Software Defined Datacenter for Microsoft Applications

Eliminate complexity in the data center with ScaleIO when you are in an open virtualization environment

No matter the country or how big is your organization, I have been working in small companies to large enterprise in several countries and in most of them the main concern is to find a balance between budget and demand. Datacenters are running out of space and they are struggling with operational expenses, nevertheless they have to provide agile solutions for business applications.

I spent many hours, often days, in customer’s datacenters helping with application migrations. I remember some customers with large numbers of traditional servers with different applications running individually with no SAN connectivity.

Those servers also needed to grow and provide more performance and capacity; direct attach (DAS) was the easy solution for most of them.

Connecting HBAs or other types of adapters to attach to SAN, NAS or SCSI arrays can be very complex and expensive. EMC ScaleIO will help you to solve this problem and leverage your current infrastructure with low cost, simplicity and elasticity.

ScaleIO is a software defined storage solution that supports HDDs, SSDs and PCIe flash cards to create virtual pool of block storage. ScaleIO converges storage and compute resources to single layer architecture to provide performance and capacity with simple management. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vfXyFPHh7n4

Why did I decide to use ScaleIO?

I selected ScaleIO to solve my customer problems because it enabled me to deliver the customer:

1. Convergence ScaleIO is hardware agnostic that converges storage and compute resources aggregating capacity, performance with simple management.

1. Scalability ScaleIO provides a scalable solution from three to thousands of nodes. Compute and storage resources grow automatically when new servers are added.

1. Elasticity The system balances data automatically adding new compute and storage resources reducing complexity

1. Performance This solution enhances performance adding servers and storages resources to the application with minimum impact.

ScaleIO software is implemented at server level and communicates via local area network to handle the application I/O, this is a dynamic and elastic solution that enable administrator to add or remove nodes on the fly. Logical Raid Striped is implemented across all the servers to provide data protection.

Here we have the components of ScaleIO software:

• Meta Data Manager - MDM configures and monitors ScaleIO system
• ScaleIO Data Client - SDC is a device driver that shows ScaleIO volumes as Block devices to the application
• ScaleIO Data Server - SDS manages the capacity of a single server

The system scales linearly adding capacity and performance to the applications with minimal impact to end users.

The platform automatically rebalances when we add or remove a server, if a server is rebooted, the data is migrated to guarantee data protection, when the server comes up again, data is back to the original disk, moreover logical Raid Striped is implemented across all the servers.

We have recently tested a new solution with Microsoft applications; this is a reference architecture supporting Microsoft SQL, Exchange and SharePoint Server enabled by VMware 5.5 and ScaleIO 1.3 virtual SAN.

This solution uses eight servers with ten SAS drives per each server and is supporting 2,500 Exchange seats, 10,000 SharePoint users and SQL Databases workload with more than 200 transactions per second.

Storage pools were created per each application, configuring different VMDK files for Databases and Logs. For each application, we have used different validation tools; Jetstress, Bulk Loader, LoadBulk2SP and a OLTP workload tool.

They generated enough workload to test the applications running on ScaleIO achieving the performance recommendations for Exchange Server 2013, SharePoint Server 2013 and SQL Server 2014.

Conclusion

ScaleIO is a software server-based SAN that converges compute and storage resources to deliver elastic storage and scalable performance on demand with the benefit of a very low operational cost.

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