The 4th Era of IT Infrastructure Composable Systems 4th Era of IT Infrastructure: Composable Systems...

The 4th Era of IT Infrastructure:

Composable Systems

White Paper

Dr. Jai Menon

Chief Scientist, Cloudistics

IBM Fellow and Dell CTO Emeritus

Cloudistics | The 4th Era of IT Infrastructure Composable Systems | 2

Copyright © 2017 Cloudistics, Inc. 11600 Sunrise Valley Dr. Suite 210 Reston, VA 20191 171905 +1.703.570.8880 | [email protected]

Table of Contents

1. INTRODUCTION 3

2. IT INFRASTRUCTURE REQUIREMENTS 4

2.1 Workload Diversity 4

2.2 Efficiency and Cost 4

2.3 Performance 5

2.4 Simple to Deploy, Manage and Use 6

2.5 Resiliency and Business Continuity 7

2.6 Open and Future-Ready 8

3. THE 4TH ERA OF IT INFRASTRUCTURES – COMPOSABLE SYSTEMS 9

4. THE CLOUDISTICS PLATFORM – A COMPOSABLE INFRASTRUCTURE SYSTEM 10

4.1 Hardware Overview 11

4.2 Software Overview 12

5. HOW THE CLOUDISTICS COMPOSABLE PLATFORM MEETS CUSTOMER REQUIREMENTS 15

5.1 How the Cloudistics Composable Platform Supports Workload Diversity 15

5.2 How the Cloudistics Composable Platform Supports Efficiency and Cost 16

5.3 How the Cloudistics Composable Platform Supports High Performance 17

5.4 How the Cloudistics Composable Platform supports Ease of Deploy, Manage and Use 19

5.5 How the Cloudistics Composable Platform supports Resiliency and Business Continuity 20

5.6 How the Cloudistics Composable Platform is Open and Future-Ready 21

6. CONCLUSION 23



1. Introduction This paper introduces a significant new approach to delivering IT infrastructure to data centers that we call Composable Systems, an integrated fully software-defined infrastructure platform that includes native virtualization of compute, storage and networking resources able to run applications out of the box. The first generation of IT infrastructures were “siloed” architectures where compute, storage and networking were selected separately. Starting from 2007, a second generation of converged infrastructure systems emerged that bundled existing server, storage and networking products together with management software. Hyperconverged or HCI systems emerged in 2012, as a third generation – offering tightly coupled compute and storage hardware that eschewed the need for a Storage Area Network (SAN). In almost all cases, networking hardware is not included as part of the HCI system and must be procured separately. None of these first three generations of IT architecture can meet all the needs of all customers. Cloudistics believes that a fourth generation of Composable systems will emerge making it extremely easy for customers to consume IT while meeting all of their performance, resiliency and cost objectives. Our view of Composable systems aligns well with Gartner’s view of a 3rd phase of integrated systems.1 This paper is organized as follows:

• Section 2: Cloudistics outlines the requirements that modern infrastructures must satisfy.

• Section 3: We formally define a Composable infrastructure. • Section 4: We describe the Cloudistics Composable Cloud Platform. • Section 5: We show how Cloudistics supports the requirements laid out in Section 2. • Section 6: The conclusion.

1 http://www.gartner.com/newsroom/id/3308017

http://www.gartner.com/newsroom/id/3308017

http://www.gartner.com/newsroom/id/3308017



2. IT Infrastructure Requirements In this section, Cloudistics specifies six requirements that modern infrastructures must support, and provide an outline about how infrastructures can be built to meet these requirements. 2.1 Workload Diversity

2.1.1 Requirement

If IT infrastructure is to be an attractive platform for all customers, it must support all types of applications, including today’s business-critical Tier-1 applications such as Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server, Exchange, SharePoint as well as tomorrow’s emerging applications such as BI, Hadoop, NoSQL and predictive analytics. It also needs to support new styles of application development and deployment, like Docker.

2.1.2 How it can be met

• An infrastructure must be easily scalable as needed, so there is no need to overprovision at the start, nor do a fork-lift upgrade later. More specifically, to support a wide diversity of workloads with varying requirements, it is important for the infrastructure to support independent scaling of compute, storage and networking.

