StorageGRID as a capacity tier extension to HCI

[MuleshVedant]

Q1 HCI nodes have challenge meeting high capacity

      dHCI are new buzzwords but customer are not in favour of vendor lock-in

     Can StorageGRID as a capacity tier extension to HCI? 

     Here the HCI holds warm and hot data. All cold and archive data stays on StorageGRID.

Q2 If yes, what can be the ILM tool to move data up and down?

Thanks

Mulesh Vedant

SISL Infotech India

[AlexDawson]

NetApp has withdrawn our (d)HCI product from the market as of this month, after 12 months notice.

VMWare VSAN HCI does not support S3 tiering internally or through any third party products I've been able to find. Applications running on top of a HCI VMware environment may be able to be configured to store data in a StorageGRID S3 store instead of into a VMDK, reducing capacity and perf requirements for the HCI environment.

Hope this helps!

[elementx · Accepted solution]

> Q1: Can StorageGRID as a capacity tier extension to HCI? 

A1: not directly as dHCI vendors don't support SG as S3 tier

> Q2: If yes, what can be the ILM tool to move data up and down?

A2:  Directly it can't be done, but indirectly you can get this done on vSphere clusters with a tool - or rather product - called ONTAP Select. For example a Nimble-based dHCI user could deploy OTS on All-Flash Nimble-backed vSphere datastores and use FP to tier cold blocks to StorageGRID. 

Some of our customers who own dHCI (NetApp HCI) may have ONTAP Select included  with capacity license for up to 400TB (depending on when they bought NetApp HCI storage nodes) and may be able to use it with NetApp HCI if it's still under support. The gratis ONTAP license is tied to NetApp HCI storage component and can't be moved to run off other (e.g. E-Series, or 3rd party) storage.