vSAN RA - Target Workloads - Solution Overview Delphix Dynamic Data Platform on VMware vSAN
Solution Overview
This solution overview is a showcase of using VMware vSAN as an HCI platform for deploying Delphix Dynamic Data Platform in a vSphere environment.
Overview
In today’s digital economy, data is the essential ingredient to a company’s success and competitive advantage. From the bottom-line efficiency to the top-line growth and innovation, turning data into action requires fast and secure access across the company.
Companies can accelerate their infrastructure modernization with VMware vSAN™ and Delphix Dynamic Data Platform providing a comprehensive approach to DataOps, making IT a strategic and cost-effective solution and helping customers evolve their data center without risk, controlling IT costs and scaling to tomorrow’s business needs.
DataOps
DataOps is the alignment of people, process, and technology to enable fast, automated, and secure management of data, eliminating points of friction across the data-fulfillment lifecycle, from request to consumption. DataOps is a new way of thinking about how to leverage data in your business.
Having high performance and cost-effective infrastructure hardware and software is critical to deliver the DataOps solution for agile mission-critical workloads.
Modern-day DataOps solutions address the change in data management requirements with an unprecedented transformation to the decade-old way of traditional data cloning, data security, and data refresh.
Delphix Dynamic Data Platform
The Delphix Dynamic Data Platform provides a comprehensive approach to DataOps, enabling companies to easily deliver and secure data, wherever it exists. With Delphix, businesses manage data distribution and access with the speed, simplicity, and level of security required to drive digital transformation.
The Delphix Dynamic Data Platform reduces data friction by providing a collaborative platform for data operators (such as DBAs, InfoSec and IT Operations teams) and data consumers (such as developers, QAs, analysts and data scientists), ensuring that sensitive data is secured and that the right data is made available to the right people, when and where they need it.
VMware vSAN HyperConverged Infrastructure
VMware vSAN, the market leader in HyperConverged Infrastructure (HCI), enables low cost and high performance next-generation HCI solutions, converges traditional IT infrastructure silos onto industry-standard servers and virtualizes physical infrastructure to help customers easily evolve their infrastructure without risk, improve TCO over traditional resource silos, and scale to tomorrow with support for new hardware, applications, and cloud strategies. The natively integrated VMware infrastructure combines radically simple VMware vSAN storage, the market-leading VMware vSphere ® Hypervisor, and the VMware vCenter Server ® unified management solution all on the broadest and deepest set of HCI deployment options.
Why Delphix on VMware vSAN?
VMware vSAN and Delphix are market leaders in their respective domains and many enterprise customers have asked for solutions to move the Delphix Dynamic Data Platform on vSAN, running on VMware certified x86 servers. With the collaboration of vSAN and Delphix:
- Traditional IT silos of compute, storage, and networking are eliminated.
- All storage management moves into a single software stack, thus taking advantage of the security, performance, scalability, operational simplicity, and cost effectiveness of vSAN.
- Workloads can be easily migrated from traditional storage arrays to a modern, dynamic, and consolidated hyperconverged infrastructure based on vSAN.
Delphix solutions are already hosted and proven on VMware vSphere platform for many years. Further, since vSAN is natively integrated with vSphere, the hosting model with vSAN storage will be a familiar deployment model for vSphere customers.
VMware and Delphix have jointly undertaken testing to validate vSAN as an HCI platform for Delphix solutions.
Typical Architecture
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To ensure continued data protection and availability during planned or unplanned downtime, a minimum of four nodes are recommended for the vSAN cluster. In this reference solution, a 4-node vSAN cluster is used to validate the cluster functions for typical Delphix workloads and scaling of test and development environments using the Delphix Dynamic Data Platform.
A typical configuration includes two or more disk groups per node. Custom vSAN storage policies can be created for different use cases to satisfy performance, resource commitment, failure tolerance, checksum protection, and quality of service requirements in an application-centric way. An all-flash configuration is recommended for high performance requirements.
Simplicity
Delphix and vSAN together provide great simplicity in managing DataOps use cases. While Delphix simplifies the workflow for provisioning copies of production data for DataOps, vSAN provides HCI that has single pane of management for compute, storage, and network resources using the vSphere web client.
Agility
The solution enables business agility, with the Delphix Dynamic Data Platform accelerating application development, and helps identify bugs in a shorter period of time. vSAN provides an agile infrastructure that is easy to scale and responsive to changing business needs and enabling rapid deployments.
Performance
The solution also provides a high-performance architecture for virtual databases (VDBs). The high performance is achieved through shared block caching in Delphix memory, Delphix block mapping, and vSAN performance optimization. A sample test is run with a Delphix engine on a 4-node cluster that hosts the Delphix VM and the test and development VDBs. In this 4-node vSAN enabled vSphere cluster, Delphix VM is placed on one of the ESXi hosts while test and development VMs are spread across the other three ESXi hosts. Hosting the test and development VMs and Delphix on the same vSphere cluster will help to efficiently utilize the compute and storage available in the cluster.
Apart from using the Delphix IO report card to successfully pass the Delphix IO test, we also used Swingbench to generate Oracle TPC-C like workload. Swingbench is an Oracle workload generator designed to test an Oracle database. The Swingbench VM is set up on a separate management infrastructure to generate read and write intensive TPC-C like workloads. Both workloads are set up to generate high disk IO throughputs at the VDB level, which was also observed at vSAN datastore level. The test results validate vSAN as a high-performance HCI platform for deploying Delphix solution.
Storage Efficiency and Low TCO
The solution is equipped with storage efficiency features like vSAN Erasure Coding (RAID 5 and RAID 6), which provides disk capacity saving when compared with the functionality of vSAN Mirror (RAID 1).
vSphere and vSAN helps to provide a cost-effective solution to reduce the design and operational burden of a data center. By shifting features away from hardware platform and toward software, organizations will get a significant reduction in both CAPEX and OPEX.
Delphix provides highly compressed virtualized data copies from the data source, which have minimal footprints, and thus helps increase the storage efficiency and reduce the cost.
Hardware Support
vSAN is supported on the latest-generation hardware. You can accelerate new hardware adoption with Day 0 support of the latest flash technologies. Also you can accelerate cloud-native applications with the latest flash technologies, like the new 3D XPoint NVMe drives from Intel. The broad choice of new hardware platforms and strong ecosystem of vSAN provide the fastest path to the next-generation server platforms and flash devices.
Delphix being a hardware-agnostic software solution, continuous innovation in hardware is helping deliver the speed and performance required for traditional and next-generation DataOps use cases.
Support
Customers can approach VMware or Delphix for guidance and support for deploying Delphix on vSAN.
Summary
VMware vSphere, vSAN, and vCenter Server collectively power the best HCI solution for deploying, running, and managing mission-critical database applications that require predictable performance and high availability. The integration of vSAN with vSphere simplifies the operational management with a single software stack.
While VMware HCI offers an efficient, high performance, and cost-effective platform, Delphix empowers data operators to ensure that sensitive data is secured and the right data is made available to the right people, when and where they need it.
The combined solution provides agility and speed to satisfy new DataOps requirements, greatly improving from traditional data cloning, security, and refresh methods as well as the decade-old way of deploying complex and costly IT infrastructure.
Learn More
See more vSAN details and customer stories:
For more information regarding Delphix, see Delphix .