ScaleIO Free Download starting May 29th – from EMC

Another free Software Defined storage will be available soon. This time it's EMC's ScaleIO Software! The news came from (big) Virtual Geek's blog, and you certainly know the person behind – Chad Sakac. I'm not an EMC person and I'm not familiar with the solution, but I'm most likely interested in a hyper-converged software solution that is free and that is 100% compatible with VMware, and scales linear way with no limit. More servers you add, more storage you get with lower latency and faster access.

Already few days back you could perhaps noticed that vVNX Community Edition is also free download and use. vVNX is distributed as an OVF template and allows to use up to 4Tb of storage… vVNX is also from EMC.

But let's go back to the ScaleIO. The management and automation is possible through vSphere plugin and as yoiu can imagine, it can leverage local disks (SSDs, Spinning Disks, PCIe cards) to create a storage pool which is presented to all hosts in a cluster. It's clearly different from VMware VSAN from the architectural perspective at it is not a kernel module like VSAN is. So basically there is a couple of VMs which gather the local storage through VMDKs or RDMs and then pool it and present it via NFS or ISCSI.

The details (if you haven't read the original article) are all here as the author IS an expert in a domain. The most important is the date – On May 29th, the ScaleIO 1.32 bits will be available for download here.   The ScaleIO community is here.

Quote:

At its core – there are two simple components – the SDS (Server) and SDC (client).  The SDS consumes any local HDD, SDD (persistence/read/write cache), PCIe NAND devices (persistence/read/write cache) you give it, and also can leverage local host RAM for a read cache.  You can specify as little or as much of any of the server resources as you want.   Heck, nodes don’t even need to be symmetrical in any way. The SDC is a light weight client that communicates to any number of SDS nodes across an ethernet or IB network via a proprietary protocol (not iSCSI) designed to be super-lightweight.

There is also a third component which acts as witness and which can step-in when there is a split-brain scenario.

Image courtesy Virtual Geek:

Deployment options – it's possible to deploy the SDC on Windows or Linux nodes…. and much more…

Another quote from Chad's blog:

ScaleIO – does it support vSphere?  Yup.  Hyper-V, KVM, Openstack cinder integration?  Yup.   Linux general use (Redhat, SLES, CentOS, and soon Ubuntu LTS releases and CoreOS),  Yup.   Oracle and other databases?  Yup – and with a level of performance that will blow your mind.   You want fully hyper-converged?  Yup.   Want a 2 layer SDS (pool of storage/IOps on dense rackmount consumed by blades that scale independently)?  Yup.

Original Source: Virtual Geek