vSAN vs. OpenEBS based MDAP
One of the most interesting things — at least to me — in evolutionary biology is the concept of parallel evolution. For instance, the Aloe and Agave plants may appear as interchangeable in your local nursery as drought resistant “succulents” and yet prove to be barely related at all — their evolution diverged at the time of the dinosaurs. They evolved to have similar features because the ecosystems in which they competed had similar requirements.
These days OpenEBS running on Kubernetes is sometimes compared to vSAN from VMware — which has successfully filled the niche of software only storage enabling hyper-converged storage and compute on vSphere. In the first quarter of 2018, for example, VMware reported that vSAN had achieved a run rate in excess of $600 million and had doubled year on year.
In this blog, I’ll focus on the similarities and differences of features and approaches. While vSAN integrates into vSphere and is surrounded by various tools with different names, in the case of OpenEBS, the orchestrator is Kubernetes and the surrounding tooling is called the MayaData Agility Platform or “MDAP”.
Fundamental architecture:
Both vSAN and OpenEBS leverage the existing orchestrator for quite a bit of functionality. In the case of …
