If you knew then...what you know now. The Why, What and Who of scale-out storage

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1 If you knew then......what you know now The Why, What and Who of scale-out storage

2 The Why? Calculating your storage needs has never been easy and now it is becoming more complicated. With Big Data (pssst - did you know, 80-90% of all data is estimated to be unstructured), IoT, Digital transformation and the soon-to-be law, General Data Protection Act (GDPR) putting greater demand on companies to make sure data is stored, secured, retrievable and accessible. Companies are having to re-think their storage options.

3 Traditionally your storage options were: Option 1 Go Big! So you make a very ambitious estimate on your requirements. In theory this works but the business will not want to make a massive capital investment in storage that they may never need.

4 Option 2 - SCALE-UP This is the more typical approach. There are some obvious advantages to scale-up: Provides a cost effective way to increase storage capacity Maximizes existing hardware Resource upgrades are generally easy to implement and manage Minimizes the need for physical equipment and lowers energy consumption But it s not plain sailing either. As your storage needs grow, you add more drives. This works up to a point but ultimately, you will either reach your physical limit or else you will find that performance is compromised. The only alternative then is the dreaded forklift upgrade. As anyone who has been through this will tell you, this is not a happy experience. There is disruption and often downtime involved. There is an effort needed to bed in the new system and this can cause further downtime, disruption and even data loss. After all this effort, you can end up with are sprawling storage islands; underutilised storage and a complicated storage management situation.

5 There is a better Option: Scale-out storage Scale-out storage gives you all the advantages of Options 1 and 2 (i.e. as much storage as you need but in a very cost effective way) without any of the pain of adding new drives or forklift upgrades. Scale-out storage is being hailed as the next frontier of data management. Read on to find out why!

6 The What? What is scale-out storage and how does it work? Also known as horizontal scaling, scaling out is the process of adding or removing new hardware to existing IT systems. By nature, this method is designed to offset many of the disadvantages that plague scaling up. Core advantages of scale-out infrastructures include: Breaks free of the capacity and performance constraints that limit older equipment; Provides access to new and improved storage, RAM, CPU and other features found in newer hardware; Better hardware makes it easier to streamline system management, facilitate redundancy, and improve uptime; The beauty of the scale-out methodology lies in its on-demand flexibility. Organizations can start out with an investment that supports their existing environment and allows for reasonable growth. Then as business evolves and their storage needs grow, they can incorporate additional capacity and performance - all without tedious forklift upgrades. While scale-out infrastructures are usually more expensive to deploy upfront, their hassle-free approach to scalability often leads to a more cost effective investment in the end.

7 The What? How does it work? The ideal scale-out infrastructure combines two popular IT concepts: clustering and software-defined networking. Software companies develop applications that once installed, allow your infrastructure to expand seamlessly by adding new clusters and storage devices as needed. Leveraging basic network protocol, these devices combine to function as a single unified storage system. This is capable of sharing CPU, RAM, and other resources between one another. Individual clusters can be managed via a distributed file system or global namespace, essentially making the physical location of your servers a non-issue. A scale-out NAS architecture can support a single cluster or multiple clusters with virtually unlimited capacity. Each new device comes bundled with its own set of resources to help optimize the total efficiency of your storage system. For example, a new server may include additional storage space as well as its own CPUs, RAM, and I/O. As a result, scale-out systems not only increase storage capacity, but also improve performance and overall reliability.

8 The Who? There are any number of vendors who sell scale-out storage but the relatively new kid on the block, Exablox, has taken a revolutionary approach. They asked the question - if YOU were to design the perfect storage solution, what would it look like? A solution that would grow with your business, that would be easy to deploy and use. A solution that would offer enterprise-class features without an enterprise-class price. The answer is OneBlox. OneBlox is an object-based storage appliance, which employs scale-out Ring architecture. A Ring may consist of one or multiple OneBlox, scaling from a few TBs to nearly 700TBs of raw flash or hard-drive storage capacity. Object Based Storage Object based storage is a computer data storage architecture that manages data as object. This is as opposed to other storage architectures like file systems which manage data as a file hierarchy and block storage which manages data as blocks within sectors and tracks. Each object typically includes the data itself, a variable amount of metadata, and a globally unique identifier. Object storage can be implemented at multiple levels, including the device level (object storage device), the system level, and the interface level. In each case, object storage seeks to enable capabilities not addressed by other storage architectures. For example interfaces that can be directly programmable by the application or a namespace that can span multiple instances of physical hardware, and data management functions like data replication and data distribution at object-level granularity.

9 What Exablox offers is: Easy to set up Exablox makes it easy for you to instantly set up your own scalable storage in-house. Engineered with a goal of zero-configuration, the plug-and-play OneBlox solution lets you easily set up a scalable storage environment in five simple steps in just five minutes. Moreover, because it s object-based, there are no volumes, no LUNs - no hassle. Start with the capacity you need today - even mix and match drives - and easily establish a seamless pool of scalable storage. Easy to grow Exablox makes it easy for you to scale capacity as your storage needs grow. You can scale-out your capacity dynamically in less than five minutes, by simply adding drives or an additional OneBlox without changing your apps or creating new storage islands. Moreover, scaling with Exablox is non-disruptive and requires zero configuration. Our OneBlox solution is automatically self-discovering and selfconfiguring. You can easily enable all of your applications to access and share new storage capacity as soon as you add it. In case of disk failure, there is no painstaking rebuild of data using parity bits. Instead objects are copied from good drives and redistributed to ensure similar levels of protection as before the disk failure. It also comes with built in enterprise grade features such as: Continuous data protection Inline deduplication and compression Encryption Real-time replication over wide area networks

10 The OneBlox OneBlox 5210 Designed as an all-flash high performance Tier-1 primary storage; High performance backup; Virtualisation. OneBlox 4312 Ideal as a secondary storage; consolidation of file services; a backup target or archive. Satisfied customers include (but not limited to):

11 Conclusion Traditional storage solutions will struggle to cope with the ever-increasing amounts of data being generated. In addition, GDPR will place greater obligations on companies to be able to secure and access data quickly. Scale-out storage offers companies the ability to buy the storage they need today and then very easily add as needed - in essence pay as you grow. OneBlox from Exablox is a revolutionary solution offering scale-out storage with enterprise features such as data protection, inline deduplication, encryption and real time replication but without the enterprise price tag.

12 Sources StorageCraft Technology