Cloudian Announces HyperStore 7 – Gets Super Cloudy

Posted on 2018-01-24 by dan

Cloudian recently announced HyperStore 7, and I was fortunate enough to grab a few minutes with John Toor to run through the announcement.

The Announcement

The key features of HyperStore 7 include:

Multi-cloud access via a common API: Manage all cloud and on-premises storage assets, including Amazon AWS, Google GCP, and Microsoft Azure via a common API
Merge Files and Objects: Combine file and object management to a single namespace, accessed via SMB (CIFS) / NFS protocols and the S3 API
Scale-out architecture: Multiple distributed controllers can manage a single namespace across on-premises and cloud environments for performance scaling, increased availability and simplified data access
Converged Data Access: Permits data stored as files to be retrieved as objects, or vice versa, providing full data interchangeability

I’ll run through these in a little more detail below.

Multi-cloud via Common API

The cool thing about HyperStore 7 is that it’s delivered as a single software image. This means you can manage your HyperStore environment from a common interface, regardless of whether it’s an appliance located on-premises, or a virtual image running in Azure, GCP or AWS.

[image courtesy of Cloudian]

The common image also means you can start out small and build up. You can deploy on-premises first, then work up to a hybrid cloud deployment, and then, if you’re so inclined, you can deploy HyperStore 7 natively in the cloud. The best thing about this feature is that you don’t need to undo the work you’ve already done on-premises, you can just build on it.

Files and Objects, Together

Once of the most exciting features, in my opinion, is “Converged Data Access”. The recent introduction of HyperFile ramps up the file and object play considerably, with a single namespace across multiple environments, and files and objects being stored in that namespace. You can access data in object or file format interchangeably as well.

[image courtesy of Cloudian]

Note also that data stored in its native cloud format. So if you’re using Azure, for example, your data is stored in blob format, and is thus accessible to other applications that can leverage that format.

Other Notes

The basic edition of HyperFile is included with HyperStore at no charge. The hardware appliance remains the primary model for on-premises deployments, with Cloudian noting that a lot of customers are still most comfortable buying hardware from a vendor for their storage deployments.

Thoughts

With the introduction of HyperFile, Cloudian made some leaps ahead in terms of breadth of offering. In my opinion, the ability to deploy HyperStore 7 on your favourite public cloud platform, and have it running a shared data pool with your on-premises HyperStore storage, is simply icing on the cake. A lot of people are talking about how they are all in with multi-cloud solutions, but it seems that Cloudian have come up with a fairly simple solution to the problem. You’ll need to do a little work to make sure your networking is set up in the way you need it to meet your requirements, but you’d need to do that if you were looking to do file or object in public cloud in any case. There are a bunch of use cases for this type of technology, and it’s nice to see that it’s not a bunch of different products glued together and called a solution.

It’s no secret that I think Cloudian have been doing some pretty cool stuff in the object space for a while now. The addition of HyperFile capability last year, and this multi-cloud capability in HyperStore 7, gets me all kinds of excited to see what they’ve got in store for the future. If you’re after a scalable object (and file) solution works well on-premises and off-premises, you’d do well to check out what Cloudian has to offer.

Cloudian Announces HyperFile, Makes Object Better

Posted on 2017-12-06 by dan

Cloudian recently announced an addition to their HyperStore appliance. I had the opportunity to be briefed by Jon Toor and thought I’d share the highlights of the announcement here. I’ve had the pleasure of talking to Cloudian at a few Storage Field Day events. If you’re unfamiliar with the HyperStore 4000, you can read my coverage of it here. In short, it’s 840TB of object storage in 4RU with really, really, comprehensive S3 compliance, amongst other things.

HyperFile You Say?

HyperFile is the new file front-end controller for the HyperStore appliance. It supports the following features:

SMB3 and NFS3;
High Availabilty with active / passive controllers;
Non-disruptive failover;
POSIX compliance;
Active Direcotry / LDAP authentication;
Write Once Read Many (WORM); and
Snapshots.

