Cloudian HyperStore Technical Review

The best of Software-De�ned Storage and Appliances

Storage Switzerland, LLC

COLM KEEGANSENIOR ANALYST—STORAGE SWITZERLAND SPONSORED BY:

Software-De�ned Storage for Flexibility and Cost E�ciency

Software-de�ned storage gives enterprises the ability to leverage the latest advancements in cost-e�ective commodity CPU and storage technology. It allows enterprises to keep their environments in lock-step with the ever increasing storage and IO demands of critical business applications. For SDS architectures more powerful CPUs lead to greater scale and performance. Intel, for example, typically comes out with a new CPU product every 6-12 months. Compare this with the typical 3-year product refresh cycle from proprietary storage vendors and it is clear why IT organizations need more �exibility. In addition, manufacturers continue to drive innovation into the hard disk drive market space, delivering increased disk drive densities and a lower cost per GB. SDS architectures allows enterprises to take advantage of these technology updates earlier, gaining signi�cant e�ciency bene�ts.

The Best of BothWorlds

Introduction

Various industry sources estimate that unstructured data (user �les, PDF’s, email, rich multimedia, machine sensor data, etc.) accounts for upwards of 90% of all new data growth. Software-de�ned object storage o�ers an alternative approach, to NAS/SAN systems. But many organizations don’t have the time or the people resources to integrate their own solutions. Instead, they need the best of both worlds—the ease of deployment that an appliance o�ers, along with the cost savings that a software-de�ned storage (SDS) solution can deliver. Cloudian's HyperStore Appliance promises to deliver both of these capabilities to the enterprise.

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Appliances for “Turn-Key” and Simple Deployment of IT Products

Many data center administrators want the ease of deploying a “turn-key” storage o�ering. For these organizations, there is value to implementing pre-certi�ed storage appliances that take the guess-work out of con�guring the right server and storage combinations. Rapid deployment and risk mitigation are key for these enterprises, especially because their IT sta�s are stretched too thin. A turn-key system helps to speed up deployment times and mitigate the risk of application downtime or performance problems that can occur from mis-con�gured systems. An additional bene�t is that it gives the IT organization a single vendor to support the entire hardware and software stack.

Ideally, businesses should have the option of deploying either a software-only solution or an appliance-based solution from the same vendor. This would a�ord the greatest �exibility as businesses may opt to change their implementation strategies over time.

Cloudian HyperStore Appliances “Best of SDS and Appliances”

Software-de�ned hybrid cloud storage solutions, like Cloudian's HyperStore, enable data centers to create highly cost-e�ective unstructured data storage repositories built on commodity hardware that can span both across the enterprise and out into public cloud environments. With the release of HyperStore version 5.0, Cloudian has now come to market with their cloud storage appliance family. The HyperStore Appliance is available in three models, each of which has been designed to address various use cases and application workloads.

Software-de�ned object storage technology can be a great �t for organizations, like service providers and large enterprises, that want to utilize commodity infrastructure to scale-out their computational and storage resources. For many of these organizations, IT is their product. They have the IT personnel on sta� to design and integrate a solution that best meets their business requirements. What they need are technologies that allow them to be more nimble so that they can always respond to the needs of the business as well as drive every possible cost out of delivering IT.

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HyperStore appliances come in three enterprise-targeted models, each one fully integrated with Cloudian HyperStore software to assure unlimited scale, multi-data center storage, fully automated data tiering, replication, erasure coding, multi-tenancy, and support for all S3 applications.

