This week’s podcast is a conversation between Martin and Chris, talking about how we define scale-up and scale-out storage.  A recent discussion on Twitter about Pure1 and the idea of federated scale-out generated some interesting feedback, so we thought it might be good to get some definitions in place.

The opening discussion talks about how scale-up and scale-out should be defined and what definitions of scale-out exist.  Volume managers used to be the old-school way of implementing federation, as was storage virtualisation.  So perhaps federation is a genuine use case.

Martin and Chris move to talk about NAS and object, then reflect on how the cloud computing providers implement their storage platforms.  Surely these are scale-out?  The truth is, that level of detail is generally kept secret.  Finally, the conversation talks about one of the biggest storage headaches – rebalancing.

Elapsed Time: 00:19:38

Timeline

* 00:00:00 – Intros

* 00:01:00 – Scale-out versus scale-up – how do we define them?

* 00:02:30 – tightly-coupled, loosely-coupled, federated scale out.

* 00:03:30 – So what solutions are scale-up?

* 00:05:00 – Is federated storage a fair version of scale-out?

* 00:07:00 – Does scale-up have a value with very large drive types?

* 00:07:30 – Volume Managers – old school federation

* 00:09:30 – What about NAS and object store solutions?

* 00:12:00 – How does public cloud storage implement scale-out?

* 00:15:00 – The biggest storage management issue – rebalancing.

* 00:18:20 – So should we care about scale-out or scale-up?

* 00:19:15 – Wrap Up

Vendors mentioned in this podcast: Nimble, SolidFire, NetApp, Pure Storage, Tintri, Dell EMC and IBM.

Copyright (c) 2016-2018 Storage Unpacked.  No reproduction or re-use without permission. Podcast Episode J879.