It wouldn’t be a product announcement without a bezel shot. I can’t say whether this is actually what it looks like, but if it does, it’s kind of cool.

[image courtesy of Cloudian]

The appliance itself is 2RU with dual controllers and a shared backplane. The cool thing is that it can be deployed as VMs, making it appealing for service providers looking to setup multiple environments for customers. Supported hypervisors include vSphere 5.1 (or later) and KVM. Replication is handled at the HyperStore level.

Multi-tenancy is supported with dedicated controllers.

[image courtesy of Cloudian]

There’s a global namespace between file and object and it also supports a shared namespace across multiple NAS controllers, meaning you can up your number of controllers to increase bandwidth or replication performance. From a scalability perspective, it supports up to 64 namespaces per controller. One of my favourite features is what Cloudian call “converged access” between file and object, meaning you could use S3 for storing files. It also supports Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform and Amazon S3 formats, opening up some interesting possibilities for file consumption on-premises and in the cloud.

There are two editions available. The Basic HyperFile NAS Controller includes

Full protocol support;
High-availability;
Converged data access; and
Data migration.

The Enterprise HyperFile NAS Controller adds

Snapshot;
WORM; and
Geo-distribution with file versioning/locking.

Thoughts

I’ve been a fan of Cloudian’s products for some time, and this addition to the HyperStore platform makes them a compelling option for file and object storage in the data centre. With this approach they’re looking to push further into Media Asset Management (MAM) and video surveillance solutions. The title of the post is misleading. Object is already pretty cool, and a very suitable solution for a number of workloads. So why would an object vendor need to add file to work in these industries? Isn’t object ideally suited to these kinds of workloads? Yes, but sometimes the leading software vendors and people in charge of workflows are focused on other things, like only supporting file. So Cloudian have adapted to take a bigger piece of the pie. In much the same way that some data protection solutions are still file oriented, the HyperFile allows Cloudian to play in areas where it’s traditionally been excluded.

I’m also a fan of the appliance as VM approach and I like the breadth of protocol support and cloud integration available. If you’re going to put cloud in the name of your company the expectation will be there that you know what you’re doing. Cloudian haven’t disappointed thus far. If you’re in the market for a solid object (and now file) solution, you could do worse than talking to the folks at Cloudian.

Cloudian Announces HyperStore 4000 – Gets Super Dense

Posted on 2017-02-24 by dan

I’ve written about Cloudian before, having had the good fortune of seeing them present at Storage Field Day 7 and Storage Field Day 10. I recently had the opportunity to be briefed by Jon Toor, Cloudian’s CMO, on the HyperStore 4000 (the datasheet can be found here and Cloudian’s press release can be found here).

Super Dense Spec

[image via Cloudian]

The HyperStore 4000 comes with two nodes per chassis, each with 2 Intel E5-2620 v4, 8 core CPUs and 128GB RAM. There are 35 hot-swap 3.5″ drives per node, with 2 800GB hot-swap SSDs per node and 10GbE networking (same as the HyperStore 1500).

With raw capacity of 700TB in a 4RU enclosure, Cloudian tell me the HyperStore 4000 reduces storage costs by 40 percent versus their previous solutions.

It also offers:

Data availability is enhanced by the resilient hardware architecture (two compute nodes per chassis), delivering 99.999999 percent data durability from a three-appliance cluster; and
Built-in hybrid cloud tiering (to Amazon S3 or Google Cloud) enables customers to optimize their storage model with a combination of on-premises Cloudian storage and public cloud storage.

Thoughts

I’ve written about Cloudian’s S3 guarantee before – and this is still a big part of the value proposition. I spoke to Jon about where he saw uptake in Cloudian (and object storage in general) in the enterprise. He talked about data protection on-premises being the obvious problem being solved with object and spoke of object storage cost approaching the same economics as tape. But there’s other stuff you can use object storage for too, including media asset managers (using S3 compliance) and video surveillance. Most of the software on the market has some kind of hook into S3, and this is heavily leveraged by Cloudian to provide the same services on-premises.

