Ordering a combo meal from your fast-food joint isn’t all that different from architecting a virtualized environment. Humor me here. Data architecture takes into account CPUs, memory, storage, and networking resources. However, your applications may not have an appetite for all these components. A more likely scenario is where at least one of these resources mostly sits idle. In legacy virtualized environments, like vSAN, resources are consolidated, and scaling for performance results in overprovisioned storage. The overprovisioned storage goes unutilized; typically, storage utilization ratios are between 30–40% in these environments. If you’re using vSAN you are leaving money on the table—or leaving food on the plate, if we extend the combo meal metaphor—in the form of unused resources. Modernizing your virtualized environment with disaggregated storage for OpenShift Virtualization results in greater resource efficiency and lowers costs.
Underutilized resources result in lost capital and operating expenditures. Purchased (or financed) resources consume power, real estate, and require cooling, yet they don’t provide any useful benefit to the applications. Therefore, reducing or eliminating stranded resources represents significant cost savings for your organization.
Infrastructure architects employ different techniques to minimize the waste of these underutilized resources. One technique is to deploy a large number of system configurations, with each configuration matching a specific application. However, deploying a large number of system configurations comes with significant management and operational overhead, which doesn’t align with the operational efficiency mandates of many organizations.
Virtualizing the environment with vSAN was very common. Running virtual machines (VMs) reduced hardware costs and simplified management. However, the model had its limitations: compute and storage had to be scaled together, which still results in wasted resources; the hypervisor yielded inconsistent latency; and you couldn’t mix virtualized and non-virtualized workloads. Many organizations found the model insufficient to support high-performance workloads at scale.
Disaggregated Storage for OpenShift
When considering migrations from vSAN to OpenShift-V, disaggregated storage architectures offer a compelling alternative. Disaggregated storage architecture plays a crucial role in successful virtualization modernization initiatives. Separating storage resources from computing resources enables independent scaling and greater flexibility, essential for dynamic OpenShift-V environments. Independent scaling of resources optimizes OpenShift-V utilization and reduces costs. This agility is critical for supporting the fluctuating demands of virtualized applications and aligns perfectly with the goals of virtualization modernization: increased efficiency, agility, and cost-effectiveness.
Minimizing stranded resources is a powerful lever for reducing infrastructure costs. Eliminating stranded resources through disaggregation can help architects size infrastructure according to application demand and reduce infrastructure costs.
Disaggregating resources by letting applications “share their combo meals” results in less application starvation, underutilization, infrastructure, lower total cost of ownership, and happier end users.
Optimize OpenShift-V Resource Utilization
Lightbits’ software-defined, disaggregated architecture enables independent scaling of compute and storage, offering unparalleled flexibility to meet evolving workloads and business needs. You can consolidate more workloads onto fewer servers, maximizing your hardware investment and eliminating data center sprawl. High availability is ensured through seamless storage server failover, safeguarding business continuity. By leveraging standard Ethernet networks and NVMe over TCP storage protocol, Lightbits reduces infrastructure costs. With Lightbits, you can achieve the perfect balance of performance, reliability, and cost-effectiveness, redefining what’s possible in OpenShift-V environments.
