you build an extremely fast and cost-efficient cloud, which can set any company apart from its competitors.
Intel and StorPool Solution Brief
Intel and StorPool – Extremely Fast Distributed Storage for Cloud Service Providers
If you have any questions feel free to contact us at info@storpool.slm.dev