Future of Information Storage with ISS SuperCore and Ceph

Intelligent Systems Services Inc.

Alex Gorbachev, President

Neal Purchase, Solutions Architect

Cindy Markee, Director of Technology Sales

Email: supercore@iss-integration.com

Data Storage Challenges

• Always. Need. More. GB TB PB EB

• RAID rebuild times now takes days per disk

• Limits on SAN array expansion (once you hit the physical limits you have to buy more arrays)

• Cost. Cost. Cost.

• Have to choose: Speed? Cost? Size?

• Upgrades mean downtime

Intro to Ceph

• Created as a Ph. D. thesis by Sage Weil in 2007

• Method for storing data that does not depend on parity calculations, controllers or lookup tools

• Pseudo Random Data Distribution

• CRUSH – Controlled Replication Under Scalable Hashing

• Getting too weird?

Hotel with a Billion Rooms

Pseudo Random Hashing

Abel

Baker

Charlie

• Data location is based on data itself

• Secondary (Tertiary etc.) location computed on the fly

Ceph RADOS

• Reliable Autonomic Distributed Object Store

• Block Device store without limitations on size, scalability, performance

Why is this not everywhere?

• Focus on performance, features, scalability

• No SAN like interface

• Native drivers are not yet mainstream

• Cloud oriented rather than enterprise

• But RADOS is a mature, well performing technology, so we developed…

Client Network and Fabric

Virtualization Servers

SuperCore Delivery Cluster

SuperCore Active Storage Nodes

SuperCore Control-Monitor

iSCSI

Fibre Channel

NFS

CIFS/SMB

Standalone Servers

SuperCore Backup

Basic Node Architecture

Control and Management Interface

Why we think this is AWESOME…

Resilience and Survival

• Replaces the outdated RAID technology with distributed storage logic that (unlike RAID) delivers limitless expansion and instant rebuild capability.

• Core and delivery EACH have separate redundancy layers

• Self healing algorithm located and eliminates faults on the fly without limitations (RAID systems can take 1-2 hits before data gets irreversibly corrupted, while SuperCore can take many hits in different areas and remain functional).

Replication and Optimization

• Ability to set placement rules for storage (where does data go and how is it spread out to protect the most against failures - rack, row, data center, city, continent...)

• Highly available flash caching that can be individually configured for every volume and centralized tiered caching.

• Performance increases with growth vs. traditional systems

Economy

• Different client systems can share the same storage hardware while maintaining quality of performance and separation of resources

• Ability to control storage overhead to meet capacity and performance demands while maintaining the required degree of protection

• On-demand provisioning (Thin Provisioning) economizes storage use overall up to 40%

Questions?