Predictable Scaling with the HP X9000 (built on Ibrix software)

I'm only about 6 months behind many of the world's leading independent storage bloggers on learning about HP's storage products, so I've been eager to catch up to them. Imagine my delight this morning when I picked up Greg Knieriemen's tweet on the most recent report from ESG on our X9000 Scale-Out NAS systems.  Thanks to Brian Garret and Vinny Choinski of ESG for their straightforward analysis.  

I was somewhat familiar with Ibrix as a software product that powered NAS clusters, but the new ESG Labs report helped me grasp HP's vision for the X9000 storage appliances much better.

Interested readers should view the report to see the results as well as the methodology that was used.  There were three test beds covering throughput, content delivery and file creation metrics culled from a mix of X9000 configurations. The X9320 is a storage appliance with internal disks and the X9300 is a gateway version of the product that connects to external SAN storage. Another model, the 9720, which is the super-sized version of the 9320 (full 42u rack) not used in the tests. 

3PAR customers will be familiar with the processing architecture of the X9000. The granular "head unit" of the X9000 system is called a couplet, and is a pair of fault-tolerant NAS heads.  This is similar to 3PAR's storage system architecture where nodes are added in pairs.

But the surprising thing about scalability for the x9000 is not necessarily how large it can grow, but how effectively it can also be employed in much smaller environments.  As the ESG Labs report concludes:

Who would have guessed that companies overwhelmed by Word and PowerPoint archives could benefit from the same solution as those burdened by 100-TB annual growth of genome sequencing data? Who knew that a NAS file system developed for high-performance computing could evolve into a graceful, cost-effective scale-out solution with predictable and near-linear performance for small and large files and exotic and everyday applications? The challenges that scale-out NAS solves are much more “everyday” than “lunatic fringe,” and the X9000 makes it consumable by almost anyone. If you are facing file system growth and complexity challenges, you should consider the X9000. It’s affordable, includes commercial features like snapshots and replication, and lets NFS and CIFS work on the same file system. You can buy a scale-out architecture that will grow with you and meet the needs of your business without interruption. The Fusion segmented file system, combined with HP’s servers and storage (not to mention HP’s buying power and supply-chain advantage), brings what started as a niche solution to the masses. 

 

Comments

[nate]

so there really is a gateway version of the ibrix product? From what I could tell on their site it seemed their gateway product was built on polyserve (X5000 ?) with the higher end one being bundled storage(looked like MSA) and not usable as a traditional standalone gateway for 3rd party storage.

maybe I mis read or maybe their web site is too confusing!

[marc farley]

The ESG report talks about the X9300 as an Ibrix gateway and I trust them to get it right. I don't know about the mix and match capabilities of the various models. I'll try to find out.

[marc farley]

OK, here's the scoop: The X9000 is all Ibrix technology - none from Polyserve. The appliance products (9320 + 9720) with integrated disk drives are not supported as gateway systems. However both gateway systems and appliances can be mixed within a cluster under a single name space up to 16 PB in size and you can tier across those different systems. Hope that helps.

[Patrick Osborne]

A starting point for people to get more info is www.hp.com/go/x9000 and our configuration database at HP (SPOCK) details which block arrays are supported by the X9000 file-servings gateways.

A very popular deployment for X9000/IBRIX is using gateways with block arrays and X9720 in the same single namespace. This gives you the ability to deploy 2 tiers of block storage (FC and SATA) in the same namespace. Using Data Tiering in the filesystem, customers have the ability to seamlessly and automatically migrate data from Tier 1 to Tier 2 based on simple policies.

(Note: Patrick Osborne, who wrote this comment works on the X9000 team at HP)