Scale Databases Across Data Centers, Cloud and Edge

For IT leaders, application modernization is an ongoing imperative — and a critical enabler of digital transformation in the enterprise.

More Info: DES-9131: Dell EMC Infrastructure Security Specialist

Distributed and mission-critical applications, such as those for global financial services, require a modern database, such as Apache Cassandra. Organizations gain additional benefits from deploying modern databases in containerized environments that streamline management and operations, especially on a broad scale.

Application modernization also brings the opportunity to design a distributed database model that can span data centers, provide high availability and deliver high-performance data processing capabilities as data continues to grow in volume, variety and velocity.

And this is where DataStax Enterprise software comes into play. Built on Apache Cassandra, DataStax Enterprise offers a scalable, highly available NoSQL database solution that can be scaled on premises, across data centers, across cloud providers and out to the edge. DataStax gives enterprises the freedom to run data in any cloud — Kubernetes, hybrid or bare metal — at global scale with no downtime or lock-in.

The distributed nature of DataStax Enterprise means that organizations can now deploy fault-tolerant databases that can manage high-velocity unstructured and semi‑structured data while providing high performance and 100 percent uptime. Along the way, DataStax combines the high performance and high availability of Apache Cassandra with enterprise-grade deployment, security and management tools.

Speed time to results

In recent years, Dell Technologies has worked closely with DataStax on the development of reference configurations for DataStax Enterprise on Dell EMC PowerEdge servers. These solutions are designed to help organizations gain the greatest performance and value from their DataStax investments. And this remains the case today as Dell Technologies and DataStax roll out a new solution architecture for DataStax Enterprise running on Dell Technologies infrastructure. This architecture is designed to enable a highly available and secure Apache Cassandra deployment that can handle the large data growth and processing needs of modern and modernized applications.

To develop this analytics solution, engineers from Dell Technologies and Intel deployed two DataStax Enterprise configurations that mirrored a typical yet smaller-scale Apache Cassandra deployment — both deployed on a containerized, cloud-native, Kubernetes platform. The first configuration was deployed on Red Hat OpenShift, while the second configuration used VMware Tanzu. Both  configurations are the foundation of modern Kubernetes container environments.

Details of this initiative are highlighted in a new Dell Technologies white paper that provides joint engineering-tested guidance for application modernization and data management. This white paper describes a baseline DataStax Enterprise solution architecture that was used by DataStax, Intel and Dell Technologies to test DataStax Enterprise performance. It also presents the results of the performance tests.

To cut to the chase: The benchmarks in this initiative show that DataStax Enterprise performs well in a Kubernetes environment using either Red Hat OpenShift or VMware Tanzu running on Dell EMC PowerEdge servers.

Source: delltechnologies.com