SIMPLIFY DATA MANAGEMENT WITH AUTOMATED TIERING AND ARCHIVINGUSE CASE

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ChallengeData volumes and storage infrastructure growth is increasing management complexity. Data needs to be preserved for longer periods of time and made available in real-time to more people in the organization to help them do their jobs more effectively.

Benefits• Object Storage for file-based applications

• Policy-based storage tiering and archiving

• High durability, integrity and accessibility

• Dramatically faster time to first byte

• Consolidate storage tiers including tape

SolutionHGST ActiveScale object storage system and Versity Storage Manager (VSM) combine to create a continuous archiving solution for large-scale business and technical data environments. The combination of object storage performance and economics with a standard POSIX interface, brings together the best of both worlds.

Ideal for enterprise IT or Cloud Service Providers offering data management services to those that don’t want to do it themselves.

As companies expand their storage infrastructure to address the explosion of file-based data, they are struggling with increasing management complexity. Not only is more data being generated, it needs to be preserved for longer periods of time and made readily accessible to more people in the organization to achive the company’s business objectives.

Putting the right data on the right storage technology during its lifespan can help organizations save money and allows them to maximize the value of their data. A modern policy-driven tiered storage solution takes advantage of a range of storage technologies—flash, hard disk, cloud and tape—to meet the flexibility, performance and capacity demanded by large-scale business and technical data environments. This includes companies in energy exploration, financial services, life sciences, manufacturing and media/entertainment industries.

Large-scale Data ManagementDesigned to address these challenges, the combined solution from HGST and Versity makes data management easy with policy-based storage tiering, comprehensive data protection, and massively scalable, durable and affordable private cloud storage. Good data management today means the effective handling of information in order to harness its value within an organization. With the HGST ActiveScale™ object storage system and Versity™ Storage Manager (VSM), data storage and management can be done efficiently and automatically.

Built upon a proven foundation of SAM-QFS, VSM supports virtually unlimited archive size and is compatible with a wide range of storage technologies. VSM supports nearly unlimited buckets of storage and offers a robust tiering and archive policy engine that transparently migrates and stores data in the ActiveScale system. A standard POSIX-compliant (Portable Operating System Interface) file system implementation supports a broad range of applications with no customization. All data is stored in open, standard file formats, so files managed by VSM are accessible by standard unmodifed applications.

Simplifying ComplexityBy continuously tiering and archiving data according to defined policies, VSM protects data and can even eliminate the need for traditional backup. VSM is not a backup system or a file system with add-on archiving features. It is designed from the ground up for managing large, complex archives. VSM adds an extended set of archiving metadata to existing, standard POSIX metadata, and requires no other applications to manage or synchronize metadata with the file system. File transfer rates are near the raw transfer rate of the ActiveScale system.

Simplify Data Management with Automated Tiering and Archiving

Private Cloud Storage for Archiving SolutionWith data retention times increasing and more frequent use of archive data across the company, IT must have confidence that the data on the archive tier (Figure 1) will be readable throughout its long lifespan. The archive tier needs to be easily scalable to tens, even hundreds of petabytes and require minimal IT support to manage. Data will be regularly migrated from the primary storage tier, which means the archive tier has to support standard file protocols, but also cloud protocols, such as Amazon® S3™. For workloads that are low concurrency, need high throughput, a NAS may not be required. The HGST ActiveScale object storage system and Versity Storage Manager check all of these boxes and more.

ActiveScale system’s durability, performance and cloud-scale efficiency make it ideal for consolidating tiers of storage, including tape. Advanced erasure coding enables up to 15 nines durability, while proactive data integrity checks and self healing ensure that what goes in, comes out. For the most demanding environments, a system can be be deployed across three geographic regions to ensure data remains fully protected and accessible in the event of a full data center outage.

As a private cloud, the system is simple to deploy and manage and can be easily scaled over time. A single rack can be expanded to 2.9PB of usable capacity. Performance scales linearly with capacity up to 3.5GB/s per full rack. As a disk-based system, the time it takes to access the first byte of archived data is dramatically faster than tape.

Together with the Versity Storage Manager, the solution forms the foundation for a modern cloud-scale archive tier. Versity Storage Manger delivers a scalable file interface to the ActiveScale system that requires no change to existing applications. Enterprise customers can enjoy the benefits of a private cloud immediately. To learn more visit www.hgst.com/products/systems.

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© 2017 Western Digital Corporation or its affiliates. Produced 10/17.

Western Digital, the HGST logo, and ActiveScale are registered trademarks or trademarks of Western Digital Corporation or its affiliates in the U.S. and/or other countries. Amazon S3 is a trademark of Amazon.com, Inc. or its affiliates in the United States and/or other countries. All other marks that may be mentioned herein are the property of their respective owners. References in this publication to HGST-brand products, programs, or services do not imply that they will be made available in all countries. Product specifications provided are sample specifications that are subject to change and do not constitute a warranty. As used for storage capacity, one petabyte (PB) = one quadrillion bytes, one terabyte (TB) = one trillion bytes, and one gigabyte (GB) = one billion bytes. Total accessible capacity varies depending on operating environment. Please visit the Support section of our website, www.hgst.com/support/systems-support, for additional information on product specifications. Pictures shown may vary from actual products.

SIMPLIFY DATA MANAGEMENT WITH AUTOMATED TIERING AND ARCHIVING

Figure 1. Automated tiered storage and archiving architecture for file-based workloads

GEO1 GEO2 GEO3

ActiveScale + Versity Tiering & Archiving Architecture

Processing Cluster

Tape Copies

File-centric Applications

PrimaryNAS

use case dependant

Versity StorageManager (VSM)

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SecondaryNAS

Consolidation Opportunities

policy driventiering and archiving

ActiveScaleobject storage

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USE CASE