White Paper Technology

CloudByte ElastiStor makes Storage Predictable, Affordable and Easy

even as Datacenters Scale to Thousands of Applications

STORAGE ARCHITECTED FOR THE

NEW-AGE DATACENTERS

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Table of Contents

Executive Summary ……………………………………………………………………………………. 3

Legacy Solutions are a Misfit in the New-Age Datacenters …………………….. 4

CloudByte Technology

TSM Architecture ……………………..…………………………………………………………. 5

Heuristics Based Performance Control ……………..………………………………… 6

CloudByte Deployment Architecture …………………….……..………………………….... 7

ElastiStor: Key Features …………………….……..……………………………..………………….. 8

ElastiStor: Standard Storage Features ……..…………………………………………………. 9

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Executive Summary

Legacy storage solutions fail to scale up to the demands of new-age datacenters, which are

witnessing a rapid increase in number of applications and new levels of performance requirements.

While virtualization has made rapid strides on the server side, storage technology witnessed just

incremental innovations in the past decade. By baking in advanced technologies of virtualization

and software-defined intelligence, ElastiStor is architected to make storage predictable, affordable,

and easy, even as datacenters scale to thousands of applications.

CloudByte ElastiStor controllers are built for multi-tenancy i.e., every application hosted on a

shared storage platform is completely isolated and dedicated its own set of storage resources.

ElastiStor intelligently provisions these storage resources based on an application’s performance

(QoS) demands. This allows datacenters to realize the cost efficiencies of shared storage, while

delivering guaranteed QoS to every application.

In addition to affordably delivering performance to a large number of applications, ElastiStor offers

complete security, comprehensive management tools and superior reliability, that’s expected in

carrier-grade storage solutions. Software-only and software-defined, ElastiStor is installable on

industry-standard servers. With zero-proprietary hardware and OpenStorage, ElastiStor frees

datacenters from any proprietary lock-in and allows storage infrastructure to be custom-built,

whether it’s SATA, SAS or SSD.

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Legacy Solutions are a Misfit in the New-Age Datacenters

Legacy storage solutions were designed to handle stable workloads from applications hosted on

dedicated physical servers. However, with server virtualization and the new class of enterprise

applications, datacenters have to deal with rapidly increasing number of applications, new levels of

performance demands, which are often dynamic and hosted on virtual servers. Due to their

architecture limitations, legacy solutions cannot scale well in these virtualized environments.

Tradeoff between Performance and Affordability

Legacy solutions are restricted by monolithic controller architecture, making it impossible to

completely isolate applications within shared storage. As a result, applications contend for the

shared storage resources and due to this noisy neighbor effect, no application can be guaranteed

performance. In short, to ensure predictable performance, applications require dedicated physical

storage. The cost structure and complexity to host these dedicated storage islands is prohibitively

high, especially with rapidly increasing number of applications. Datacenters are forced to choose

between delivering predictable performance and balancing their cost structure.

Current workarounds include overprovisioning shared storage resources, grouping similar

workloads together, and dedicating storage to performance-sensitive applications. These are far

from perfect and fail to either deliver predictable performance or optimally utilize resources.

Management Nightmare

With legacy solutions, provisioning performance (QoS) requires hardwiring of storage, which is just

not scalable with today’s dynamic workloads. Fragmented management of multiple storage islands

can be tedious and daunting even for datacenters with large management overheads. Further,

within shared storage, legacy solutions are incapable of providing granular resource usage

analytics, leading to complexities in identifying bottlenecks and billing customers (for a CSP).

Several storage management tools have popped up over the last decade due to the sheer number

of inefficiencies in the legacy systems. While they help alleviate the above-mentioned pain points,

none of them address the core problems– eliminating the need for storage fragmentation or

enabling on-demand provisioning.

Security

Storage assigned to a customer/application must be free from data snooping, unauthorized

manipulation, and deletion. In many scenarios, data confidentiality maybe required even from the

service provider or enterprise IT. With the lack of complete isolation and encrypted access, legacy

solutions do not meet these standard security requirements.

In the SAN world, LUN masking is used to some extent to separate an application’s storage at the

switch level. However, this is neither comprehensive nor scalable. Service providers cannot provide

comprehensive security without expanding their physical infrastructure.

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CloudByte Technology: Patented TSMTM

Architecture

Legacy Architecture

Legacy storage solutions are restricted by their monolithic controller, where applications share the

same access layer, file system and disk subsystem. Further, physical resources of a controller such

as CPU and memory are shared without any reference to an application’s performance needs. With

the monolithic approach, it is impossible to guarantee QoS to applications within shared storage.

CloudByte TSM Architecture

The CloudByte storage controller is designed and built from the ground up for multi-tenancy. In a

CloudByte controller, each application is fully isolated at all storage stack levels and unified under a

Tenant Storage Machine (TSM). With completely isolated applications, controller resources allotted

to each application can now be easily monitored, controlled, and provisioned.

As we’ll see in detail in the next section, CloudByte also intelligently provisions controller resources

to each application, based on the application’s QoS requirements (IOPS, latency and throughput).

Further, each application’s data can now be optionally encrypted to provide additional security.

Figure 1: Legacy Monolithic Architecture vs. ElastiStor TSM Architecture

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CloudByte Technology: Heuristics Based Performance Control

CloudByte Intelligence Dynamically Provisions Resources based on QoS Requirements

For the first time ever, CloudByte delivers tailored QoS (IOPS, throughput, latency) to every

application within shared storage. CloudByte software includes an intelligent heuristics daemon

which continuously learns the quantity of various controller resources needed to deliver the

required QoS and accordingly provisions them to each application.

