Traditional storage systems are limited in their ability to easily and cost-effectively scale to support large amounts of unstructured data. With about 80 percent of data being unstructured, new approaches using x86 servers are proving to be more cost effective, providing storage that can be expanded as easily as your data grows. Software Defined Storage is a scalable and cost-effective approach for handling large amounts of data.
But when scale-out storage grows, it can get very complex in configuring and installing. Touching each server and configuring network ports, disk for storage, or even the install media can take a long time and is mostly error-prone. And it's a difference to prepare 5 servers or 50 servers. But there are two solutions that can help a lot and reduce the overall amount of work. Even large environments don't take longer than smaller environments.
Cisco UCS Manager: Creating policies and profiles and associating them to servers simplifies scale-out storage solutions a lot. There is no need to repeat specific configurations for each server. Just assign the previously created Service Profile and you're done.
UCS Manager Ansible Modules: Sometimes it doesn't make sense to create everything via the UCS Manager GUI and you want to further simplify the whole process for configuring and installing servers. Then Ansible for UCS Manager (https://github.com/CiscoUcs/ucsm-ansible) is the right way to move forward. You run a complete Ansible Playbook with all variables you need and within less than 2 minutes your UCS Manager Service Profiles get associated.
We have now all important Ansible Modules for UCS Manager published to configure a complete scale-out storage solution. A couple of options for you to run an Ansible Playbook for UCS Manager:
Playbook: You could either use a hardcoded playbook or a playbook with variables and a JSON file.
I did a quick test of configuring and installing 2 x S3260 Dual Node Chassis. You could use much more hardware - the time would be around the same as the process of association works in parallel.
Check out the video below:
We will follow up with more Ansible solutions and thinking also about a complete solution with the integration of 3rd party software to make scale-out storage with UCS even more simple.
Olli Walsdorf
Technical Marketing Engineer for Scale-Out Storage
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