Executive Summary; Overview; Business Problem - HPE Apollo 4500 Reference Manual

Reference guide
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Executive summary

Traditional file and block storage architectures are being challenged by the explosive growth of data, fueled by the expansion of Big Data,
unstructured data, and the pervasiveness of mobile devices. Emerging open source storage architectures such as Ceph can help businesses deal
with these trends, providing cost-effective storage solutions that keep up with capacity growth while providing service-level agreements (SLAs)
to meet business and customer requirements.
Enterprise-class storage subsystems are designed to address storage requirements for business-critical transactional data latencies. However,
they may not be an optimal solution for unstructured data and backup/archival storage. In these cases, enterprise-class reliability is still required,
but massive scale-out capacity and lower investment drive solution requirements. Additionally, modern businesses must provide data access
from anywhere at any time, through a variety of legacy and modern access protocols.
Ceph software defined storage is designed to run on industry-standard server platforms, offering lower infrastructure costs and scalability
beyond the capacity points of typical file server storage subsystems. HPE Apollo 4000 series hardware provides a comprehensive and
cost-effective storage capacity building block for Ceph-based solutions.
Ceph has its code roots in the open source community. When considering an open source-based solution, most enterprise environments will
require a strong support organization and a vision to match or exceed the capabilities and functionality they currently experience with their
traditional storage infrastructure. Using SUSE Enterprise Storage to build enterprise-ready Ceph solutions fills both of these needs with a
world-class support organization and a leadership position within the Ceph community. SUSE Enterprise Storage helps ensure customers are
able to deploy Ceph software defined storage on industry-standard x86 server systems, to serve their block, file, and object needs.
Hewlett Packard Enterprise hardware combined with SUSE Enterprise Storage delivers an open source unified block, file, and object storage
solution that:
• Has software that offers practical scaling from one petabyte to well beyond a hundred petabytes of data
• Lowers upfront solution investment and total cost of ownership (TCO) per gigabyte
• Provides a single software-defined storage (SDS) cluster for both object and low to mid-range performance block storage
• Uses open source, minimizing concerns about proprietary software vendor lock-in
• Provides a better TCO for operating and maintaining the hardware than "white box" servers
• Can be configured to offer low-cost, low-performance block and file storage in addition to object storage
HPE hardware gives you the flexibility to choose the configuration building blocks that are right for your business needs. The HPE Apollo 4000
Gen9 server systems are most suited for the task and allow you to find the right balance between performance, cost-per-gigabyte, building block
size, and failure domain size.
Target audience
This paper is written for administrators and solution architects who deploy software defined storage solutions within their data centers. This
paper assumes knowledge of enterprise data center administration challenges and familiarity with data center configuration and deployment
best practices, primarily with regard to storage systems. It also assumes the reader appreciates both the challenges and benefits open source
solutions can bring.

Overview

Business problem

Businesses are looking for better and more cost-effective ways to manage their exploding data storage requirements. In recent years, the amount
of storage required for businesses to meet increased data retention requirements has increased dramatically. Cost-per-gigabyte and ease of
retrieval are important factors for choosing a solution that can scale quickly and economically over many years of continually increasing
capacities and data retention requirements.
Organizations that have been trying to keep up with data growth using traditional file and block storage solutions are finding that the complexity
of managing and operating them has grown significantly—as have the costs of storage infrastructure. Storage hosting on a public cloud may not
meet cost or data control requirements in the long term. The performance and control of on-premises equipment still offers real business
advantages.