Fine. It was announced a month ago. But I thought it would be nonetheless useful to cover off the Dell EMC announcement regarding ScaleIO Ready Nodes. The landing page for ScaleIO Ready Nodes is here and you can check out Dell EMC’s press release here. The box shot isn’t super exciting, but it’s a Dell 13G server, isn’t it?

[image courtesy of Dell EMC]

Dell EMC tell me that the ScaleIO Ready Node “combin[es] powerful hardware with agile, scalable and performant software”. In a nutshell, you get:

• Dell 13G PowerEdge Servers – if you’re already a Dell customer, this is great.
• Pre-validated, tested and configured – enterprise folk crave this stuff.
• Locked down parts list, firmware, bios – everyone loves the “simplicity” of appliances.
• Simplified planning and building – you don’t need to think too much about the hardware.
• Single vendor support of HW & SW – sleep better at night.
• Market based pricing – my experience is Dell are traditionally competitive with pricing.

Specifications

You can grab the datasheet from here. There are high density (1RU) nodes and high capacity (2RU) nodes available in all flash and hybrid configurations.

Different ScaleIO Ready Node types can be part of the same system and this is a fully supported deployment model, as long as networking and storage pools are not mixed across node types.

The Hybrid configurations offer SSD/HDD and HDD only options. These can also be configured for hyper-converged or storage only deployments.

All models include dual 750w Power Supplies. RAID controllers used are the Dell PERC H730 for hybrid or disk only nodes, and the PERC H330 for All Flash nodes.

Hybrid nodes leverage SanDisk DAS Cache software for caching both reads and writes. Using standard SSDs as cache devices significantly reduces latency for most workloads, without the need for PCI Flash cards. Setup is an easy 3 step process, just install the software, identify the cache devices (SSDs), and assign the HDDs to the cache devices. And you’re good to go.

Software-defined as hardware appliance?

Dell EMC say the key advantages of the ScaleIO Ready Node are as follows:

• Pre-architected to utilize all drives for data
• Pre-configured with 64GB SLC Serial ATA Disk on Module (SATADOM) flash memory module embedded
• Pre-validated configurations with complete combination of bios, driver and firmware tested and locked down
• Fully supported with pre-selected and fully tested server parts and drives for new units and FRU replacements

This got me thinking (just a little bit – don’t be scared) about the whole software-defined X marketplace and the different approaches I’ve been seeing from vendors regarding the interoperability of their software offerings and their hardware offerings. Traditionally, I’ve thought of EMC as the storage company (with a heavy hardware tilt despite claims of being a software company) and Dell as a server company (although I’ve always had pretty good experiences with Dell storage, and started working with EMC via the original Dell | EMC partnership). It was only a matter of time before we started seeing EMC SDS getting coupled with Dell “appliances”, and there’s a lot to be said for the strategy. I’ve never had a big problem with Dell hardware (any more so than any other vendor) and so, potentially, the opportunity to hitch my wagon to an SDS offering via validated hardware and a “one throat to choke” offering has a lot of appeal. The nice thing about this, at least for the moment, is that you don’t need to run ScaleIO on Dell-flavoured hardware if you don’t want to.

I don’t envisage Dell forcing customers to adopt their hardware in order to leverage these types of offerings. There’s still a massive market for ScaleIO on non-Dell hardware, and the success of the product leads me to think that Dell is really just doing this for those customers who feel better using products that come from one vendor.

Further Reading and Final Thoughts

Whether you’re into Dell hardware or not, the concept behind ScaleIO Ready Nodes seems reasonable, and certainly has appeal for conservative enterprise types who want to be cool and use SDS but still want someone else to take care of all the boring support and interoperability stuff.

And ScaleIO in and of itself is a pretty cool product and worth checking out. You can also try ScaleIO for free, (along with IsilonSD Edge and ECS). Details can be found here. For a slightly more cynical take on the ScaleIO Ready node announcement, check out Simon’s article at El Reg here.

I’ve no doubt this isn’t the last time you’ll hear about “synergies” between the two companies as they start to merge (and with Dell EMC World just around the corner). I’m interested to see which ones work and which ones don’t, but it’s going to be a bit of time before we know which one is which.