Nebulon has integrated its smartInfrastructure platform with Red Hat’s Ansible software – including a set of modules that allow users to automate Nebulon infrastructure deployment and management by using Ansible Playbooks.
The Nebulon Ansible Collection, when combined with the firm’s Nebulon ON cloud-based control plane used for management, is claimed to reduce operational overheads by up to 75 per cent compared with operating hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) or traditional three-tier server infrastructure, according to Nebulon.
Nebulon’s infrastructure platform is based on a PCIe card called the Services Processing Unit (SPU), which fits inside server nodes and controls all the storage drives in each node. Each SPU is linked to all the others in a cluster via dedicated Ethernet connections, effectively producing a kind of distributed storage area network (SAN) that is configurable via the cloud-hosted Nebulon ON control plane.
The advantage of this arrangement is that Nebulon’s smartInfrastructure does not use up any CPU or memory resources from an application cluster, unlike HCI, which uses up some CPU cycles for the handling of the software-defined storage layer.
