Appliance design paradigm using RedHat CEPH and Dell EMC ScaleIO storage solutions

The HyperScalers research laboratory designs cloud computing based appliances and calibrates their performance in terms of market relevance. The design helps customers in identifying building blocks of their appliance, which should be preconfigured and designed with known outcome. This paper discusses the types of appliances which can use CEPH or ScaleIO as a storage solution.

CEPH being a multi-featured solution

RedHat CEPH is a distributed data storage solution. It contains heap of features and can be termed a single solution to all storage software requirements. It has multiple software layers before the data resides into storage disks. Following diagram shows those logical software layers and hardware architecture of a CEPH appliance:
The CEPH solution implemented out of HyperScalers laboratory consisted of 40G data path, 10G network backbone, multiple JBOD with 3.5” HDDs, 7 dedicated nodes, 3 dedicated switches for data and management paths. This is an optimized multi-plane OpenStack appliance running CEPH and OpenShift on an OCP gear. This provides IaaS for all types of storage and DevOps solutions.

ScaleIO being a lean and flexible solution

EMC ScaleIO is software storage solution to deliver flexible and scalable performance and capacity on demand. It converges compute and storage commodities in a single-layer architecture. It simplifies capacity aggregation, management points and highly scalable on demand.
The EMC ScaleIO setup in HyperScalers lab consisted of 3 nodes concurrently running as SDS (server), SDC (Client) and MDM (Management). It uses 12Gb/s SAS SSD as storage and SAS RAID card as HBA. It ran on 10Gb/s data path and consisted of a NAS shared file system. The appliance verified