The entry-level product ( HSA1024 ) is a 1U, 24TB system that is equipped with 32GB of RAM and a 4xGigE NIC. According to Cloudian, this model is ideal for low-throughput workloads like �le sync and share. The mid-tier appliance ( HSA1048 ) is also a 1U device, it is con�gured with 48TB of capacity, 32GB of RAM and a 4xGigE NIC. With its larger storage footprint, this model is ideal for big content applications like medical records, data-center backups and large multimedia libraries. The HSA2060 is the top-end appliance. It is a 2U, 60TB system that is �ash-optimized and is con�gured with 64GB of RAM and two NIC devices - 2xGigE and 2x10GigE. Equipped with two SSD drives, this system intelligently places metadata into memory and SSD to help ensure high performance. Designed for extremely high IO bandwidth requirements, Cloudian is positioning this model as their high performance appliance for Media and Entertainment, Energy, Finance, and Health Care enterprise environments.

All three models provide redundancy and high availability features like hot-pluggable disk drives and dual hot-pluggable power supplies.

Entry-Level to Enterprise Performance

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The all-in-one appliance approach gives data center planners the con�dence to deploy these systems into their production environments knowing that they have been pre-tested and con�gured to optimally work with HyperStore software. HyperStore runs on Red Hat or CentOS Linux, however, end-users do not have to be Linux experts to implement or manage the appliance. Instead, the appliance completely shields the Linux operating system from the end-user or administrator and presents an easy to use graphical user interface (GUI) for system management. Like the HyperStore software-only o�ering, Cloudian's appliances o�er native integration with Amazon S3 REST API protocol. By attaching to Cloudian storage via standard CIFS/NFS, existing applications in the data center do not have to be recoded to interoperate with private cloud storage or storage resources in the public cloud. This saves organizations time and money and helps to simplify and speed up the implementation of hybrid cloud storage infrastructure.

Appliance-Powered Simplicity

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Cloudian HyperStore version 5.0 is a major new software release. Built on Cassandra no-SQL database, enhanced with �le system properties, HyperStore can store vast amounts of unstructured data without object size limitations. This gives HyperStore improved storage scaling and �ner control over data availability.

HyperStore Version 5.0

Cloudian storage clouds are implemented by deploying individual nodes comprised of CPUs and disk drives into a logical “ring” architecture. As physical nodes are added, all the resources are aggregated into a common pool of storage and CPU resources across the ring. Rings can start out with as little as one node, however, for redundancy and availability purposes, two or three nodes are typically deployed in an initial implementation. Single nodes can then be added to the ring as needed. Data is dispersed across the ring, via erasure coding or replication to improve availability and to enhance performance.

Ring Architecture Scalability

An example of this improved scaling is HyperStore’s virtual node or “vNode” technology.Cloudian's vNode technology enhances data redundancy and availability a step further. The disk resources within a single node can be subdivided into smaller IO devices (vNodes). This allows for greater IO parallelism and hence greater storage IO performance across the ring. Secondly, it enhances availability because if a drive or a node fails, recovery processes can be distributed in parallel across all the drives within

Virtual Node Performance

The ability to run disk IO in parallel across multiple nodes is a critically important feature because as more storage devices are added to the ring, the higher the likelihood that a drive will fail. To compound this problem, disk manufacturers are now coming out with ultra high-density 10TB disk drives. The RAID rebuild times for recovering these drives can easily take 48 hours or longer. Even RAID6 protected storage systems, which can withstand up to two simultaneous drive failures without incurring data loss, become more vulnerable to data loss as drive rebuild times increase. By leveraging erasure coding in combination with a massively parallel disk IO architecture, HyperStore dramatically shrink drive rebuild times and decreases the window of exposure during the repair process.

Parallel Disk IO Data Protection

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Erasure coding is a more e�cient way to protect data at petabyte scale. Unlike RAID 5 and RAID 6, erasure coding allows protection against more than two simultaneous drive failures. Moreover, with erasure coding, data or objects can be dispersed across multiple drives within a rack, or across multiple racks within the data center and/or racks in o�-site data centers. RAID con�gurations, on the other hand, are bound to an individual RAID-set or drive shelf. This means that as storage grows, there will need to be an increasing number of parity drives to provide data redundancy. This increases costs and because of increasing drive rebuild times, it doesn’t necessarily decrease the exposure of data loss from drive failures.

