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This article mainly analyzes the storage federation and Scale-out what are different related knowledge points, the content is detailed and easy to understand, the operation details are reasonable, and has a certain reference value. If you are interested, you might as well follow the editor and learn more about "what's the difference between the stored federation and Scale-out".

During this period of time, there is not much big news stored, but some manufacturers have updated their products. For example, there are some large updates in the midrange storage of Dell EMC.

First of all, Unity-AF finally supports online re-deletion. That is to make up for a relatively large deficiency of its all-flash Unity. From my point of view, Unity also has two big shortcomings, Scale-out (there seems to be no road sign) and double active activity (as if there are already road signs).

Unity-AF uses the fixed-length re-deletion technology of 8KB. At present, Watermelon does not get the details. I do not know whether to use strong hash non-comparison or weak hash + comparison to solve the problem of fingerprint conflict. Unity-AF re-deletion and compression are bundled together, that is, re-deletion compression must be turned on or off together.

Another mid-range storage is that SC finally packaged two all-flash models, the SC5020F and the SC7020F. I compared the specifications, which are all packaged in SC5020 and SC7020, that is, this independent model has exactly the same hardware specifications as a hybrid array except that it cannot be plugged in a mechanical hard drive. Of course, the way the software is quoted is different, and the software becomes all-inclusive in accordance with the industry practice of AFA.

This packaging may have been influenced by analysts (see Dell EMC Storage acquisition one-year inventory, Gartner analysts seem to mean.), because Gartner has several suggestions to manufacturers in the one-year inventory of Dell's acquisition of EMC, among which SC is advised to launch SSA.

Well, at present, Dell EMC's SAN has products in the form of AFA, so what's the difference between these products?

Dell EMC divides the industry's AFA architecture into four types. Type 1 is the Active/Passive dual control architecture, and the typical representative is Pure Storage.

And Type 2 is the unified storage of Amax A, represented by its Unity-AF. Type 3 is a federated Amax An array, and the typical product is SC AF. And Type 4 is a scale-out-enabled array, and the typical products are VMAX-AF and ExtremeIO.

Many people have asked me, what the heck is this federation, and what is the difference between this federation and Scale-out?

Here, we use a control frame (containing two controllers, which can generally be used as a complete system) as a basic unit of reliability to talk about the difference in the use of a volume / LUN of a host in federated and Scale-out clusters.

1. If a LUN can drift online from one control frame to another, this mode of work is federation.

2. If a LUN can be load balanced across control frames, that is, multiple control frames can read / write the same LUN at the same time, then this is Scale-out.

3. If the LUN has a mirror on both control boxes and supports arbitration, then it is double active.

Therefore, we can see that federation mainly solves the problem of online migration of a load, while Scale-out solves the problem of performance expansion of a load, while dual active users solve the problem of disaster recovery. Federation can be used with Shuanghuo, while Scale-out can be used with Shuanghuo.

Dell EMC SC does not support scale-out, but supports federation, supporting up to 10 arrays to form a federation, so to promote aggregation performance is 3.9 million IOPS. That is, to achieve full performance, you must need 10 LUN, one for each control box. If it's a scale-out, you only have one LUN.

Therefore, the federal cluster focuses on unified management, and the drift of the LUN is transparent to the host.

Federation can be used in conjunction with online data migration, online load balancing and online DR (dual active).

In fact, the industry supports federal products, in addition to Dell EMC SC, is HPE 3PAR. However, 3PAR currently supports only four array clusters, and federated LUN seems to be mutually exclusive to snapshot functionality, which is not as good as SC.

There is also a product, IBM XIV, which has a management mode Hyper-Scale, which can manage many sets of XIV uniformly, and LUN also supports drift between these XIV, but is transparent to the host. Therefore, although IBM does not promote federation, it is a federation function in terms of function. XIV, like 3PAR, supports both scale-out and federation functions. However, XIV has only one control box, so its architecture is the architecture of share nothing, which is different from 3par.

Through these comparisons, you can see that federation, Scale-out and double active users can all achieve a certain degree of performance and capacity expansion, but there is still a big difference.

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