Software-defined storage (SDS) is a key driver of data center transformation. As a data center grade SDS, the enterprise features, availability, performance and flexibility of ScaleIO make it perfect for traditional array consolidation, private cloud/IaaS, and new emerging technologies like DevOps and container microservices.
Customers love that they can use industry-standard hardware, Ethernet and ScaleIO to reduce costs, simplify storage lifecycle management, and begin operating with ruthless efficiency.
The first set of new features focuses on space efficiency, to provide more effective usable capacity and improve the total cost of ownership for our customers. ScaleIO.Next introduces multiple space efficiency features including inline compression, space- efficient thin provisioning and flash-based snapshots. In addition, snapshots get an additional boost in ScaleIO.Next by enabling the creation of more snapshot copies, automating snap management and adding unrestricted refresh / restore capabilities. This is huge for customers who want to shrink their storage footprint and reduce costs using software-defined storage.
Since ScaleIO is hardware agnostic, it’s very easy for us to take advantage of new hardware releases immediately. Therefore, with ScaleIO.Next we will by providing performance and acceleration advancements using Dell PowerEdge 14G and NVMe Drives for the ScaleIO Ready Node. This will provide performance and metadata acceleration using NVDIMMs and NVMe drives to support the most-demanding customer applications in the data center.
Additionally, ScaleIO.Next has a strong focus on simpler storage lifecycle management. This release enables even tighter integration with VMware environments with full vVols support, reducing overhead on the hypervisor, allowing administrators to consume data services at the VM granularity and offloading data services to ScaleIO.
ScaleIO.Next also provides seamless volume migration which simplifies storage operations as ScaleIO now provides the flexibility to rearrange and optimize data placement on All-Flash, Hybrid or HDD-only media at any time. Customers can now easily balance performance and cost of data with these new abilities.
ScaleIO also streamlines provisioning and management of ScaleIO Ready Nodes with new Automated Management Services (AMS) features. AMS provides complete lifecycle management of ScaleIO Ready Nodes: deploy ScaleIO, upgrade the OS / hypervisor, apply patches for firmware, and monitor the hardware components. The enhanced capabilities of AMS in ScaleIO.Next add support for storage nodes running on RHEL 6 & 7 and allow customers to deploy a traditional two tier ScaleIO configuration, where ScaleIO Ready Nodes can host either applications or storage.
Last but certainly not least, ScaleIO.Next introduces a myriad of additional new features to improve reliability, availability, scalability and ease-of-use.
As you can see, we’ve packed a lot into this release, designed to . deliver improved efficiency, performance, and management of SDS.