Enterprises are entering a territory that was exclusively the domain of cloud providers. Thanks to initiatives like the Internet of Things and Big Data and the general explosive growth of unstructured data, organizations have to evolve from managing terabytes of storage to managing petabytes. Cloud providers had the advantage of starting from essentially a clean slate and quickly adopted object storage, which is ideal for these capacities. Enterprises don’t have this advantage, they have to deal with legacy applications and legacy storage systems, making the shift from TBs to PBs seem more like a revolution instead of an evolution.
Universal Object Storage
As the argument over storage area network (SAN) and network-attached storage (NAS) reached its height, unified storage became popular, systems that essentially ended the conflict by supporting both file and block protocols. Also, IT professionals realized that SANs did some things well and NAS did other things well. Object storage is just another aspect to the age-old SAN vs. NAS debate, providing particular strength in managing large amounts of unstructured data. And universal object storage systems similarly end the argument by providing block, file and object storage on a single system. In many cases an object store can be accessed via multiple file protocols at the same time. This allows a legacy application to feed the same storage system that a Hadoop based application is using to deliver analytics results.
Promise Vsky
Promise Technology has released a new product, Vsky, that can both scale-out and scale up. Each node can have up to 4 storage units attached to it. As volumes are created they span across nodes. Nodes can be added to the architecture in a classic scale-out design, seamlessly adding to the performance and capacity of the environment. The system can be accessed via S3, Swift, Object, NFS, CIFS, SMB as well as iSCSI.
Promise uses a unique combination of data protection to deliver the reliability that the enterprise is used to. First, they leverage replication of objects so that each data set is available on multiple nodes. The number of nodes that data is replicated to is controlled by the user, and of course the number of available nodes.
Unlike many other object storage systems there is also data protection within the node. Promise leverages their Perfect RAID technology, that provides a variety of RAID levels including 0, 5, 6, 10, 50 and 60. RAID is typically considered a non-starter in object storage because these systems tend to use very high capacity 6TB+ drives which, under a traditional RAID architecture, can take weeks to rebuild. Perfect RAID allows rebuild timing to be scheduled (so it doesn’t kickoff during peak hours). And unlike most RAID systems, the rebuild only has to process actual data on the failed drive, not free space, saving a tremendous amount of rebuild time.
StorageSwiss Take
A big challenge for many object storage systems is that they do not maximize per-node capacity. This typically leads to wasted performance on an aggregate basis. Promise Technology eases that problem, by allowing up to four storage shelves per node. Also, by providing a system that can deliver file, block and object in a single system, it increases the utility within the enterprise. For data centers looking to consolidate virtualized workloads and large unstructured data stores into a single system, Promise Technology’s Vsky may be the answer.
George Crump is the Chief Marketing Officer at VergeIO, the leader in Ultraconverged Infrastructure. Prior to VergeIO he was Chief Product Strategist at StorONE. Before assuming roles with innovative technology vendors, George spent almost 14 years as the founder and lead analyst at Storage Switzerland. In his spare time, he continues to write blogs on Storage Switzerland to educate IT professionals on all aspects of data center storage. He is the primary contributor to Storage Switzerland and is a heavily sought-after public speaker. With over 30 years of experience designing storage solutions for data centers across the US, he has seen the birth of such technologies as RAID, NAS, SAN, Virtualization, Cloud, and Enterprise Flash. Before founding Storage Switzerland, he was CTO at one of the nation's largest storage integrators, where he was in charge of technology testing, integration, and product selection.
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