Scale up and scale out architecture as required, without impacting service availability

Businesses grow, processes change. An organization’s IT infrastructure needs to be able to meet these new, sometimes unexpected challenges. Planning for the future is difficult though, and spending excessively to make sure future requirements can be met is inefficient and wasteful, if the budget is even available. The aim is to avoid over-provisioning, and instead configure architecture to current levels which saves money. Consequently however, this approach requires the server and storage solution to retain the ability to scale up and out with minimal fuss.

StorMagic SvSAN not only enables the IT architect to produce a highly-efficient, simple storage infrastructure to meet current needs, it also retains the flexibility to address future demands. SvSAN has been designed to provide highly available storage that is as lightweight and cost-effective as possible. As a result, the simplicity in its design allows storage architecture to be scaled easily should it be required.

White Paper: Flexibility for the Future – Scaling with StorMagic SvSAN

Explore SvSAN’s scaling capabilities in more detail with this white paper which explains how an organization using StorMagic SvSAN can easily scale-up capacity or scale-out compute using their existing architecture without disruption and with minimal expense.

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Scale up with SvSAN

Scaling up a deployment allows an organization to cost-effectively upgrade existing storage infrastructure to meet increasing demands, without having to undergo an entire hardware refresh. By carefully identifying drives that can be replaced with higher capacity alternatives, or adding additional drives if space is available, storage capacity can be increased. Similarly, increasing performance demands can be met, simply by adjusting the configuration of the deployment and introducing more SSDs or more spinning disk drives.

SvSAN can be scaled up without any disruption to service. Providing there is capacity for new or expanded drives within the server, upgrades can be carried out quickly and easily. The accompanying diagram demonstrates how a two node SvSAN cluster can be scaled up without any downtime, by taking each node offline in turn, carrying out the upgrade, and bringing it back online and resynchronizing.

Scale out with SvSAN

Scaling out an IT infrastructure enables organizations to improve resiliency and handle additional application demand in a staged, cost-effective manner. By spreading out application load across more resources, performance is improved and the disruption caused by a server failure is reduced.

Scaling out is achieved by adding additional compute-only nodes to the SvSAN cluster. The existing SvSAN cluster presents its synchronously mirrored storage to the new compute-only nodes in the network. As with scaling up, scale out compute-only nodes can be introduced non-disruptively to the SvSAN cluster, and do not require additional SvSAN licenses.

Storage Performance Analysis

Before considering the future, it’s critical to understand existing requirements. Conducting an analysis of the organization’s storage performance produces a baseline from which a correctly provisioned solution can be built. Many organizations believe they need expensive all-flash arrays for performance, or huge banks of disks for capacity. The reality can often be far simpler, and far cheaper.

The diagram below demonstrates how to non-disruptively scale-up an SvSAN deployment. By taking each node offline separately, adding the additional drives, and then resynchronizing, service availability is uninterrupted.