Give new dimensions to your Storage using CloudByte ElastiStor

Let me start by saying that like any other Storage appliance, CloudByte ElastiStor too does all the “must do things” required to run your business. What I would really like to highlight are the offerings that are unique to this product and how this suits an enterprise or a Cloud business much better than the ones we know of.

For long, storage administrators have been made to believe that storage is supposed to give you some space to store your data (and that’s about it). So, if you want to store 100GB of data, the storage box gives you a 100GB LUN and you dump the data into this LUN. Most of the innovations in storage has been about putting some data protection and migration goodies around this 100GB LUN. However, with the advent of Cloud and with more and more people preferring to move in to Cloud for various reasons, the storage box is expected do more than that traditional stuff.

With Cloud, multi-tenancy becomes a paramount requirement and that trend is clearly visible with most of the vendors choosing to build multi-tenant systems. But the big question is “Is multi-tenancy enough?” The answer is a big “NO”.
In a shared storage infrastructure, you need to ensure that every tenant is guaranteed a fixed (agreed upon) level of performance. This performance is in-turn defined by the applications it chooses to run in the Cloud. Typically, the applications would expect the storage box to give certain number of IOPS, some level of throughput and desired latencies for the application consuming the storage. This is exactly where CloudByte pitches in and gives the flexibility to the customer to get QUALITY (in terms of guaranteed performance) out of the storage services he is buying from the Cloud Service Provider. This is what CloudByte calls as “QoS” and enables a service provided to build a platform where, your business is able to host applications on a multi-tiered storage environment. A multi-tiered storage environment is where your business is able to host applications based on the performance characteristics. What it eaxactly means is that now you can have performance guaranteed in a shared Cloud infrastructure and also tune the performance up or down easily as and when the requirement from the application changes.

Looking one level deep into QoS and its impact on the Storage world:

Firstly, let us list the three main parameters here; IOPS, Throughput and Latency. When we say “performance guaranteed”, we are basically trying to control these parameters. So, the new way to look at a provisioned LUN is that it is not just bound by a capacity attribute, but also the attributes related to QoS. The newly QoS provisioned LUN can now read “100GB iSCSI LUN with 500IOPS OR 200GB NFS volume with 50Mbps throughput”. This is not it, the QoS attribute is not just restricted to the storage volumes but to the tenants as well. In fact, the Storage Volume’s QoS is carved out from the Tenant Storage Machine (TSM) which in turn gets its QoS attributes from the Pool on which it is hosted.

Getting into the idea of Pooled Storage:

With traditional Storage, you have an overhead of adding some sort of a volume manager which basically takes care of exposing a monolithic layer of storage to the upper client layers. All the star studded storage features such as data protection and migration are managed by this extra layer. The Pooled Storage concept eliminates the overhead of the volume manager from the storage stack. File systems are no longer constrained to individual devices. Disk space is shared among all file systems in the Pool. The file system inherently is designed in such a way that it acts like volume manager too. The Pooled Storage approach ensures that you make the most optimal use of your storage by letting you add only the required number of disks into your JBOD. Hence, there is no hassle of pre-allocated storage or unnecessary wastage. Further, the Pools expand as you add disks and thus, completely eliminate the process overhead of attaching new drives to the Pool. This process is extremely simple and transparent.

Some light into CloudByte ElastiStor feature offerings:

ElastiStor gives you a variety of features which will help you plan and manage your storage infrastructure in a much more efficient way. Here are a few features:

• Intuitive Management: For long, considered as a very tedious task needing specialist skills, storage management has been made a layman thing with CloudByte management console, called ElastiCenter. You don’t really need an expert storage administrator with fancy storage certifications to manage your storage. Tasks such as provisioning, monitoring, alerting, maintenance have been made so intuitive that it is easier for everyone to manage it.
• Multi-tenant Architecture: This is an absolute must have feature in a service provider environment. CloudByte enables service providers to host multiple tenants (could be Cloud customers) of a shared infrastructure and yet maintain the highest levels of security between the tenants and further, ensure delivery of requested performance for every tenant.
• Guaranteed Performance: Without any second thoughts, this is the most critical problem CloudByte addresses in today’s world. It is certainly a paradigm shift for majority of people who always look at storage as a place to dump data and expect nothing more of it. With the world moving fast towards the Cloud, how does one ensure that critical applications are given the resources they need to do the processing? CloudByte is trying to tackle exactly this issue, and is offering a solution which ensures that each application in the Cloud can be set with certain performance attributes and a guaranteed quality of service.
• High Availability: In order to ensure 24x7 data continuity, CloudByte offers an advanced N-way HA solution. The solution ensures that all applications run without a down time when one or more storage controllers are offline (planned or unplanned).
• Advanced Data Protection: CloudByte offers customers the options of both, local as well as remote data protection. There is no limit on the number of snapshots one can capture. Visibly simpler ways to schedule and manage the snapshots are provided to the customer. Most importantly, it is easy to restore data in case of an emergency.
  The disaster recovery feature allows customers to copy their data to a remote site and activate the site in case of a disaster at the primary site. Also, there is no need to worry about interim failure of DR links as the copy always resumes from where it interrupted.
• Inline Compression and De-duplication: If you see analysis done by the storage analysts, you will notice that a lot of them emphasize on the wastage of storage due to duplicate data. In fact, few researches even claim that the wastage of storage due to duplicate data is as high as 80%. Trying to reduce this huge expense for a business, CloudByte offers data de-duplication feature in form of inline de-duplication. With this technique, the duplicate blocks are caught right in the memory and thereby, cannot make it to the disk.
  Just like de-duplication, the compression offering is also inline. The compression significantly improves the performance in addition to keeping the space usage to optimal. Various compression algorithms are supported with CloudByte ElastiStor and the user has the choice to choose from any of the 7 algorithms based on data storage and performance needs.
• Unified Storage: The customer environment is dynamic. For example, a Data-center which starts as a consumer of file storage ends up in a situation where block storage becomes a new requirement or vice versa. CloudByte ElastiStor is a unified storage platform where both, file protocols (NFS/CIFS) as well as block protocols (iSCSI/FC) are supported on the same box. The differentiating factor is the ease with which this is done. It is as simple as creating a Storage Volume and selecting the check box for iSCSI or NFS. The unified architecture drastically brings down the hardware requirements, which in turn reduce the infrastructure cost.