On February 28th, the SNIA Networking Storage Forum (NSF) took at look at what’s happening in Scale-Out File Systems. We discussed general principles, design considerations, challenges, benchmarks and more. If you missed the live webcast, it’s now available on-demand. We did not have time to answer all the questions we received at the live event, so here are answers to them all.
Q. Can scale-out file systems do Erasure coding?
A. Indeed, Erasure coding is a common method to improve resilience.
Q. How does one address the problem of a specific disk going down? Where does scale-out architecture provide redundancy?
A. Disk failures typically are covered by RAID software. Some of scale-out software also use multiple replicators to mitigate the impact of disk failures.
Q. Are there use cases where a hybrid of these two styles is needed?
A. Yes, for example, in some environments, the foundation layer might be using the dedicated storage server to form the large storage pool, which is the 1st style, and then export LUNs or virtual disks to the compute nodes (either physical or virtual) to run the applications, which is the 2nd style.
Q. Which scale-out file systems present on windows, Linux platforms?
A. Some of the scale-out file systems provide native client software across multiple platforms. Another approach is to use Samba to build SMB gateways to make the scale-out file system available to Windows computers.
Q. Is Amazon elastic file system (EFS) on AWS scale-out file systems?
A. Please see:
https://docs.aws.amazon.com/efs/latest/ug/performance.html
“Amazon EFS file systems are distributed across an unconstrained number of storage servers, enabling file systems to grow elastically to petabyte scale and allowing massively parallel access from Amazon EC2 instances to your data. The distributed design of Amazon EFS avoids the bottlenecks and constraints inherent to traditional file servers.”
Q. Where are the most cost effective price/performance uses of NVMe?
A. NVMe can support very high IOPS and very high throughput as well. The best use case would be to couple NVMe with high performance storage software that would not limit the NVMe.