It is generally recommended to use erasure coding in a local or regional geography since network latency can be a factor when data is disbursed across extended distances. As a result, there is a need in many enterprise environments for asynchronous replication services when sharing and/or protecting data across wide geographies.

ErasureCoded DataRedundancy

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Replication has been used to protect data on primary storage systems for decades. It allows businesses to protect against data loss by mirroring or replicating data from their primary storage system to a secondary storage system in the data center or to an array at an o�-site facility.

Most object storage systems provide either replication or erasure coding but typically they don’t provide both. Cloudian HyperStore software allows storage managers to not only choose from either erasure coding or replication but they can use both simultaneously. Furthermore, it can be assigned down to the bucket level. So storage managers could con�gure one “bucket” (a bucket is a virtual container of objects or �les) of data capacity with erasure coding and another bucket with replication. This further enhances the ability of an organization to provide multiple service levels as it relates to data availability and o�site protection. One user group may be satis�ed with having their data protected via erasure coding across multiple racks in the data center, while another group may require their information to be replicated to a secondary site halfway around the world.

Compared to traditional storage systems which typically can only provide one type of data replication service, asynchronous or synchronous, private cloud storage like Cloudian's provides multiple data mirroring services simultaneously. This provides data center environments with more �exibility in terms of the data protection service levels they can apply to their multi-tenant environments. In other words, erasure coding or replication can be de�ned by individual users or groups of users based on a pre-de�ned policy or SLA. This is a critical component for providing data protection or DR-as-a-Service capabilities.

Replication

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Replication

Cloudian HyperStore also provides the ability to con�gure the level of data consistency when using replication to protect objects across a storage ring. For example, the default consistency requirement for read and write operations is de�ned as “quorum”, meaning that a read or write operation must succeed on a quorum (or set number) of replica copies before a success response is returned to the client application.

This enables users to con�gure how stringent they wish their replication policy to be. For example, for those data objects that are considered mission critical, the replication policy may be to wait until an acknowledgment is received from nodes across multiple data center locations before an acknowledgment is sent back to the application. On the other hand, if performance is deemed more critical, then a correspondingly fewer number of replicas may be con�gured within a particular quorum.

Con�gurable Data Consistency

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Another bene�t of Cloudian's vNode technology is that it enables data centers to intermix node types. In other words, storage nodes deployed into a ring can be of dissimilar size. For example, a 24TB node could be installed alongside a 48TB node and the HyperStore operating system will automatically pool and load balance these resources as they are added to the ring. This gives businesses the �exibility to add capacity and CPU resources as granularly as desired. It also helps to improve e�ciencies as the right resources can be added to the ring at the right time.

Storage Node Heterogeneity

To further improve data center e�ciencies, HyperStore 5.0 o�ers three di�erent types of data compression technology—lz4, snapp and zlib. Compression can reduce storage and network consumption by up to 40%, while accelerating data replication speeds. With less data to store on disk and less data to move over the network, businesses can get more life out of their existing storage and network investments; further improving their ROI and lowering their TCO.

Compression Your Way

With data security breaches becoming more commonplace, as evidenced by the recent theft of millions of account passwords at Google, it is essential for businesses to safeguard their data from the prying eyes of data hackers and unauthorized users. HyperStore 5.0 simpli�es the data encryption process by providing transparent key management at the server or node layer. This relieves administrators from the burden of having to manage encryption keys and eliminates the risk of data loss occurring due to lost keys. Furthermore, encryption can be managed very granularly—either at a bucket level or down to an individual object.