• Since multiple workloads may be running on the same infrastructure, the IT infrastructure should allow each workload to specify Service Level Agreements (SLAs) and for the infrastructure to be able to enforce these SLAs, so each workload gets predictable performance.

2.2 Efficiency and Cost


• The infrastructure must have an attractive cost point and an efficient physical footprint.

• The need for operational simplicity is dealt with as part of a separate requirement to be described shortly. The usage of the infrastructure must be optimized.

• Each workload should consume just the resources it needs – overprovisioning should not be necessary.



2.2.2 Requirements

• Compute, storage and networking must all be virtualized, so that the infrastructure allocated to an application is neither under or overprovisioned.

• Storage resiliency must be provided in a space-efficient manner – by using redundant array of independent disks (RAID) instead of multiple copies of data, for example. While some in the industry have downplayed use of RAID recently, the truth is that de-clustered RAID has performance and rebuild times that are superior to other touted alternatives such as erasure coding.

• Storage must provide data reduction services such as deduplication, compression, snapshots and thin provisioning. This is particularly important for Flash storage. Advanced data services such as snapshots and replication must be space and bandwidth efficient.

2.3 Performance

2.3.1 Requirement

To support Tier-1 applications, the infrastructure must support high performance and low-latency. High performance in each of compute, storage, networking and virtualization layers are important.

The performance must also be predictable.


• The infrastructure must use the latest generation of servers, all Flash storage, high performance networks and modern hypervisors with low overheads.

• Virtual Machines (VMs) must be given direct access to block storage without layers of translation to minimize storage latencies.

• Enough compute resources must be dedicated to storage controller functionality to ensure that the inherent read/write capability of the storage drives is not inhibited.

• Low-overhead implementations of network and storage virtualization must be used. • VM level network microservices such as routing and firewalls must be provided to

minimize the need for east-west traffic to hairpin to physical hardware and back. • Predictable performance must be supported through SLA enforcement and use of

all flash storage.



2.4 Simple to Deploy, Manage and Use

2.4.1 Requirement

It should take only a small number of people and minimal expertise to deploy, manage and use the infrastructure.

It should take only minutes after the hardware has been racked and powered, to set up and get operating everything needed to run the first application.

The infrastructure should be composable – it should be easy to separately carve out the exact compute, storage and network needs of each user or tenant of the infrastructure.

It should be simple and non-disruptive to add more infrastructure or to upgrade it. Agile, dynamic environments need independent scaling of compute, storage and networking.

It should be easy to know if an application is meeting its SLA and to remediate if it is not.

• It should all be able to be managed from a single portal – no silos.

It should be easy to bring in the infrastructure and have it sit side-by-side with existing infrastructure and be able to move existing applications and associated data to the new infrastructure.


• The entire infrastructure must be software-defined, meaning that it can be easily provisioned using an Application Programming Interface (API), using software or from a single portal – no need to resort to scripting, Command Line Interface (CLIs), terminals and keyboards.

• Analytics and optimization techniques should be used to monitor and optimize the placement of applications and the assignment of infrastructure to each application.

• Virtualization of all functions (server, storage and networking) must be integrated into the infrastructure and controlled through APIs to ensure fast and automated provisioning of the infrastructure.

• Storage and networking capability must be VM- or container-centric rather than LUN- or network-centric.

A composable infrastructure would eliminate unnecessary choices for the customer, where such choices add to complexity without providing significant value. As an example, Flash storage has become cheap enough relative to spinning disks (see Figure below) that all Flash storage is appropriate for most application needs – other storage requirements such



as for archival storage can be satisfied using the public cloud. This simplifies the infrastructure and its management, reduces unnecessary customer choice, and eliminates use of failure-prone mechanical components from the data center.

2.5 Resiliency and Business Continuity

2.5.1 Requirement

While some applications may not need this, to support business critical Tier-1 applications, the infrastructure should be capable of supporting five-nines of reliability (no more than five minutes of downtime per year). For example, all flash arrays like those from Pure Storage or XtremIO claim to be five-nines, which is now the standard for supporting Tier-1 applications.

It must never lose data or return the wrong data to an application.

The infrastructure must also support natural disasters and other site-related issues.


• To support five-nines, the infrastructure must provide for non-disruptive hardware upgrades, non-disruptive software upgrades, non-disruptive scaling, fast failover and recovery times, and minimal performance loss during hardware failures.

