3 ms·

Software defined storage vs. hardware defined storage

21 points by jtsymonds 6y ago

stingraycharles 6y ago
I mean, I understand where they are coming from — minio is an s3 object store that integrates remarkably well into the whole containerized ecosystem, but there’s definitely something to be said for “old” tech. Just to give an example, having been bitten more than just a few times in the past, I personally am hesitant to use minio and the likes because the landscape changes so fast. I don’t really understand minio’s business model, but do know they’re heavily VC funded and are likely not making a profit right now. This begs the question whether it is a safe bet. On the other hand, we could buy some storage appliance from a reputable brand and have an s3 compatible API there. I know that when I’m buying Dell or whatever the company isn’t going away any time soon, and if something’s wrong, I can get a Dell engineer to our datacenter in a few hours of time. Lastly, I don’t really want to containerize my storage. I always consider storage and other state something I want to keep out of kubernetes, and treat it as an external service to kubernetes. There are quite a few things that can go wrong when running these services inside kubernetes, and in my experience things just stay a lot simpler if you just stick to VMs for this type of stuff. YMMV.
myrandomcomment 6y ago
So I read this list and at the end I was like well this is a bit bias to SW, then I looked at the source. There are trade offs on both sides. There are some advantages to the HW side, mostly consistent performance depending on the workload and the clients view of the storage. It's still and interesting space that is ripe for innovation despise all the current players. It's likely where I will go with my next startup.
Proven 6y ago
This is just plain wrong. Almost all modern hardware sold for on on-premises S3 use can be purchased as SDS which means in most cases there's no stated difference between SDS and SDS installed on appliance vendor-engineered appliances. As stingraycharles said above, if you don't want to mess around with BIOS and RAID and OS settings and updates for a very important app (say, patient records), you'll get an appliance. If you want on-prem S3 for some simple apps like private Docker registry, in most cases you can buy the s/w from your appliance vendor and run it in KVM VMs, for example. But if you need a tested hardware and software stack with Minio, your choices become very limited.

21 points by jtsymonds 6y ago

I mean, I understand where they are coming from — minio is an s3 object store that integrates remarkably well into the whole containerized ecosystem, but there’s definitely something to be said for “old” tech. Just to give an example, having been bitten more than just a few times in the past, I personally am hesitant to use minio and the likes because the landscape changes so fast. I don’t really understand minio’s business model, but do know they’re heavily VC funded and are likely not making a profit right now. This begs the question whether it is a safe bet. On the other hand, we could buy some storage appliance from a reputable brand and have an s3 compatible API there. I know that when I’m buying Dell or whatever the company isn’t going away any time soon, and if something’s wrong, I can get a Dell engineer to our datacenter in a few hours of time. Lastly, I don’t really want to containerize my storage. I always consider storage and other state something I want to keep out of kubernetes, and treat it as an external service to kubernetes. There are quite a few things that can go wrong when running these services inside kubernetes, and in my experience things just stay a lot simpler if you just stick to VMs for this type of stuff. YMMV.

myrandomcomment 6y ago

So I read this list and at the end I was like well this is a bit bias to SW, then I looked at the source. There are trade offs on both sides. There are some advantages to the HW side, mostly consistent performance depending on the workload and the clients view of the storage. It's still and interesting space that is ripe for innovation despise all the current players. It's likely where I will go with my next startup.

Proven 6y ago

This is just plain wrong. Almost all modern hardware sold for on on-premises S3 use can be purchased as SDS which means in most cases there's no stated difference between SDS and SDS installed on appliance vendor-engineered appliances. As stingraycharles said above, if you don't want to mess around with BIOS and RAID and OS settings and updates for a very important app (say, patient records), you'll get an appliance. If you want on-prem S3 for some simple apps like private Docker registry, in most cases you can buy the s/w from your appliance vendor and run it in KVM VMs, for example. But if you need a tested hardware and software stack with Minio, your choices become very limited.