Controller resources needed to deliver a specific QoS are not static, but vary depending on factors

such as the configuration of disks, the location of tenant data on disks, the amount of data in

cache, and the amount of data that needs to be fetched from the disks. The equation continually

changes and this pattern is learnt by CloudByte heuristics daemon. This pattern is then used to

provision the resources of the storage controller such as CPU, memory, cache lengths in the file

system, and network bandwidth. While the heuristics learning happens at the storage controller

level, resource enforcement happens at the TSM level.

Figure 2: Resource provisioning to achieve QoS requirements

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CloudByte Deployment Architecture

Figure 3: CloudByte deployment architecture

Scale to Thousands of Applications

An ElastiStor controller is built by deploying ElastiStor OS on industry-standard server. These

controllers can be linearly scaled to form an ElastiStor cluster, with one ElastiStor controller

dedicated as an administration node. With each controller supporting several applications/VMs, an

ElastiStor cluster can scale to thousands of applications.

With zero-proprietary hardware and OpenStorage, ElastiStor frees datacenters from any proprietary

lock-in and large upfront investments. Further, infrastructure can be custom-built based on the

datacenter demands, whether it’s SATA, SAS or SSD.

Storage made Predictable, Affordable, and Easy

For the first time ever, ElastiStor delivers guaranteed QoS to every application right from shared

storage, eliminating the need for any dedicated storage islands. By un-fragmenting storage islands

and optimally utilizing resources, ElastiStor steeply cuts down datacenters’ storage footprint,

leading to 80-90% cost savings over 3-5 years. With its on-demand provisioning, ElastiStor breaks

the need for hardwiring storage to deliver an application's performance. Further, ElastiStor makes

storage management incredibly easy with vCenter-like administration, delegated administration

and REST APIs (see “key features” for more details).

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QoS-Configurable Storage Endpoints

Share your storage and deliver predictable performance to every application.

For the first time ever, ElastiStor allows storage LUNs to be defined beyond

capacity, in terms of IOPS, throughput and latency. This allows applications

with diverse workloads to be guaranteed QoS right from a shared storage

platform. Together with linear scaling, a single extensible shared storage

platform from ElastiStor can now replace legacy solutions’ dedicated storage

islands. By un-fragmenting storage islands and optimally utilizing resources,

ElastiStor steeply cuts down your storage footprint, leading to 80-90% cost

savings over 3-5 years.

On-Demand Storage Provisioning

Do you still manually configure hardware to provision storage for any new

application? Break the need for hardwiring storage with ElastiStor's

on-demand provisioning. Just enter the required SLA/QoS parameters and let

ElastiStor automate node selection and resource allocation for you. ElastiStor

includes an intelligent heuristics daemon which continuously learns the

quantity of various controller resources needed to deliver the required QoS.

vCenter-like Administration Console

ElastiStor makes managing storage as easy as managing VMs, even when as

you scale to hundreds of applications. Storage admins can now comprehen-

sively manage the entire storage cluster, spanning across multiple sites, from

a single web-based console. Further, ElastiStor gives you unprecedented ac-

cess and control over resource usage within shared storage, right down to

the application-level granularity.

REST APIs and Plugins for Easy Integration

Every action performed at ElastiStor admin console translates into a REST

based API call in the backend, enabling admins to fully manage ElastiStor

right from their existing portals. Our plugin for VMware vCenter (also based

on REST API) enables storage management right from the vCenter, right from

setting QoS policies to monitoring resource usage.

N-way High Availability

ElastiStor enables N-way High Availability, exponentially increasing reliability

(mean time to failure), compared to the standard 2-way HA provided by

existing solutions. CloudByte's storage un-fragmentation and its patented

TSM architecture make N-way HA affordable and feasible.

Delegated Administration

A much requested feature from the cloud service providers, delegated

administration empowers both CSPs and its customers to monitor and

control storage, as necessary. Management privileges vary based on the

admin functionality – for example, a super admin can manage the entire

storage cluster, whereas a customer admin can manage just the storage

resources allotted to that particular customer.

ElastiStor: Key Features

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ElastiStor: Standard Storage Features

Scalability 128-bit file system

Zettabyte storage capacity

Unlimited file size

Access Protocols NFSv3, NFSv4, CIFS, iSCSI, FC

Storage Connectivity SAS JBODS, iSCSI targets, FC targets

Storage Resilience RAIDZ1, RAIDZ2

Storage Efficiency De-duplication

Compression

Thin provisioning

Backup Efficient Snapshots, Unlimited

Efficient Clones, Unlimited

Tape Backup

Availability N-way high availability (N-way HA)

Partial failure transfer to the available node

Active-Active mode

HA with/without storage redundancy

Disaster Recovery Tenant level disaster recovery

High availability across primary and DR sites

Block level replication

Synchronous mirroring

Asynchronous mirroring

RPO—Last minute

RTO—Few minutes

Data Integrity Protection against silent data corruption

Fixes corrupt block without having to take the file system offline

CloudByte’s file system is built on ZFS and hence, it inherits all the standard ZFS features

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multi-tenant storage

Service Providers can now provide full benefits of dedicated

storage to their customers on a shared storage platform

For more information, visit www.cloudbyte.com or follow us on Twitter @CloudByteInc