Deployment Choices: SolidFire, ONTAP, and E-Series¶

SolidFire

Guaranteeing performance, high availability, and unsurpassed scale, SolidFire is the industry’s most comprehensive OpenStack block storage integration. SolidFire benefits include Quality of Service (QoS), which guarantees performance to every cloud application, and Helix data protection, which ensures that data is available and protected against loss and corruption. SolidFire also allows the incremental and non-disruptive addition of nodes and has a full-featured API that enables complete automation. Fully compatible with object storage for integrated backup and restore, SolidFire has unsurpassed knowledge of the Cinder block storage services within OpenStack.

ONTAP

If rich data management, deep data protection, and storage efficiency are desired and should be availed directly by the storage, the NetApp FAS product line is a natural fit for use within Cinder deployments. Massive scalability, nondisruptive operations, proven storage efficiencies, and a unified architecture (NAS and SAN) are key features offered by the ONTAP storage operating system. These capabilities are frequently leveraged in existing virtualization deployments and thus align naturally to OpenStack use cases.

E-Series

For cloud environments where higher performance is critical, or where higher-value data management features are not needed or are implemented within an application, the NetApp E-Series product line can provide a cost-effective underpinning for a Cinder deployment. NetApp E-Series storage offers a feature called Dynamic Disk Pools, which simplifies data protection by removing the complexity of configuring RAID groups and allocating hot spares. Utilization is improved by dynamically spreading data, parity, and spare capacity across all drives in a pool, reducing performance bottlenecks due to hot-spots. Additionally, should a drive failure occur, DDP enables the pool to return to an optimal state significantly faster than RAID6, while reducing the performance impact during the reconstruction of a failed drive.