Figure 1: SSDs vs. 7.2K rpm vs. 15K rpm spinning magnetic disk drives



• To ensure data loss probability is vanishingly small, the infrastructure must support and recover from multiple simultaneous storage drive failures.

• Support for failover between sites without disruption to operations must be provided.

• Individual applications that need small RTOs (Recovery Time Objective) and RPOs (Recovery Point Objective) must be supported and application consistent replication and snapshots should be provided.

2.6 Open and Future-Ready The infrastructure should be built using standard hardware components such as standard x86 servers and standard switch hardware. It should use open standards. The infrastructure should support emerging trends and directions in business processes and technology – such as emerging approaches to application development and deployment like Docker and containers. Container technology is rapidly transforming the way enterprises develop and deliver applications, and adoption is set to ramp up spectacularly in the next year. A new report from the Cloud Foundry Foundation, Hope Versus Reality: Containers in 2016, shows that 16 percent of all organizations are already using containers in production, and another 64 percent [of organizations] are expecting to move into production in the next year.2 Given this, it is important for IT infrastructures to provide first-class support for containers (such as Docker) and associated container orchestration systems (such as Docker Swarm or Kubernetes). IT infrastructures should be future-ready, allowing for easy incorporation of new generations of technology. For example, emerging storage technologies like Non-Volatile Memory Express (NVMe0 fabrics and 3D Xpoint memory must be supported as and when they become available.

2 http://siliconangle.com/blog/2016/06/17/containers-are-on-fire-as-enterprises-ramp-upadoption/

https://www.cloudfoundry.org/learn/2016-container-report/

https://www.cloudfoundry.org/learn/2016-container-report/

http://siliconangle.com/blog/2016/06/17/containers-are-on-fire-as-enterprises-ramp-up-adoption/






3. The 4th Era of IT Infrastructures – Composable Systems Customers are looking for infrastructures that meet or beat HCI systems in cost and ease of deploy and ease of use, while overcoming the seven limitations outlined above. The current state of IT infrastructures is summarized in Table 1.

Table 1: Comparing IT Infrastructures

As technology has continued to advance, it is now becoming possible to provide IT infrastructures that: 1. Satisfies the requirements laid out in Section 2; 2. Eliminate the seven limitations of HCI systems outlined in Section 3.3 above; and 3. Match or exceed the cost and simplicity of HCI systems. We call this next generation of IT infrastructure Composable Infrastructures. Such systems:



• Tightly integrate server, storage, networking, virtualization, VM/container centric

management and an application marketplace to create a high-speed infrastructure platform that includes everything needed to run applications out of the box.

• Include native virtualization of compute, storage and networking resources, without

need for additional 3rd party software.

• Allow each of these three resources to scale easily and independently of each other, making it possible to run a wide diversity of workloads.

• Use only off-the-shelf x86 server nodes, storage drives and network switches – it is entirely software defined.

• Dynamically assemble or compose the resources needed to run a workload and those resources are returned to a free pool when the workload terminates.

• Employ a single unified management portal to manage the entire infrastructure using an API.

Cloudistics’ definition of Composable systems aligns well with Gartner’s definition of the 3rd phase of integrated systems from 2016-2025 (see Footnote 1). In Gartner’s view: “The third phase of integrated systems will deliver dynamic, composable and fabric-based infrastructures by also offering modular and disaggregated hardware building blocks, driving continuous application delivery and continuous economic optimization.”

4. The Cloudistics Platform – A Composable Infrastructure System

The Cloudistics platform, one of the earliest Composable Infrastructure Systems, is described below in design and at a high level.



The Cloudistics platform comes with all the software and hardware needed to run applications ---out of the box. The Cloudistics platform is capable of running all your enterprise applications. To support fast time to value, low cost and ease-of-use --- no additional 3rd party software or hardware is required to run applications. The Cloudistics platform is fully software-defined and virtualized, ensuring agility. Included in the platform is an application marketplace (e.g. iPhone App Store for enterprise apps) which allows simple point-and-click deployment of applications. The resources needed to run an application are “composed” on the fly, and intelligent workload placement with SLA enforcement ensures guaranteed performance. The Cloudistics platform is hyper-scale, allowing each of the resources (storage, server, network to scale independently without traditional clustering limits. It is a multi-tenant platform that supports self-service for different organizations, customers, tenants or workloads, making it attractive for both traditional data center customers, both large and small, and for Managed Service Providers (MSPs).

