Converged storage is a storage architecture that combines storage and computing resources into a single entity. This can result in the development of platforms for server centric, storage centric or hybrid workloads where applications and data come together to improve application performance and delivery. The combination of storage and compute differs to the traditional IT model in which computation and storage take place in separate or siloed computer equipment. The traditional model requires discrete provisioning changes, such as upgrades and planned migrations, in the face of server load changes, which are increasingly dynamic with

virtualization In computing, virtualization or virtualisation (sometimes abbreviated v12n, a numeronym) is the act of creating a virtual (rather than actual) version of something at the same abstraction level, including virtual computer hardware platforms, stor ...

, where converged storage increases the supply of resources along with new VM demands in parallel.

Design considerations

The goal of converged storage is to bring together server and storage and/or application and data to deliver services that are better optimized for target workloads. This can mean server and storage converged within a common hardware platform. For example, a

blade server A blade server is a stripped-down server computer with a modular design optimized to minimize the use of physical space and energy. Blade servers have many components removed to save space, minimize power consumption and other considerations, whil ...

enclosure, applications and storage can be brought together within a server by

. Server and storage can be managed as a resource pool, for example in infrastructure- as-a-service (IaaS).

Common hardware platform

Industry standard servers, such as those using Intel processors (

x86 x86 (also known as 80x86 or the 8086 family) is a family of complex instruction set computer (CISC) instruction set architectures initially developed by Intel based on the Intel 8086 microprocessor and its 8088 variant. The 8086 was introd ...

), form the basis of converged storage. As these servers follow

Moore’s Law Moore's law is the observation that the number of transistors in a dense integrated circuit (IC) doubles about every two years. Moore's law is an observation and projection of a historical trend. Rather than a law of physics, it is an empiri ...

and increase power and performance they have the capabilities to run storage workloads, in addition to being compute servers. Data centers can further consolidate and minimize the use of physical space and energy by using industry-standard –based

for both server and storage.

Common software

In server virtualization, multiple “virtual” servers operate on a single platform using

hypervisor A hypervisor (also known as a virtual machine monitor, VMM, or virtualizer) is a type of computer software, firmware or hardware that creates and runs virtual machines. A computer on which a hypervisor runs one or more virtual machines is calle ...

technology. These virtual servers could be running traditional server tasks, such as applications programming. By using storage controller software, these servers could also be made into data storage systems. This latter architecture is known as

virtual machine In computing, a virtual machine (VM) is the virtualization/emulation of a computer system. Virtual machines are based on computer architectures and provide functionality of a physical computer. Their implementations may involve specialized hardw ...

-based storage. The storage software is often called a VSA−virtual SAN appliance or virtual storage appliance. VSA products from companies such as HP,

Nutanix Nutanix, Inc. is an American cloud computing company that sells software, cloud services (such as desktops as a service, disaster recovery as a service, and cloud monitoring), and software-defined storage. History Nutanix was founded on September ...

and

VMware VMware, Inc. is an American cloud computing and virtualization technology company with headquarters in Palo Alto, California. VMware was the first commercially successful company to virtualize the x86 architecture. VMware's desktop software ru ...

allow users to build storage-area networks using their existing servers.

Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS)

The goal of

IaaS The first major provider of infrastructure as a service (IaaS) was Amazon in 2008. IaaS is a cloud computing service model by means of which computing resources are supplied by a cloud services provider. The IaaS vendor provides the storage, net ...

is to provide a pool of resources that can be quickly deployed to deliver new services. This requires a service designer to lay out the required characteristics for a new service or application and an

orchestration (computing) In system administration, orchestration is the automated configuration, coordination, and management of computer systems and software.Erl, Thomas (2005) Service-Oriented Architecture: Concepts, Technology & Design. ''Prentice Hall'', . A number ...

engine to configure the underlying infrastructure to deliver the new service.

Characteristics

Scale-out architecture

Scale-out Scalability is the property of a system to handle a growing amount of work by adding resources to the system. In an economic context, a scalable business model implies that a company can increase sales given increased resources. For example, a ...

architecture is a component of converged storage. Scale-out storage is the combination of modular computers and standardized storage components to create federated storage pools. The result is an increase of computer power, bandwidth and storage capacity that can exceed that of a single traditional storage array or high performance computer. Storage vendors such as

NetApp NetApp, Inc. is an American hybrid cloud data services and data management company headquartered in San Jose, California. It has ranked in the Fortune 500 from 2012–2021. Founded in 1992 with an IPO in 1995, NetApp offers cloud data services ...

