Storage Architectures for 5G Cloud Native Infrastructure

Storage solution selection for Cloud Native Infrastructure is quite complex primarily due to the fact whether VM or Container , whether PNF or VNF or CNF the “State” has been the most important characteristics of a Telco Service .One ideal scnerio in 5G era will be UPF resiliency where not only we want real time detection but also to secure end point connections after the new instance is spun up , this requires a strong “Storage” solution that is secure , standard and manages state while keeping infrastructure immutability .

Although the block stroage is important choice but fact is with 5G use cases and data proliferation the most important decision for Telco and Enterprise is how to manage the unstructured data at scale

Requirements for a Telco grade Storage solution

Following are top requirements from Telco perspective to architect the storage solutions

• A unified solution that is ready for the “Hybrid Cloud Infrastructure” era all the way from Cloud to Core to Edge
• Scale out expansion model to ensure workloads are not impacted during day2
• H/A architectures considering the fact not every node have an H/A at Edge how stroage can serve those cost and footprint constraint environments
• Disaster recovery
• Day2 operations specially changes ,upgrades and B&R Processes
• Software Upgrades and Hardware refresh
• How to ensure Telco grade performance specially as scale of data grows

Dell Power Scale Storage Solutions

PowerScale is a new unstructured data storage family based on new PowerScale OneFS 9.0. The new OneFS is optimized to run on PowerEdge-based x86 servers and will accelerate our time to innovation, and your agility to keep up with your customers ever-changing needs. It can offer simplicity at any scale, handle any data, any where, and search within your data to help you unlock it’s potential.

With a scale-out architecture, capacity and performance are provisioned only as needed without having to over-provision storage or resort to fork-lift upgrades. With a single namespace, single file system environment and Enterprise-class data services customers get simplicity, flexibility and performance with increased efficiency and new automation capabilities.

Benefits from our accelerated innovation include these new features and models:

• Simplicity at Any Scale: OneFS increased efficiency and automation capabilities – from 7TB to petabytes scale , with 16TB to 61TB storage per Node
• Any data. Anywhere: We now support S3 object access, and offer new PowerEdge-based all flash and NVMe nodes & more cloud options.
• Intelligent Insights: CloudIQ for datacenter insights. DataIQ for data insights.

It’s a complete solution for unlocking the potential within your data.

If you want to more do check out PowerScale intro and demo

What is Dell oneFS

As unified OS for all DellEMC storage portfolio including Islion, ECS, PowerScale he OneFS file system is based on the UNIX file system (UFS).Each cluster creates a single namespace and file system, without partitions. File system is distributed across all nodes in the cluster and is accessible by clients connecting to any node in the cluster.

OneFS controls access to free space and to non-authorized files via share and file permissions, and SmartQuotas, which provides directory-level quota management.

Because all information is shared among nodes across the internal network, data can be written to or read from any node, thus optimizing concurrent performance.

PowerScale at the Edge

For the edge we are optimized for data-intensive applications and workloads in the field. For example, you can use a PowerScale F200 at the Edge, let it process that data locally and if needed, replicate back to a F600 at the Core.

PowerScale F200

PowerScale F600

References

• https://volumes.blog/2020/06/16
• check Dell Technologies website