4.1 Hardware Overview Cloudistics uses off-the-shelf hardware in the Cloudistics composable platform. Our initial implementation used the latest Dell PowerEdge FX hardware; however Cloudistics will support other hardware partners in the future.

The composable platform has separate compute, storage and network blocks that are independently scalable. For example, a 2U compute block has 1-8 Intel Broadwell nodes, with up to 576 hyperthreaded cores and 4 TB of RAM.

A storage block has from 6 to 96 usable TB of all enterprise flash storage and two disk controllers built from standard Dell servers. The result is enterprise features and performance of proprietary RAID arrays, without the cost.

The network block has redundant SDN-enabled ONIE (Open Network Install Environment) switches, each with 48x10 GbE and 6x40 GbE ports, running the Pica8 NOS (network operating system). A 32x100 GbE switch is also available for even higher performance or for use as a spine switch in large deployments of the composable platform. The open switches used in Cloudistics’ composable platform are less expensive than proprietary switches from traditional switch vendors; but have all the enterprise functionality needed for use within the composable platform.



4.2 Software Overview Key differentiation of the Cloudistics composable platform comes from the software. There are four separate software components described below:

4.2.1 AOS – Adaptive Operating System

Our Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM-based hypervisor) is called the Adaptive Operating System (AOS). AOS runs on all the compute nodes in the composable system, eliminating the need to separately purchase virtualization licenses, modules, or costly license renewals.

AOS supports high availability, full and para-virtualization, live migration, CPU/memory/storage oversubscription, CPU and memory hot-plug, and built-in security. Unlike many other infrastructures or the public cloud, a running application in the composable platform can be given more memory or cores without having to stop and restart the application.

Compute nodes are grouped into one or more collections called migration zones – a workload can migrate from one compute node to another in the same migration zone. Migration zones can span sites.

AOS natively supports Docker containers, both stateless and stateful. To support stateful applications, Cloudistics provides a Docker Volume Driver that leverages our Efficient & Scalable Hardware (EBF) storage. To support containers, Cloudistics uses the concept of a “Zone VM.” Many containers can run inside the Zone VM. A Zone VM is a VM that includes the Cloudistics Docker Volume Driver and the Docker Engine. Once a Zone VM is started, individual containers inside this VM can be created and removed very quickly, much faster than traditional VMs can be created and removed. This is superior to the alternative approach used in the industry where each container runs in its own VM. At the same time, unlike running containers on bare metal, the Cloudistics approach preserves the advantages of isolating the compute node from container failures as well as the ability to live migrate containers. Regular VMs and Zone VMs with containers can be run simultaneously.



4.2.2 AON – Adaptive Overlay Networking

The Cloudistics Adaptive Overlay Networking (AON) software component provides network virtualization, based on open standards, at line speed. Many infrastructures support compute and storage virtualization; the Cloudistics platform is the 1st to also natively support network virtualization. This is essential for a true software-defined data center (SDDC) matching the agility of the public cloud.

Network virtualization allows virtual networks to be dynamically created and destroyed in support of application needs, without requiring the manual reconfiguration of the underlying physical network. Virtual networks are much easier to use and manage than virtual local area networks (VLANs). Unlike VLANs, they support network address preserving workload migrations, and they are not limited to 4096 sub-networks.

Network virtualization includes both overlay networking and function virtualization. Overlay networking allows VMs to communicate using virtual network addressing. The overlay network provides the agility needed to support modern applications, the underlay network provides the robustness needed in enterprise data centers. Function virtualization implements networking functions such as switching, routing and firewalls in software.

The Cloudistics differentiated approach to overlay networking is 100% based on open standards - standard IPv4 and standard switches and routers. Unlike other approaches, the composable platform does not require switches to be specially configured. Instead of compute-intensive encapsulation, the composable platform uses address substitution allowing the virtual networks to operate at line speeds without special hardware support.

With network virtualization, Cloudistics supports true micro-segmentation. By implementing micro-segmentation at the network layer, the composable platform secures individual applications into secure islands. Additional security is achieved through our use of application level firewalls.

