Dell Technologies presents Dell PowerScale (replacing EMC Isilon) as a scale-out NAS solution and server technology that provides the flexibility of a software-defined architecture with accelerated hardware innovations to harness the value of data.
Isilon Systems was acquired by EMC in 2010; some EMC Isilon NAS appliances are still available and supported under the PowerScale brand.
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IBM Storage Ceph
Score 8.0 out of 10
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IBM® Storage Ceph® is a software-defined storage platform that consolidates block, file and object storage to help organizations eliminate data silos and deliver a cloud-like experience while retaining the cost benefits and data sovereignty advantages of on-premises IT.
It is well suited for scale out NAS storage. One can use Rest API calls to get relevant data. It can be used in the product SRM, where one can discover arrays from Isilon/PowerScale and can monitor the reports. One can monitor Capacity and Performance reports of the array.
It is absolutely, hands down the best storage solution for Open Stack. I would even argue it is the only solution if a company is operating at petabyte scale and need resiliency. The storage solution allows any organization to scale their environment using commodity hardware from top to bottom. It has a battle tested track record where it is even being used as the data storage back end for the Large Hadron Collider at Cern
Highly resilient, almost every time we attempted to destroy the cluster it was able to recover from a failure. It struggled to when the nodes where down to about 30%(3 replicas on 10 nodes)
The cache tiering feature of Ceph is especially nice. We attached solid state disks and assigned them as the cache tier. Our sio benchmarks beat the our Netapp when we benchmarked it years ago (no traffic, clean disks) by a very wide margin.
Ceph effectively allows the admin to control the entire stack from top to bottom instead of being tied to any one storage vendor. The cluster can be decentralized and replicated across data centers if necessary although we didn't try that feature ourselves, it gave us some ideas for a disaster recovery solution. We really liked the idea that since we control the hardware and the software, we have infinite upgradability with off the shelf parts which is exactly what it was built for.
Isilon is immensely more scalable than Celerra and gave us better control over snapshots and replication. The addition of global deduplication provides a huge space savings benefit as well.
VSAN (Virtual SAN) and Ceph are both software-defined storage solutions, but they have some key differences in terms of their architecture and capabilities.VSAN is a software-defined storage solution that is built into the VMware vSphere hypervisor. It allows organizations to create a shared storage pool using locally attached storage on multiple ESXi hosts. VSAN is designed to be highly available, and it can automatically detect and recover from hardware failures.Ceph, on the other hand, is an open-source software-defined storage solution that can run on a variety of different hardware and virtualization platforms. It provides object, block, and file storage in a single platform, and is designed to be highly scalable and highly available. Ceph is also known for its ability to handle large amounts of data, and it can be integrated with a wide variety of different applications and services.In terms of functionality, VSAN is more suited for virtualized environments, as it is built into vSphere and it is designed to work well with vSphere's other features such as vMotion and DRS. Ceph on the other hand provides more flexibility as it can run on multiple platforms and it can handle more types of storage like object, block and file storage.I