But object storage (and Cloudian in particular) is not just about cheap and deep. Object does distributed storage really well too. Jon spoke about Cloudian providing good, verifiable visibility into data locality. This can be extremely important for government authorities and businesses with a requirement to focus not just on how their data is stored, but also where.

If you’re in the market for some nice, dense, smart object storage, I’d encourage you to look further into the Cloudian offering. For another perspective on the HyperStore 4000 announcement, El Reg has a good summary here.

Storage Field Day 10 – Wrap-up and Link-o-rama

Posted on 2016-07-17 by dan

Disclaimer: I recently attended Storage Field Day 10. My flights, accommodation and other expenses were paid for by Tech Field Day. There is no requirement for me to blog about any of the content presented and I am not compensated in any way for my time at the event. Some materials presented were discussed under NDA and don’t form part of my blog posts, but could influence future discussions.

This is a quick post to say thanks once again to Stephen, Tom, Megan and the presenters at Storage Field Day 10. I had an enjoyable and educational time. For easy reference, here’s a list of the posts I did covering the event (they may not match the order of the presentations).

Storage Field Day – I’ll Be At SFD10

Storage Field Day 10 – Day 0

Storage Field Day 10 – (Fairly) Full Disclosure

Kaminario are doing some stuff we’ve seen before, but that’s okay

Pure Storage really aren’t a one-trick pony

Tintri Keep Doing What They Do, And Well

Nimble Storage are Relentless in Their Pursuit of Support Excellence

Cloudian Does Object Smart and at Scale

Exablox Isn’t Just Pretty Hardware

It’s Hedvig, not Hedwig

The Cool Thing About Datera Is Intent

Data Virtualisation is More Than Just Migration for Primary Data

Also, here’s a number of links to posts by my fellow delegates (and Tom!). They’re all really quite smart, and you should check out their stuff, particularly if you haven’t before. I’ll try keep this updated as more posts are published. But if it gets stale, the SFD10 landing page has updated links.

Chris M Evans (@ChrisMEvans)

Storage Field Day 10 Preview: Hedvig

Storage Field Day 10 Preview: Primary Data

Storage Field Day 10 Preview: Exablox

Storage Field Day 10 Preview: Nimble Storage

Storage Field Day 10 Preview: Datera

Storage Field Day 10 Preview: Tintri

Storage Field Day 10 Preview: Pure Storage

Storage Field Day 10 Preview: Kaminario

Storage Field Day 10 Preview: Cloudian

Object Storage: Validating S3 Compatibility

Ray Lucchesi (@RayLucchesi)

Surprises in flash storage IO distributions from 1 month of Nimble Storage customer base

Has triple parity Raid time come?

Pure Storage FlashBlade well positioned for next generation storage

Exablox, bring your own disk storage

Hedvig storage system, Docker support & data protection that spans data centers

Jon Klaus (@JonKlaus)

I will be flying out to Storage Field Day 10!

Ready for Storage Field Day 10!

Simplicity with Kaminario Healthshield & QoS

Breaking down storage silos with Primary Data DataSphere

Cloudian Hyperstore: manage more PBs with less FTE

FlashBlade: custom hardware still makes sense

Squashing assumptions with Data Science

Bringing hyperscale operations to the masses with Datera

Making life a whole lot easier with Tintri VM-aware storage

Enrico Signoretti (@ESignoretti)

VM-aware storage, is it still a thing?

Scale-out, flash, files and objects. How cool is Pure’s FlashBlade?

Josh De Jong (@EuroBrew)

Max Mortillaro (@DarkkAvenger)

Primary Data: a true Software-defined Storage platform?

If you’re going to SFD10 be sure to wear microdrives in your hair

Hedvig Deep Dive – Is software-defined the future of storage?

Pure Storage’s FlashBlade – Against The Grain

Pure Storage Flashblade is now available!