4.2.3 EBF – Elastic Block Flash

The third software component is called the Elastic Block Flash (EBF), which runs on the storage controllers (these are standard x86 servers with shared access to a set of hot swap enterprise Flash drives).



EBF is a federated, all-flash storage subsystem that is designed for performance, redundancy, scalability, and manageability of virtualized and containerized workloads. Storage controllers come in pairs, and EBF performance scales linearly as additional controller pairs are added. A pair of controllers and related storage is called a storage block, and storage blocks are grouped into storage pools.

Storage data protection includes RAID, hot sparing and in-drive erasure coding. The controllers are fully redundant with automatic failover. If the primary controller fails, the secondary takes over immediately with zero downtime, no data loss, and no rebuilds.

The Cloudistics EBF uses a unique approach to storage virtualization. Clustering and cross-node locking protocols are avoided in the Cloudistics platform, allowing storage to scale without traditional limits. Unlike other approaches, there is no filesystem or any other translation layer—VMs and containers have direct access to storage, resulting in all the raw performance of flash being directly available to VMs and containers. EBF delivers the highest IO performance possible while maintaining all features of an enterprise storage system including: thin provisioning, single-instance storage, live snapshots, cloning, on-the-fly storage expansion, on-the-fly VM disk expansion, asynchronous DR, incremental backups and self-encrypting drives.

4.2.4 Cloudistics Intelligent Cloud Composer and Management Portal

The fourth component in the Cloudistics composable platform is the intelligent cloud composer and management portal which enables complete control of the platform from a single-pane-of-glass and provides composability and usage metering.

The Cloudistics Cloud Composer supports intelligent workload placement and SLA enforcement. Workload placement onto compute nodes and storage pools includes throughput, bandwidth and storage capacity needs of the workload, and also space savings opportunities. The composable platform also permits even more sophisticated placement algorithms, including those that factor in ownership of resources and availability of particular features on the nodes.



The portal gives visibility to everything from low-level hardware (e.g. fans) all the way up to the application level and it can support everything from an entry system to a large multi-data center implementation.

The health monitoring support system automatically alerts the Cloudistics’ support team of potential performance issues. At Cloudistics, we can see failures and initiate replacement service requests before the customer even knows there is a problem. A chat interface allows a customer to connect directly with the support team.

5. How the Cloudistics Composable Platform meets customer requirements

Finally, we will revisit the six requirements laid out in Section 2, and show how the design of the Cloudistics Composable (System or Platform? – need to be consistent) can meet those requirements, while eliminating the shortcomings of HCI systems.

5.1 How the Cloudistics Composable Platform Supports Workload Diversity Since different customer workloads will have different compute, storage and networking requirements, a key requirement is to be able to scale these independently.

Cloudistics has separate compute, storage and network blocks, with any to any connectivity between the blocks. Within the integrated system, any one of these three blocks can be added to, without affecting the other blocks. This makes it incredibly simple to scale compute, storage or networking as needed to support a given workload or set of workloads. In the Cloudistics Composable Platform the architecture allows compute to be scaled to almost 700 nodes (50,400 HT cores), storage to be scaled to 10s of PBs, and networking to be scaled to 10s of high-performance leaf and spine switches. Architectural extensions which will support another factor of 10 in scaling are in development

Cloudistics composable platform storage blocks are built using dedicated x86 servers. Storage services (such as thin-provisioning and deduplication) are provided on a VM or



container basis, not on a LUN basis. All the complexities of SAN management are eliminated and not visible to the administrator or user of the system.

Cloudistics composable platform uses all Flash storage in EBF, making it easier to support guaranteed performance for applications. Cloudistics composable platform will be certified for a wide range of applications including Big Data Hadoop (Horton, Cloudera, MapR), analytics (Splunk), NoSQL (Cassandra, MongoDB), Relational (PostGres), Redhat (RHEL), Microsoft, VDI (Citrix, Workspot, Parallels) and Docker.

Cloudistics composable platform makes it possible to easily import existing VMware or Hyper-V workloads to the platform with a few clicks.