Dell Dell is an American based technology company. It develops, sells, repairs, and supports computers and related products and services. Dell is owned by its parent company, Dell Technologies. Dell sells personal computers (PCs), servers, data ...

Hewlett-Packard The Hewlett-Packard Company, commonly shortened to Hewlett-Packard ( ) or HP, was an American multinational information technology company headquartered in Palo Alto, California. HP developed and provided a wide variety of hardware components ...

and EMC provide scale-out storage to address both the growth of

unstructured data Unstructured data (or unstructured information) is information that either does not have a pre-defined data model or is not organized in a pre-defined manner. Unstructured information is typically text-heavy, but may contain data such as dates, num ...

and the need to simplify data center operations. At the file system level, parallel file systems like

BeeGFS BeeGFS (formerly FhGFS) is a parallel file system, developed and optimized for high-performance computing. BeeGFS includes a distributed metadata architecture for scalability and flexibility reasons. Its most used and widely known aspect is data ...

are available to provide a single namespace with automatic data distribution for shared network access across the internal storage devices of multiple servers. Scale-out storage differs from scale-up architectures in traditional storage, which primarily scales by adding many individual disk drives to a single non-clustered storage controller. In a scale-out architecture, management software is used to manage the multiple storage devices, to act like a single system. Storage analyst company, Enterprise Strategy Group, writes that scale-out storage can help to provide timely IT provisioning, improve system availability and provide better resource utilization.

Federation

Storage federation (also known as federated storage) uses distributed volume management to shift workloads from busy arrays to those with available capacity. This is done using native peer-to-peer communication. Multiple autonomous storage systems are combined and managed as a single storage pool. This helps to improve storage utilization, balance workloads and ease storage migration.

Multitenant architecture

Converged storage supports the multitenant (

multitenancy Software multitenancy is a software architecture in which a single instance of software runs on a server and serves multiple tenants. Systems designed in such manner are "shared" (rather than "dedicated" or "isolated"). A tenant is a group of us ...

) architecture of

cloud computing Cloud computing is the on-demand availability of computer system resources, especially data storage ( cloud storage) and computing power, without direct active management by the user. Large clouds often have functions distributed over mul ...

, in which multiple machines or users access the virtual and physical resources at the same time. In addition to storage, the other resources accessed in this architecture are processors and networks. A converged storage does this by moving application workloads between disk systems.

Comparisons to traditional storage architectures

Monolithic storage architectures

Monolithic storage architectures share RAM across multiple IO controllers. They have been characterized as large storage arrays that require a large upfront investment and resources. Hitachi Vantara, is quoted as saying such storage requires enterprises to spend $500,000 on customizing their data centers to support the power requirements of monolithic equipment. Monolithic arrays provide failover benefits. The shared cache architecture of monolithic arrays ensures that if one cache module fails, another cache is used to process the user's request. However once you have more than a single system this architecture is complex and requires investment to manage and control the interactions between the different components. Monolithic architectures support both block and file-based architectures, either independently or in a unified storage system that brings together both block and file.

Direct-attached storage

Direct-attached storage Direct-attached storage (DAS) is digital storage directly attached to the computer accessing it, as opposed to storage accessed over a computer network (i.e. network-attached storage). DAS consists of one or more storage units such as hard drives ...

(DAS) provides scaling of storage directly attached to the server. The storage is dedicated to a single server and is not sharable among multiple servers. Data stored on a

Storage area network A storage area network (SAN) or storage network is a computer network which provides access to consolidated, block-level data storage. SANs are primarily used to access data storage devices, such as disk arrays and tape libraries from serve ...

(SAN) and

network-attached storage Network-attached storage (NAS) is a file-level (as opposed to block-level storage) computer data storage server connected to a computer network providing data access to a heterogeneous group of clients. The term "NAS" can refer to both the tech ...

(NAS) architectures can be shared among several server applications.Mellor, Chris. "Direct-attached storage vs SAN: Clustered DAS model gaining favor in virtualised, solid-state world?," SearchStorage.co.u

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References

{{reflist, colwidth=30em Computer data storage