Gabe Maentz (@GMaentz)

Heading to Tech Field Day

Arjan Timmerman (@ArjanTim)

We’re almost live…

Datera: Elastic Data Fabric

Francesco Bonetti (@FBonez)

EXABLOX – A different and smart approach to NAS for SMB

Marco Broeken (@MBroeken)

Rick Schlander (@VMRick)

Storage Field Day 10 Next Week

Hedvig Overview

Tom Hollingsworth (@networkingnerd)

Flash Needs a Highway

Finally, thanks again to Stephen, Tom, Megan (and Claire in absentia). It was an educational and enjoyable few days and I really valued the opportunity I was given to attend.

Cloudian Does Object Smart and at Scale

Posted on 2016-06-29 by dan

Before I get started, you can find a link to my raw notes on Cloudian‘s presentation here. You can also see videos of the presentation here.

I’m quite keen on Cloudian’s story, having seen them in action at Storage Field Day 7. I also got to have a beer with Michael Tso at the SFD10 mixer and talk all things Australian.

Smart and at Scale

Cloudian took us through some of their driving design principles, and I thought it was worth covering these off again. You’ll notice the word “scale” gets used a lot, and this has been a particularly important capability for Cloudian. They did a blog post on it too.

One of the key features of the HyperStore solution is that it needed to support what Cloudian term “Smart Operations at Scale”. This requires the tech to:

Be simple and intuitive;
Be fully automated from an operations perspective (e.g. add/remove drives/nodes, upgrades);
Provide visual storage analytics to automatically see hot spots; and
Offer self service consumption (via a policy based approach).

Cloudian have also worked hard to ensure they can provide “Extreme Durability at Scale”, with the HyperStore solution offering the ability to:

Be always repaired, always verified;
Offer automated failure avoidance (through the use of Dynamic Object Routing); and
Be “enterprise” grade.

One of the keys to being able deliver a scaleable solution has been the ability to provide the end user with “Smart support at Scale”, primarily through the use of:

Proactive (not reactive) support;
Continuous monitoring; and
Global analytics.

The analytics piece is a big part of the Cloudian puzzle, and something they’ve been working hard on recently. With their visual analytics you can analyse your data across globe and plan for future based on your demand. Cloudian not only performs analytics at scale, but also designed to facilitate operations at scale, with:

One screen for hundreds of nodes (in a kind of “beehive” layout);
Instant view of a node’s health;
The ability to add nodes with one click; and
The ability to dynamically rebalance the cluster.

When it comes to software defined storage platforms, the simple things matter, particularly as it relates to your interactions with the hardware platform. To that end, with HyperStore you’ve got the ability to do some basic stuff, like:

Identifying node types;
Blinking suspect servers; and
Blinking suspect drives.

When you’re running a metric s**t-tonne of these devices in a very big data centre, this kind of capability is really important, especially when it comes to maintenance. As is the ability to perform rolling upgrades of the platform with no downtime and in an automated fashion. When it comes to rebuilds, Cloudian provides insight into both data rebuild information and cluster rebalance information – both handy things to know when something’s gone sideways.

The Cloudian platform also does “Smart Disk Balancing”. If there’s a disk imbalance it will change the tokens pointing from “highly used disk to low used disk”. If there’s a disk failure, new data automatically routes to newly assigned resources. Makes sense, and nice to see they’ve thought it through.

Further Reading and Conclusion

Cloudian make quite a big deal of their S3 compatibility. They even give me a sticker that says it’s guaranteed. It looks a lot like this:

Chris Evans also did a series of posts on S3 and Cloudian that you can read here, here and here. He also did a great preview post prior to SFD10 which is also worth a look. He’s a good lad, he is. Particularly when I need to point you, my loyal reader, to well written articles on topics I’m a little sketchy on.

S3 compatibility is a big thing for a lot of people looking at deploying object storage, primarily because AWS are leaps and bounds ahead of the pack in terms of object storage functionality, deployed instances, and general mindshare. Cloudian haven’t just hitched their wagon to S3 compatibility though. In my opinion they’ve improved on the S3 experience through clever design and a solid approach to some fundamental issues that arise when you’re deploying a whole bunch of devices in data centres that don’t often have staff members present.

