The software-defined storage (SDS) appliance concept of hyper-convergence is an attractive alternative to traditional Storage Area Network (SAN) and Network Attached Storage (NAS) for small to medium as well as large-sized businesses. Hyper converged infrastructure seems to be popular right now. So what is hyper-converged storage, and why should you care?
A hyper-converged storage system allows IT to manage compute, storage and virtualization resources as a single integrated system through a common tool set. The resulting system, often referred to as an appliance, consists of a server, storage, networking, and a hypervisor with management framework. Hyper-converged appliances can be expanded through the addition of nodes to the base unit to suit the compute and storage needs of a business in a manner know as scale-out.
Hyper-converged scale-out storage differs from the older scale-up approach. In a scale-up system, the compute capacity is confined as storage is added, while in a scale-out system, new compute nodes can be added as the need for compute and storage arises. Scaling-up storage has often been cost prohibitive and often lack the necessary random IO performance (IOPS) needed by virtualized workloads. The scale-out approach is a more efficient use of hardware resources, as it moves the data closer to the processor. When scale-out is combined with solid-state drive (SSD) storage it offers far lower latency, better throughput, and increased flexibility to grow with your business. Scale-out is commonly used for virtualized workloads, private cloud, data bases, and many other business applications.
Today, Atlantis Computing introduced a new all-flash hyper-converged appliance that extends the concept of a software defined scale-out storage to the cloud. Atlantis HyperScale™, a turn-key hyper-converged appliance, delivers all-flash performance storage based on Intel® SSD Data Center Family for enterprise wide applications. What is different is that HyperScale™ based on Atlantis USX pools existing enterprise SAN, NAS , and DAS storage and accelerates its performance by use of Intel SSDs. By abstracting the storage, USX delivers virtual storage volumes to enterprise applications. It further provides a context aware data service that performs deduplication and IO acceleration in real time for quality of service even when using public cloud services.
The Intel SSD Data Center Family holds the key for the HyperScale™ all-flash appliance. The Intel® SSD is designed for read- and write-intensive storage workloads with fast, consistent performance for smooth data center operation. The reliability, data integrity, and cost-effectiveness of the storage volumes in the HyperScale™ appliance helps protect your data with enterprise class features at a reasonable cost. The architecture of Intel's SSDs ensure the entire read and write path and logical-block address (LBA) mapping has data protection and error correction. Many enterprise workloads depend not only on reliable data, but consistency in how quickly that data can accessed. Consistent latency, quality of service, and bandwidth no matter what background activities are happening on the drive is the basis of the Intel Data Center Family. Rigorous testing ensures a highly reliable SSD with consistent performance.
Today HyperScale™ all flash hyper-converged appliance introduces a new order of scale-out storage. The turn-key appliance can eliminate scalability and performance bottlenecks and allow computing and storage capacity to grow with the business need.
The post A New Order of All-Flash Hyper-Converged Storage: Atlantis HyperScale™ with Intel® Solid-State Drives appeared first on Blogs@Intel.