Carol Platz

Author Archives: Carol Platz

Breaking the ‘Shared-Nothing’ Bottleneck: A NoSQL Paradigm

While there is no single storage architecture model that fits all NoSQL databases, the often recommended approach is a distributed, shared-nothing architecture using local storage (often flash-based) at each node. At the storage hardware level, direct-attached storage (DAS) would be an example of shared-nothing architecture. This model provides the desired high performance, low latency, fault tolerance and availability that business-critical NoSQL databases like Cassandra and MongoDB require. While DAS offers significant advantages, it’s counterproductive to today’s data center climate of reduced CapEx, OpEx and sustainability initiatives. At the same time, critical data services inherent in a shared networked storage system, such as storage area networks (SANs), are missing in DAS. However, with today’s SAN solutions, you can have your cake and eat it, too: efficiency, data services, resilience and yes, high performance and low latency, too. Modernizing your data platform to a SAN model, using a supplier with a disaggregated, software-defined architecture, can deliver the performance and fault tolerance your NoSQL database requires without compromising efficiency. Why Shared-Nothing Is Common for NoSQL DAS is a prevalent model for performance-sensitive workloads, like NoSQL databases, because historically local flash, especially

Leaner, More Efficient Storage Infrastructure for the AI Era

The AI era demands a simple infrastructure strategy that prioritizes scalability, performance and cost efficiency in managing AI data pipelines. A key challenge is supporting large language model (LLM) training, which requires massive data, compute and storage resources. Efficient training relies on the continuous feeding of large data sets and the storage of model parameters, intermediate results and checkpoints. Above all, the infrastructure strategy must ensure that the AI resources are scalable, reliable and cost-efficient. Scaling AI Training Infrastructure As models grow, so do the demands on high-performance block storage system with multiattach capabilities. The block Continue reading

Minding the Gap: SDS That Carries You Through Last Mile

Data center modernization is inevitable to keep pace with today’s performance-intensive workloads, which are growing especially rapidly in the financial services and e-commerce sectors. Software-defined storage (SDS) offers the promise of greater agility, scalability and reduced costs, making it a compelling part of the platform architect’s vision of a streamlined, software-driven infrastructure. A common priority for modernization is retiring traditional Fibre Channel (FC) SANs, which are perceived as legacy and complex. While still adequate for many application workloads, performance gaps exist in SDS block storage solutions that are engineered into legacy FC SANs, which cannot support the organization’s mission-critical application workloads. Once reserved as the primary storage tier for traditional workloads,

NVMe-oF Substantially Reduces Data Access Latency

Modeling hyperscaler cloud architecture is gaining significant momentum in enterprise data centers as many IT teams are repatriating their public cloud workloads back on premises, modernizing their data center for cloud native workloads or building their own specialized public cloud services. They want to integrate the best capability and efficiency aspects of the public cloud with on-premises control. Several key benefits of the public cloud are driving data-center requirements, which include efficiency, scalability, flexibility, automation and agility. Technological innovations have emerged as key enablers of best-of-breed cloud architecture to achieve the benefits promised by the public cloud, which are software-defined storage, open source orchestrators such as Kubernetes, and NVMe-oF (Nonvolatile Memory Express Over Fabrics). All are gaining popularity as foundational components of modern cloud architecture. What Is NVMe-oF? The NVMe-oF v1.0 specification was released in June 2016. NVMe-oF is a network protocol that extends the parallel access and low latency features of Nonvolatile Memory Express (NVMe) protocol across networked storage. Originally designed for local storage and common in direct-attached storage (DAS) architectures, NVMe delivers high-speed data access and low latency by directly interfacing with solid-state disks. NVMe-oF allows these same advantages to be achieved in distributed and Continue reading