QCT has a diversified portfolio, that includes high-density computing and storage products, and rack solutions for leading data centers. Well versed in hyperscale deployments and currently providing large-scale data center hardware and cloud solutions to Telco and cloud service providers (CSPs), QCT has a firm position in the server market and a wide range of highly-efficient and low-energy consumption servers. Among its solutions are integrated products that leverage QCT hardware and software from software-defined storage (SDS) players, like Red Hat®.
Red Hat® uniquely offers essential integration across the entire open-source software stack — offering organizations robust software, proven reference architectures, global support, and ultimately the confidence to deploy open-source software technology in production. Red Hat Ceph Storage and Red Hat Gluster Storage are two of the leading scale-out, SDS products fueled by thriving open source communities. QCT in collaboration with Red Hat offers solutions to help telecommunications companies (telcos) and CSPs transition to new storage infrastructures and implement a wide variety of application workloads immediately. For most companies, this type of transition requires elastic technology infrastructure for shifting resources to meet changing needs. That is why there are reference architectures and performance and sizing guides for Ceph and Gluster on QCT servers that detail what has been learned in these pre-packaged combinations of Red Hat® software with QCT hardware to target specific workload use cases.
The Competitive Landscape
As competitive pressures build, telcos and CSPs are actively seeking new ways to deploy their applications, gain business agility, and monetize their considerable infrastructure investments as the 5G era approaches. To do so requires modern, scalable, and cost-effective storage solutions that complement the latest application and deployment innovations. Unfortunately, traditional monolithic storage solutions have become an impediment and a bottleneck for the latest agile web-scale applications — constraining applications in terms of scale, flexibility, and affordability. Business agility ultimately suffers as a result.
The solution to this has been achieved in hyperscale organizations by deploying open-source software on top of customizable cost-efficient industry-standard hardware. This approach gives those companies access to large and active developer communities and aggressive commodity price curves for industry-standard systems and components. To achieve similar results, however, telcos and CSPs must take a more specialized approach — to develop and customize open source software to fit their unique needs.
Like many IT-based organizations, telcos and CSPs are deeply concerned about storage. The amount of data being consumed is radically different than in previous generations, causing digital assets to expand exponentially. However, in recent years storage technology is actually responding to this change. Traditional storage solutions have long been a last mainstay of proprietary technology, but like computing and networking, storage is finally yielding to undeniable shifts toward industry-standard hardware and open, community-driven software stacks.
QCT and Red Hat® have an Answer
QCT and Red Hat® both understand deployment at scale and that even the slightest configuration choices accrue to impact overall performance or cost. Choosing the right processor, memory configuration, network card, or storage server can make an enormous difference when deploying petabytes of storage. Based on clusters of industry-standard x86 hardware, Red Hat® Storage on QCT servers offer petabyte scalability through an open software-defined platform that scales across physical, virtual, and cloud resources. This includes multidimensional scalability, with the ability to add more storage media to increase capacity, or more servers for more performance. A variety of storage media is supported, including the latest NVM Express (NVMe), solid state devices (SSDs), and hard disk drives (HDDs).
These software and hardware configurations from QCT and Red Hat® can be designed for input/output operations per second (IOPS)-intensive, throughput-intensive, or cost-capacity-focused workloads — all within the same SDS framework. Object, block, and file storage can all be accommodated. Specifically, QCT QxStor Red Hat Ceph Storage Edition offers high performance object storage for emerging applications like cloud DVR, and network functions virtualization (NFV) on OpenStack®, while QCT QxStor Red Hat Gluster Storage offers choice of software defined storage over traditional appliances for container based applications and micro-services. Together QCT and Red Hat® Storage combine best-in-class software along with optimized servers and verified rack-level solutions, as a result telcos and CSPs can deploy their services rapidly with confidence.
More details can be found in the downloadable Solution Brief: http://go.qct.io/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/SolutionBrief_QCT-QxStor-Red-Hat-Storage-for-Telco-and-CSP.pdf