Where Ready Nodes are the Optimal Choice

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This is the final entry in a five-part insideHPC guide series that explores networking with Dell EMC ready nodes. This post discusses where ready nodes are the optimal choice, and how to decide. 

vSan ready nodes

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The perennial question for IT asset acquisition is whether to build or consume, and there is no ‘one size fits all’ answer to the question. Individual components provide the maximum flexibility, but also require the maximum of self support. Reference architectures provide the recipe and guidance, but the customer still has the responsibility for making the system work. At the other extreme of the product spectrum, engineered systems and hybrid cloud platforms provide a fully supported integrated offering, yet deliver limited flexibility based upon high level appliance-like building blocks and services.

By disaggregating networking system software, and by decoupling networking software from hardware. platforms, companies can free themselves from the rigid and proprietary environments of yesterday to embrace software-defined principles and unlock innovation at any scale, and based on open, industry standard hardware and software.

For more information visit the Dell EMC TechCenter for the latest in-depth guidance.

Dell EMC Ready Solutions offer the ultimate compromise between the flexibility of complete custom architectures and the restricted nature of appliance-like products and services, delivering the best of both worlds and supporting technology evolution with enterprise grade support.

“The network has become again the bottleneck of a system, mostly because of NVMe drives. Four NVMe drives, aggregated, are capable of generating around 11 gigabits per second of bandwidth, which tops a 100-gigabit connection. They may saturate and block I/O with just four drives, so we are looking to 25 gigabit, which becomes 50 gigabit because we’re using a spine-leaf approach. Every server has two lanes, so aggregate bandwidth is 50 gigabits per second. This helps us ensure that the network will not be too much of a storage bottleneck.” − Antonio Cisternino, University of Pisa Chief Information Officer

Intel Technology Enables Scale-Out Storage Architectures

Intel technologies are already helping data centers move to SDI and software-defined storage systems. Intel architecture-based solutions maximize infrastructure investments and include a portfolio of interoperable, scalable, and programmable products and technologies.

ready nodes

The perennial question for IT asset acquisition is whether to build or consume, and there is no ‘one size fits all’ answer to the question.

This includes key software capabilities that significantly enhance the value of foundational Intel architecture in SDI hardware and software ecosystems. One example is the ability to speed replication with erasure coding, which is optimized for Ceph software on the Intel Xeon processor family. Key storage-related products and technologies include:

  • The Intel Xeon processor family with storage workload optimization enables more efficient storage, smarter data protection, and exceptional system performance.
  • The Intel Solid-State Drive (Intel SSD) Data Center Family with NVMe delivers more performance with fewer resources to boost storage density, speed, and reliability.
  • Intel QuickAssist Technology, a workload acceleration tool in Intel Xeon processor E5 and E7 families for compression and encryption offload.
  • Intel Cache Acceleration Software (Intel CAS) improves application performance by using an Intel SSD as a cache or frequently accessed data.
  • Intelsecurity technologies verify that virtual servers boot into “known good states” (Intel Trusted Execution Technology, or Intel.)

This insideHPC guide series also covered the following topics over the past few weeks:

Download the full report, “A Practical Guide to Networking Dell EMC Ready Nodes,”  courtesy of Dell EMC, to learn more about Dell EMC Ready Nodes and Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct Ready Nodes.