Dell Technologies announced yesterday a new iteration of their scale-out NAS offering with again a full flash model, the Dell EMC Isilon F810. This model is a 4U chassis grouping 4 nodes, 60 SAS/SATA SSD so 15 per node from 230 to 924TB raw per chassis. The performance per chassis are 250,000 IOPS and 15GB/s. The company claims to deliver 9M IOPS and 540GB/S aggregated throughput for a full cluster. In the Isilon terminology a cluster starts with 4 nodes - here 1 chassis - up to 144 nodes or 36 chassis. This limit exists for years and doesn't represent a real issue with the current density of HDD, SSD and server.
The solution is very rich in term of features but costly making real differences against competition with additional data services such inline data Compression up to 3:1 and deduplication with SmartDedupe, Replication with SyncIQ, Tiering with SmartPools and CloudPools, Compliance with SmartLock and FlexProtect for erasure coding. Many competitors don't even mention these features with a specific name as they bundle them as standards functions.
At the same time, Dell EMC mentions its new gadget, ClarityNow, a data management software acquired last summer from DataFrameworks. In fact, they swallowed the company without any public announcement except a blog post. I wrote about it in August. With that move, Isilon confirms its lack in analytics and having ClarityNow doesn't change anything, the software is just an add-on, even its GUI is still the ugly one DataFrameworks used since the beginning. The support is still the same file servers and object storage and of course now Isilon NAS and ECS family. Two questions remain open: why Dell didn't build its own analytics layer? Why did they pick this toy?
We pick a direct competitor of Isilon, Qumulo, and we detail the configuration with a cluster of 4 nodes. Ok we can extend this approach with same rack unit, capacity or performance comparisons, we let you do that exercise.
Comparison of 4 nodes cluster
| Configuration | Isilon F810 cluster | Qumulo 92T cluster |
| 4 nodes cluster | 1 chassis 4U (4 nodes) | 4 chassis 8U (4 x 2U node) |
| Storage | 60 SAS/SATA SSD (15 per node, from 3.84 to 15.36TB each) | 96 NVMe SSD (24 per node, 3.84TB each) |
| Capacity | 230 to 924TB raw | 368TB raw |
| Performance | 250,000 IOPS 15GB/s | 400,000 IOPS 16GB/s |
The battle is on with other players as well such Panasas and Weka and of course specialized flavors based on Spectrum Scale, Lustre or BeeGFS even if some of them have serous limitations.
0 commentaires:
Post a Comment