Eliminate Application Timeouts With Software-Defined Storage
Application timeouts are a frustrating reality for DevOps professionals working in open source environments, like OpenShift, OpenStack and Kubernetes. These timeouts, often stemming from storage bottlenecks, can severely hurt application performance, leading to frustrated end users, lost productivity and blown service-level agreements.
Software-defined storage engineered for consistent low latency ensures your applications run smoothly, even for the most demanding workloads at scale.
Let’s get to the root causes of application timeouts in open source environments and explore how NVMe over TCP (NVMe/TCP) and software-defined storage (SDS) will accelerate the performance and reliability of your data platform and eliminate application timeouts.
What Triggers an App Timeout?
Before effectively addressing application timeouts, it’s crucial to understand their underlying causes. Application timeouts occur when an application tries to access storage but does not receive a response within a specified time frame. In open source environments, this can be caused by several factors:
- High latency: Latency, the delay in accessing storage, is a major culprit behind timeouts. Traditional storage systems may struggle to keep pace with the demands of modern cloud-based applications, leading to increased latency and, consequently, timeouts.
- IOPS limitations: IOPS (input/output operations per second) is a metric that reflects the number of read and write operations a storage system can handle per second. If your storage infrastructure has limited IOPS, it may become overwhelmed by the application workload, resulting in timeouts.
- Network bottlenecks: The network connecting your applications to your storage can also become a bottleneck. If the network infrastructure is not designed to handle the demands of high-performance applications, it can contribute to latency and timeouts.
A Performance Boost for Red Hat OpenShift and OpenStack
Software-defined storage offers a compelling solution to the challenges of application timeouts in OpenShift, OpenStack and Kubernetes environments. By decoupling storage software from hardware, SDS introduces a layer of flexibility and efficiency that can significantly enhance performance.
- Performance amplification: SDS solutions are designed to deliver high IOPS and low latency, which can dramatically improve the overall performance of your OpenStack applications.
- Scalability on demand: One of the key advantages of SDS is its inherent scalability. As your storage needs grow, you can easily add more capacity and performance without disrupting your operations.
- Resilience and reliability: SDS solutions often incorporate features such as data redundancy and fault tolerance, ensuring the availability of your data even in the event of hardware failures. This added layer of protection minimizes the risk of data loss and downtime.
Considerations for Software-Defined Storage
When implementing an SDS solution in your OpenShift, OpenStack, and Kubernetes environments, it’s crucial to consider the underlying storage protocol. NVMe/TCP storage, invented by Lightbits Labs, is a high-performance protocol that is well-suited for performance-sensitive applications in these environments due to its low consistent latency and high-throughput capabilities.
Network infrastructure also plays a critical role in the application performance. Network latency, bandwidth, congestion and packet loss can affect performance. Lost packets need to be retransmitted, which increases latency and reduces overall throughput.
To avoid these network-related performance issues, it’s essential to ensure that your network infrastructure is designed to handle the demands of high-performance storage traffic. This may involve using high-bandwidth network adapters, implementing quality of service (QoS) policies, and optimizing network configurations.
Ceph Storage is a widely adopted open source software-defined storage platform for diverse workloads in cloud environments, including Red Hat OpenShift and OpenStack deployments. Ceph’s popularity in these environments stems from its cost-effectiveness as an open source solution.
The NVMe/TCP implementation model (NVM Express or Non-Volatile Memory Host Controller Interface Specification) involves the integration of Ceph’s NVMe-oF (NVMe over Fabrics) gateway. This model can introduce architectural complexity, leading to bottlenecks and increased storage networking latency caused by the extra hop and protocol translation.
Ceph NVMe-oF gateway from IBM Storage Ceph product documentation, “Ceph NVMe-oF gateway (Technology Preview)”
While Ceph strives to support modern high-speed protocols such as NVMe/TCP, the current approach involves using protocol gateways and translation layers atop the existing Ceph architecture. This model may improve Ceph’s interoperability, but it deviates from the originally intended design of NVMe/TCP architectures, and may not deliver the latency and performance requirements to eliminate application timeouts in OpenShift, OpenStack or Kubernetes.
Furthermore, optimizing the resources available to your storage targets is crucial for maximizing the benefits of SDS. This includes ensuring that your targets have sufficient CPU cores, memory and fast network adapters to handle the storage workload efficiently.
Conclusion
Application timeouts can be a significant impediment to smooth operations. However, by embracing SDS, DevOps professionals can unlock a new level of performance, scalability and reliability. SDS offers a compelling approach to enhance application performance and optimize storage management in open source deployments.
As you explore SDS options, consider factors such as the underlying protocol. NVMe/TCP has emerged on the scene as a cost-efficient option with no compromise, offering exceptional performance and user experiences.
To learn more about software-defined storage and compare two leading NVMe over TCP solutions side by side, visit our Ceph vs. Lightbits performance comparison.