Storage Field Day 10 – (Fairly) Full Disclosure

Posted on 2016-05-31 by dan

Here are my notes on gifts, etc, that I received as a delegate at Storage Field Day 10. I’d like to point out that I’m not trying to play companies off against each other. I don’t have feelings one way or another about receiving gifts at these events (although I generally prefer small things I can fit in my suitcase). Rather, I’m just trying to make it clear what I received during this event to ensure that we’re all on the same page as far as what I’m being influenced by. Some presenters didn’t provide any gifts as part of their session – which is totally fine. I’m going to do this in chronological order, as that was the easiest way for me to take notes during the week. While every delegate’s situation is different, I’d also like to clarify that I took 5 days of training / work time to be at this event (thanks to my employer for being on board).

Saturday

I paid for my taxi to BNE airport. I had a burger at Benny Burger in SYD airport. It was quite good. I flew Qantas economy class to SFO. The flights were paid for by Tech Field Day. Plane food was consumed on the flight. It was a generally good experience.

Tuesday

When I arrived at the hotel I was given a bag of snacks by Tom. The iced coffee and granola bars came in handy. We had dinner at Il Fornaio at the Westin Hotel. I had some antipasti, pizza fradiavola and 2 Hefeweizen beers (not sure of the brewery).

Wednesday

We had breakfast in the hotel. I had bacon, eggs, sausage, fruit and coffee. We also did the Yankee Gift Swap at that time and I scored a very nice stovetop Italian espresso coffee maker (thanks Enrico!). We also had lunch at the hotel, it was something Italian. Cloudian gave each delegate a green pen, bottle opener, 1GB USB stick, and a few Cloudian stickers. We had dinner at Gordon Biersch in San Jose. I had some sliders (hamburgers for small people) and about 5 Golden Export beers.

Thursday

Pure Storage gave each delegate a Tile, a pen, some mints, and an 8GB USB stick. Datera gave each delegate a Datera-branded “vortex 16oz double wall 18/8 stainless steel copper vacuum insulated thermal pilsner” (a cup) with our twitter handles on them. Tintri provided us with a Tintri / Nike golf polo shirt, a notepad, a pen, an 8GB USB stick, and a 2600mAh USB charger. We then had happy hour at Tintri. I had a Pt. Bonita Pilsner beer and a couple of fistfuls of prawns. For dinner we went to Taplands. I had a turkey sandwich and 2 Fieldwork Brewing Company Pilsners.

Friday

We had breakfast on Friday at Nimble Storage. I had some bacon, sausage and eggs for breakfast with an orange juice. I don’t know why my US comrades struggle so much with the concept of tomato sauce (ketchup) with bacon. But there you go. Nimble gave us each a custom baseball jersey with our name on the back and the Nimble logo. They also gave us each a white lab coat with the Nimble logo on it. My daughters love the coat. Hedvig provided us with a Hedvig sticker and a Hedvig-branded Rogue bluetooth speaker. We had lunch at Hedvig, which was a sandwich, some water, and a really delicious choc-chip cookie. Exablox gave each of us an Exablox-branded aluminium water bottle. We then had happy hour at Exablox. I had two Anchor Brewing Liberty Ale beers (“tastes like freedom”) and some really nice cheese. To finish off we had dinner at Mexicali in Santa Clara. I had a prawn burrito. I didn’t eat anything on the flight home.

Conclusion

I’d like to extend my thanks once again to the Tech Field Day organisers and the companies presenting at the event. I had a super enjoyable and educational time. Here’s a photo.

Storage Field Day 10 – Day 0

Posted on 2016-05-25 by dan

This is just a quick post to share some thoughts on day zero at Storage Field Day 10. I can do crappy tourist snaps as well if not better than the next guy. Here’s the obligatory wing shot. No wait here’s two – one leaving SYD and the other coming in to SFO. Bet you can’t guess which is which.

We all got together for dinner on Tuesday night in the hotel. I had the pizza. It was great.

