While installing a new Dell EMC Isilon H400 cluster, I noticed node 1 in the chassis was acting up a bit. It allowed me to go through the initial cluster creation wizard, but didn’t run through all the steps and scripts afterwards. I left the node in that state while I installed another cluster, but after two hours or so, nothing had changed. With no other options, I pressed Ctrl + C: the screen became responsive again and eventually the node rebooted. However, it would never finish that boot, instead halting at “/ifs not found”. Eventually, it would need a reformat before it would function properly again…
scale-out NAS
12 posts
Excelero Storage launched their NVMesh product back in March 2017 at Storage Field Day 12. NVMesh is a software defined storage solution using commodity servers and NVMe devices. Using NVMesh and the Excelero RDDA protocol, we saw some mind blowing performance numbers, both in raw IOps and in latency, while keeping hardware and licensing costs low.
I can’t hide the fact I was looking forward to the Qumulo presentation at Storage Field Day 8: I love scale-out NAS systems, with all the advantages they bring in terms of performance, scalability, manageability and upgradeability. I quickly learned that the founders of Qumulo previously worked on Isilon and OneFS. I work with Isilons in the field, so my interest was peaked
Back to Qumulo: they build a data-aware, scale-out, primary storage system. And it’s software defined. Meaning you’ll have full flexibility in the hardware you want to use and how big/fast/expensive you want to make the system. Plus it also gives you real-time insight into the data on the Qumulo system. Interested? Read on!
Exablox presented their OneBlox scale-out NAS system for small and mid-sized organizations at Storage Field Day 7. A typical customer might start with a moderate amount of data that doesn’t have too stringent performance requirements. In the next few years the customer performance requirements might double and the capacity requirements quadruple. Instead of having to buy a traditional array that would have to be sized for that 4x end-state performance and later adding extra disks for capacity, most customers would prefer to invest in small chunks and grow their system as and when it needs to. Lets see how Exablox’ OneBlox system will do this…
Last year EMC installed two new three-node Isilon clusters for one of our customers. 13 months later the customer needs more capacity so the time for adding Isilon nodes to the existing clusters has finally come. Good news for me: since the initial install I got certified to install Isilon systems myself so these expansions are all mine! EMC marketing promises an Isilon cluster expansion in 60 seconds; let’s put it to the test!