Encryption Under Cover

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Many organizations, whether a private data centers or a public cloud service providers, want to provide storage-as-a-service (SaaS). This generally requires some type of metering and quality-of-service (QoS) capabilities built into the storage platform. For example, clients that wish to archive or backup their data to low-cost cloud storage have very di�erent needs than a user who wants to utilize cloud storage for video streaming. Creating islands of object storage capacity with di�erent performance pro�les to meet di�erent service levels would historically increase management complexity and increase data center costs. At the same time, if all storage resources are fully centralized and aggregated across the same ring, it was impossible to ensure that the right application workloads are assigned to the right resources. HyperStore 5.0 solves this problem by providing QoS and metering tools. Storage administrators can set a maximum allowable limit on both storage consumption and IO, based on the user or a group of users, and then charge back those users on a monthly basis, just like a utility. A CFO could be assigned a high priority privilege (Platinum Service Level) to �nancial records while an end-user accessing �le sync and share data could be given lower priority access (i.e. Silver). In short, QoS and metering are foundational capabilities for implementing a multi-tenant private cloud storage solution.

Building The Utility

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Lastly, the opposing forces of meteoric storage growth and �at or shrinking IT sta�s is making storage management simplicity an imperative. To make their software-de�ned storage very easy to use, Cloudian has redesigned its user management console to make system management and operations highly intuitive. And as discussed earlier, Linux-based system management tasks are done completely under the covers by the HyperStore operating system so there is no need for storage administrators to have a working knowledge of Linux OS.

Software-De�ned Storage Made Simple

SummaryIn the late 90’s, commercially available Linux software that could operate on any commodity Intel server platform changed the face of enterprise data center computing. No longer were businesses captive to the huge pro�t margins exacted by industry behemoths like Sun, HP and IBM. Compute power could be deployed in abundance, very cost-e�ectively, allowing business applications to attain massive performance improvements through server clustering. In much the same way, software-de�ned storage and commodity storage infrastructure is ushering in the same monumental cost saving opportunities as well as continual performance bene�ts for businesses today. Hybrid cloud storage software, like Cloudian's HyperStore, allows enterprise data centers to implement o�-the shelf server and storage hardware to build highly scalable storage infrastructures that can seamlessly grow to meet business data growth demands. But to make the transition to next generation storage even simpler, Cloudian's HyperStore Appliance e�ectively “shrink-wraps” private cloud storage so that businesses can get the best of both worlds, the cost savings and �exibility of highly scalable, low-cost commodity hardware, with the simplicity of rack ready appliances that are supported by a single vendor. 111

Storage Switzerland is the leading storage analyst �rm focused on the emerging storage categories of memory-based storage (Flash), Big Data, virtualization, and cloud computing. The �rm is widely recognized for its blogs, white papers, and videos on current approaches such as all-�ash arrays, deduplication, SSDs, software-de�ned storage, backup appliances, and storage networking. The name “Storage Switzerland” indicates a pledge to provide neutral analysis of the storage marketplace, rather than focusing on a single vendor or approach.

Cloudian Inc. is a Silicon Valley based storage platform provider, with additional o�ces in China and Japan, focused on delivering enterprise grade public, private, and hybrid cloud storage solutions. Organizations of all sizes rely on Cloudian HyperStore to deliver secure and total control over their data while dramatically reducing IT overhead and TCO. Cloudian's customers include Duracell, NTT, Nifty, Casale, Asco Tlc and LunaCloud. Founded in 2011, Cloudian has developed Cloudian HyperStore®, a fully S3-compatible software-de�ned object storage platform that enables service providers and enterprises to build reliable, a�ordable and scalable hybrid cloud storage. The HyperStore software technology uniquely balances capacity with performance, giving users the power to set both replication and erasure coding data protection schemes within the same cluster. Powerful features such as: limitless scalability, total S3 API compatibility, QoS controls, and auto-tiering capabilities provide the enterprise with total control while ensuring data can move seamlessly between private and public clouds, making Cloudian HyperStore the cloud storage platform of choice for the enterprise. Cloudian actively partners with leading cloud computing environments (OpenStack, CloudPlatform) and the vast ecosystem of S3 compatible tools and applications.

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