5.2 How the Cloudistics Composable Platform Supports Efficiency and Cost Cloudistics provides complete virtualization of compute, storage and networking – making it possible to allocate exactly the resources needed – no more, no less – to each application. A low-overhead hypervisor integrates both compute and network virtualization and runs on the compute nodes, while storage is implemented on a separate and dedicated set of nodes. Storage resiliency is provided in a space efficient manner – by using RAID instead of multiple copies of data. Each drive uses erasure coding to handle uncorrectable errors, each group of 7 drives is organized in a 6+P RAID-5 configuration, there are 2 global spares, and RAID-0 is implemented across a group of 30 drives. The Cloudistics Composable Platform uses a single network for all uses, including storage. Data reduction techniques such as deduplication, thin provisioning and snapshots are included in the platform from Cloudistics.

Cloudistics data services like snapshots and replication are space and bandwidth efficient. Since Cloudistics includes the hypervisor and network virtualization software, no additional licensing costs are incurred, unlike most other systems.



Cloudistics footprint and cost are very attractive and competitive. Price comparisons show Cloudistics to be at least 30% cheaper than best-of-breed HCI systems and at least 2X cheaper than best-of-breed public cloud systems.

5.3 How the Cloudistics Composable Platform Supports High Performance Cloudistics products ensure high performance for each of its components.

Servers utilizing the latest generation of Intel Broadwell cores are used in Cloudistics. Dual-socket nodes with up to 36 cores/node (72 HT cores/node) and up to 512 GB of RAM per node are supported in Cloudistics.

For storage, Cloudistics’ integrated Elastic Block Flash (EBF) storage has the performance of a best-of-breed modern all flash array (such as Pure or XtremeIO) and utilizes modern 4 TB Samsung Enterprise SSDs with 3D V-Nand technology and drive level erasure coding. Furthermore, the blocks from the EBF are made directly available to the applications in the VMs, without the traditional block to file to block translations of hypervisors (LUN to VMFS to VMDK in VMware). The dedicated x86 server nodes implementing storage function are powerful enough that they can support the full read/write performance capability of the Flash drives attached to them.



For switching, high performance TOR switches with 48x10Gb and 6x40 Gb ports, and spine switches with 32x100Gb ports are used. Each EBF storage block can support 200,000 IOPS at 120 usecs of latency and can support up to 40 Gb/s of bandwidth to a single application, which matches or exceeds the capability of modern all-flash-arrays like Pure and XtremIO.

Cloudistics also uses a KVM based hypervisor with industry-leading overheads that are in the 2%-3% range.

Cloudistics implements network virtualization in Layer 3 using an innovative new technique that allows for line rate performance, see figure below.

VM level microservices such as routing and firewalls are all implemented with low overheads and minimizes consumption of compute cores. By integrating such capabilities, Cloudistics minimizes the need for east-west traffic to hair-pin up to physical hardware and back, see figure below.



5.4 How the Cloudistics Composable Platform supports Ease of Deploy, Manage and Use

Cloudistics uses a single SaaS based portal to manage all aspects of the infrastructure including real-time monitoring and alerts. The portal leverages an API provided by the hardware. Since all functions are virtualized in Cloudistics, automated provisioning of exactly what an application needs without over or under provisioning is easy. There is no need to resort to scripting, CLIs, terminals and keyboards.

Once the hardware has been racked, the time to run your first application is as low as 12 minutes. It is very easy in the Cloudistics platform to compose or carve out a VDC (Virtual Data Center) that meets the exact and specific compute, storage and networking needs of an individual tenant or user of the infrastructure.

A Cloudistics application marketplace which allows popular enterprise applications to be downloaded for free, and a portal which allows one click importation of existing apps from VMware or Hyper-V to Cloudistics makes application deployment simple.



With Cloudistics, all storage capabilities such as replication, snapshots, and thin provisioning are delivered by VM or container, exactly as the customer would want.

Cloudistics uses all flash, elastic block flash storage (EBF), eliminating the complexity of managing multiple storage types and simplifying SLA enforcement. Cloudistics also simplifies customer choice by eliminating the need to select between RAID levels. Cloudistics uses a single network for all needs, including storage.

Cloudistics runs side by side with your current infrastructure without disruption— network connection and power is all managed internally without affecting your production environment.

