SA-basically based MSP shuns HCI for Nebulon cloud-defined storage

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SYSDBA wished to refresh its HPE 3PAR arrays, and so checked out hyper-converged but determined on cloud-defined storage from Nebulon that marries native storage with a cloud expend watch over airplane

Antony Adshead

Antony Adshead,
Storage Editor

Published: 02 Jun 2021 10: 15

South Africa-basically based managed carrier provider SYSDBA has deployed Nebulon smartCore “cloud-defined storage” in place of hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) all thru a technology refresh that seen it circulation away from HPE 3PAR SAN storage arrays.

The circulation has allowed it to do 50% in hardware prices by warding off extra costly probably decisions and bettering infrastructure density.

SYSDBA specializes in high-live possibilities in financial companies and products and healthcare, with managed companies and products delivered from largely HPE server and storage hardware in a colocation.

The firm’s infrastructure had reached a “natural refresh point”, acknowledged strategic alliances manager Marc Pratt, whereas “as an economic system we weren’t as buoyant and we were taking a look for to power price and wished to be aggressive”.

SYSDBA checked out hyper-converged infrastructure which capacity of it changed into “pushed by our cost pass and the associated rate of enterprise SSD in a storage array prices greatly extra”, but realized it potentially inflexible by formulation of being ready to specify system, acknowledged Pratt.

“We had been taking a look for at ‘primitive’ HCI – Nutanix, Simplivity – but it would perchance presumably also be very restrictive by formulation of what hardware you will put in it, what chipset, and many others,” he added.

SYSDBA eventually deployed three Nebulon playing cards in HPE DL380 servers, with a total capacity of 60TB.

Nebulon media deployed on place is in the manufacture of PCIe slot-resident Storage Processing Devices (SPUs). These offload storage enter/output (I/O) processing and administration from the server to the Nebulon hardware.

SPUs replaces RAID playing cards and storage host bus adapters show in servers. Every SPU has two 25 Gigabit Ethernet (GbE) ports that manufacture the files airplane for every application cluster, alongside with 1 GbE cloud connectivity.

Besides warding off indispensable cost by being ready to deploy the heavy lifting of storage on server playing cards, Pratt likes the flexibleness this brings.

“That you just would possibly perchance deploy it on any trade-traditional server,” he acknowledged. “And you don’t must obtain caught with a explicit processor, to illustrate. In phrases of performance, there is rarely any such thing as a hit to memory and processing sources as there would be with HCI or device-defined storage.”

The native PCIe-connected SPU connects flash storage in every node and emulates storage controller functionality. In the meantime, provisioning and application, server and storage metrics are offloaded to the Nebulon ON cloud in Amazon Web Companies and products or Google Compute Platform public clouds.

Customers can assemble a Nebulon cluster, is referred to as nPod, that scales to 32 servers. Records companies and products are configured in the Nebulon ON cloud portal, including mirrors, snapshots and volumes.

The flexibility to expend an eye on storage from the cloud – in explicit in a geographic market the place possibilities would perchance nicely be sophisticated to acquire to – is soft to SYSDBA.

“Having to be on place for a 4am firmware change isn’t trusty or excellent in some buyer settings, so the truth that Nebulon will also be provisioned, managed and maintained from wherever is a bonus,” acknowledged Pratt.

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