Streamline Your Stack: 300% ROI with the Right IT Infrastructure Boyan Ivanov CEO, StorPool Storage

THE GLOBAL EVENT FOR THE CLOUD AND SERVICE PROVIDER ECOSYSTEM Foreword I’m going to show you how innovation in the IT stack can be used: 1)as a competitive advantage and 2)to directly boost your bottom line (higher profitability + new revenue)

THE GLOBAL EVENT FOR THE CLOUD AND SERVICE PROVIDER ECOSYSTEM Are you toast as a host?... A lot of hosting companies think they cannot compete with Amazon/Google

THE GLOBAL EVENT FOR THE CLOUD AND SERVICE PROVIDER ECOSYSTEM …You’re not There are 2 good news here: 1)You do not have to compete with them 2)You still can, if this is part of your strategy

THE GLOBAL EVENT FOR THE CLOUD AND SERVICE PROVIDER ECOSYSTEM But first… But first… types of hosts there are on the market

THE GLOBAL EVENT FOR THE CLOUD AND SERVICE PROVIDER ECOSYSTEM The Disruptor Disruptors – e.g. Digital Ocean – they take the industry by storm, everyone tries to emulate. It is sporadic, one-off. Hard to emulate and do.

THE GLOBAL EVENT FOR THE CLOUD AND SERVICE PROVIDER ECOSYSTEM The Innovator The Innovators – hosts which innovate systematically and constantly improve their business and technology. -The leaders on the market are built this way.

THE GLOBAL EVENT FOR THE CLOUD AND SERVICE PROVIDER ECOSYSTEM The “Me too” The “me too”: “I use Tier 1 vendors, thus I am a Tier 1 provider”. - valid strategy for the very high end of the market or for specific “risk-averse” segments - i.e. selling to banks, government, etc. - Otherwise: good luck – you do not know what you’re doing/your stack is inefficient

THE GLOBAL EVENT FOR THE CLOUD AND SERVICE PROVIDER ECOSYSTEM The Laggard The laggards – they do not want to change. - They do not have the money but most of it is they do not have the vision - hard to distinguish if technology is their problem or actually mindset and strategy - example: their web site is crappy; still using 1 GbE network; running local storage, etc. - they should either catch-up or they should close or sell their “business”

THE GLOBAL EVENT FOR THE CLOUD AND SERVICE PROVIDER ECOSYSTEM All in between The majority of hosts are somewhere between Innovators and Laggards LaggardsInnovators YOU “Me too” Disruptors

THE GLOBAL EVENT FOR THE CLOUD AND SERVICE PROVIDER ECOSYSTEM How? So you want to move your business forward? You want to compete with AWS / Google, but do not know how to do it? - INNOVATE! The innovator’s dilemma. Innovate on both the business and technology sides, hand in hand. I’ll cover tech.

THE GLOBAL EVENT FOR THE CLOUD AND SERVICE PROVIDER ECOSYSTEM Branded servers Cisco / FC network VMware / Hyper-V Storage box (SAN) Traditional Stack: $1000+ / VM* or $27.8+ /VM/month White-box servers Standard Ethernet + SDN KVM / OpenStack / ? Storage Software (SDS) “Software Defined” Stack: ~$ 198 / VM* or $5.5 /VM/ month ROI: NEGATIVE! ROI: 260% (!) Notes: VM parameters: 2GB RAM, 2 CPU cores, 40GB SSD. Full details here: Building a Cloud – stacks & business case

THE GLOBAL EVENT FOR THE CLOUD AND SERVICE PROVIDER ECOSYSTEM Components: Servers (Compute) ComponentDellSuperMicroDiff. CPU* (Intel Xeon E v4) $ RAM (32GB DDR4 ECC RDIMM) $489$162~3x SSD (Samsung PM 863, 1.92TB SATA SSD) $1,455$800~2x

THE GLOBAL EVENT FOR THE CLOUD AND SERVICE PROVIDER ECOSYSTEM Components: Network Cisco Nexus 3064-X 48 SFP+ Ports 10GbE Mellanox SwitchX-2 SX Port 40GbE = 48 SFP+ x10GbE $16-24k$6k Dual-Port 10Gb Ethernet RDMA NIC $235

THE GLOBAL EVENT FOR THE CLOUD AND SERVICE PROVIDER ECOSYSTEM Components: Storage SAN Old stack Future stack AFA arrays ZFS (SDS 1.0) Ceph SDS 2.0 Example for 25 TB usable : All-flash Array (AFA) $250k for 25 TB usable SDS stack $24k HW + $1.5k month SW

THE GLOBAL EVENT FOR THE CLOUD AND SERVICE PROVIDER ECOSYSTEM Is Network a bottleneck? No! Latency test: UDP round-trip (ping) from an un-optimized application, all numbers in us (micro-seconds): Packet size1 GE10 GE40 GE tiny (just ping) k k k k Datacenter SATA SSD: us latency – identical to network latency Most common packet sizes

THE GLOBAL EVENT FOR THE CLOUD AND SERVICE PROVIDER ECOSYSTEM Components: Hypervisors Alternatives: OnApp OpenStack CloudStack OpenNebula – recommended Proxmox Custom – scripts + libvirt/virsh

THE GLOBAL EVENT FOR THE CLOUD AND SERVICE PROVIDER ECOSYSTEM Real Life Example ~$70k in HW Semi-converged configuration - 4 HVs ~700 Virtual Machines x 2GB

THE GLOBAL EVENT FOR THE CLOUD AND SERVICE PROVIDER ECOSYSTEM Putting it all together: entire Cloud reference design for FREE here:

THE GLOBAL EVENT FOR THE CLOUD AND SERVICE PROVIDER ECOSYSTEM Some other tips (1) Other ideas about lowering hardware costs: - For hypervisors: go for higher density hypervisors with (E5-2697v4) cores. More expensive, but better unit economics ($/VM) - Put loads of RAM - 512GB. For hosting RAM is the usual bottleneck. Again this makes the hypervisor more expensive, but it can hold twice as many VMs at low CPU contention. Gives you a lower cost per unit.

THE GLOBAL EVENT FOR THE CLOUD AND SERVICE PROVIDER ECOSYSTEM Some other tips (2) - Switches: we use 10/40GE Mellanox as a very good price/quality option. We see companies using second hand Cisco / Dell – still better than staying with 1GE! - Use larger SSDs - e.g. 1.92/3.84 TB, which may mean a larger initial deployment, but lowers the number of storage nodes you'd need & lowers price/GB. - OSS is a business model for the most part; usually more expensive, when you factor salaries, time and additional hardware needed. Read a good view here.Read a good view here.

THE GLOBAL EVENT FOR THE CLOUD AND SERVICE PROVIDER ECOSYSTEM Some other tips (3) - SDS is not a silver bullet – it is a great solution but fits in some cases better than others. You may still need different products for different use cases. E.g. “unified storage” sounds great but in practice you’ll end up with different solutions for block, file & object to work well. - “Software-defined” technologies are only as good as the hardware (HW) they run on. For consistent performance and reliability use compatible HW or vendor’s prescribed configs. Otherwise: a trade-off between investment/cost and performance/results

THE GLOBAL EVENT FOR THE CLOUD AND SERVICE PROVIDER ECOSYSTEM Thank you Q&A Boyan Ivanov Founder, StorPool Storage