5.5 How the Cloudistics Composable Platform supports Resiliency and Business Continuity There is no single point of failure in Cloudistics – there is redundancy for storage controllers, drives, network switches and hypervisors. Recovery times are minimized for failures. The EBF storage controller design is active-passive, and any one controller has enough capacity to support uninhibited IOs to all the drives behind the pair of controllers. When a controller fails and the system recovers to use the previously passive controller, there is no loss in performance. Storage drive resiliency is provided by using RAID instead of multiple copies of data. Each drive uses erasure coding to handle uncorrectable errors within each Flash drive, each group of seven drives is organized in a 6+P RAID-5 configuration, there are 2 global hot spares across 30 drives, and RAID-0 is implemented across the group of 30 drives.

Cloudistics supports rolling software upgrades. A group of nodes can be defined to be a migration zone, and all nodes in a migration zone can be updated to the new release of



software, while other migration zones are at the previous release. Up to 3 releases of software can be running at the same time in different migration zones. Software updates do not require a reboot of a node, thus making software updates non-disruptive.

The Cloudistics hypervisor has HA capability, so if the hypervisor fails, VMs can be restarted on another node. No maintenance windows are needed for patching software – a running kernel can be patched.

Cloudistics also supports non-disruptive hardware upgrades and non-disruptive scaling.

Cloudistics supports small RTOs (Recovery Time Objective) and RPOs (Recovery Point Objective) and provides for application consistent replication and snapshots.

5.6 How the Cloudistics Composable Platform is Open and Future-Ready Cloudistics uses entirely off-the-shelf hardware such as x86 server nodes, open network switches and SSD drives. Newer versions of these technologies can be seamlessly incorporated into the design in the future, as they become available. Cloudistics’ hypervisor is built on KVM and it uses the industry-standard iSCSI protocol internally to connect with Elastic Block Flash (EBF). EBF is built on Linux and uses many battle hardened and robust subsystems from the Linux kernel. Cloudistics also integrates with existing data center networking and provides redundant network switching using the MLAG open Ethernet standard. Cloudistics natively supports Docker containers by using the concept of a Zone VM inside which all the containers can run. Zone VMs run a very stripped down Linux Ubuntu operating system, to minimize the overhead for running containers, allowing close to bare metal performance. Once a Zone VM is started, individual containers inside this special VM can be created and removed very quickly, much faster than VMs can be created and removed. The Zone VM approach is, therefore, superior to the alternative approach used in the industry where each container runs in its own VM. At the same time, unlike running containers on bare metal, the Cloudistics approach preserves the advantages of isolating the compute node from container failures and of being able to live migrate containers. It also provides persistent on demand block storage for containers, and supports container



level virtual networks and micro segmentation. A Zone VM can be the only VM running on a compute node. Alternatively, other application VMs can also be run alongside the Zone VM, thus allowing for VMs and containers to be run simultaneously. Cloudistics is ready to support NVMe fabrics as they become available, since the NICs used are already RDMA capable as required by the emerging NVMe fabric standard, and it can leverage next-generation 3D Xpoint memory when it becomes available from Intel and Micron in 2017.

The Table below shows how Cloudistics meets all of the requirements laid out in Section 2 of this paper, and contrasts Cloudistics’ solution to the capabilities of HCI systems.



6. Conclusion In this paper, we reviewed the first three generations of IT infrastructure – siloed, converged and hyperconverged and showed they were all unable to fully satisfy the requirements of data center customers.

We then introduced a 4th generation IT infrastructure architecture called Composable. Such systems

• Tightly integrate server, storage, networking, virtualization, VM/container centric management and an application marketplace to create a high-speed infrastructure platform that includes everything needed to run applications out of the box – a single silo platform.

• Include native virtualization of compute, storage and networking resources, without need for additional 3rd party software.

• Allow each of these three resources to scale easily and independently of each other, making it possible to run a wide diversity of workloads.

• Use only off-the-shelf x86 server nodes, storage drives and network switches – it is entirely software defined.

• Dynamically assemble or compose the resources needed to run a workload and those resources are returned to a free pool when the workload terminates.

• Employ a single unified management portal to manage the entire infrastructure using an API.

We argued that Composable systems will make it extremely easy for customers to consume IT and meet all of their performance, resiliency and cost objectives. We believe that composable systems as defined here, align well with Gartner’s definition of a 3rd phase of integrated systems (see footnote 1), and, in our view, it will become the preferred approach for infrastructure IT for the future. The Cloudistics Composable Platform meets the Gartner definition.

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