But enough with the holiday snaps and underwhelming travel journal. Thanks again Stephen, Tom, Claire and Megan for having me back, making sure everything is running according to plan and for just being really very decent people. I’ve really enjoyed catching up with the people I’ve met before and meeting the new delegates. Look out for some posts related to the Tech Field Day sessions in the next few weeks. And if you’re in a useful timezone, check out the live streams from the event here, or the recordings afterwards.

Here’s the rough schedule (all times are ‘Merican Pacific).

Wednesday, May 25	9:30 – 11:30	Kaminario Presents at Storage Field Day 10
Wednesday, May 25	12:30 – 14:30	Primary Data Presents at Storage Field Day 10
Wednesday, May 25	15:00 – 17:00	Cloudian Presents at Storage Field Day 10
Thursday, May 26	9:30 – 11:30	Pure Storage Presents at Storage Field Day 10
Thursday, May 26	13:00 – 15:00	Datera Presents at Storage Field Day 10
Thursday, May 26	16:00 – 18:00	Tintri Presents at Storage Field Day 10
Friday, May 27	8:00 – 10:00	Nimble Storage Presents at Storage Field Day 10
Friday, May 27	10:30 – 12:30	Hedvig Presents at Storage Field Day 10
Friday, May 27	13:30 – 15:30	Exablox Presents at Storage Field Day 10

You can also follow along with the live stream here.

Storage Field Day 7 – Wrap-up and Link-o-rama

Posted on 2015-04-30 by dan

Disclaimer: I recently attended Storage Field Day 7. My flights, accommodation and other expenses were paid for by Tech Field Day. There is no requirement for me to blog about any of the content presented and I am not compensated in any way for my time at the event. Some materials presented were discussed under NDA and don’t form part of my blog posts, but could influence future discussions.

This is a quick post to say thanks once again to Stephen, Claire and the presenters at Storage Field Day 7. I had a great time, learnt a lot, and didn’t get much sleep. For easy reference, here’s a list of the posts I did covering the event (not necessarily in chronological order).

Storage Field Day – I’ll be at SFD7

Storage Field Day 7 – Day 0

Storage Field Day 7 – Day 1 – Catalogic Software

Storage Field Day 7 – Day 1 – Kaminario

Storage Field Day 7 – Day 1 – Primary Data

Storage Field Day 7 – Day 2 – VMware

Storage Field Day 7 – Day 2 – Connected Data

Storage Field Day 7 – Day 2 – Springpath

Storage Field Day 7 – Day 3 – Cloudian

Storage Field Day 7 – Day 3 – Exablox

Storage Field Day 7 – Day 3 – Maxta

Storage Field Day 7 – (Fairly) Full Disclosure

Also, here’s a number of links to posts by my fellow delegates. They’re all switched-on people, and you’d do well to check out what they’re writing about. I’ll try and update this list as more posts are published. But if it gets stale, the SFD7 landing page has updated links.

Ray Lucchesi

Data virtualization surfaces

Transporter, a private Dropbox in a tower

Object store and hybrid clouds at Cloudian

Enrico Signoretti

It’s storage showtime! #SFD7

Storage Field Day 7, links and live stream

When looking good is no longer enough

File Transporter, private Sync&Share made easy

Thinking different about storage

Rumors, strategies and facts about Hyper-converged

Mark May

I’m going to Storage Field Day 7!

It’s almost time! #SFD7 is next week!

Day 0 of SFD7 – Yankee Gift Swap and delegate dinner

Goodbye to Storage Field Day 7

Storage Field Day 7 – Primary Data

Christopher Kusek

I’ll be attending Storage Field Day 7 – Now with Clear Containers!

Jon Klaus

Storage Field Day 7, here I come!

Storage Field Day 7 is about to start!

Storage Field Day 7 – Catalogic ECX reducing copy data sprawl

Storage Field Day 7 – Exablox OneBlox: scale-out NAS for SME

Vipin V.K

It’s Storage Field Day again…! – #SFD7

Keith Townsend

Kaminario – Storage Field Day 7 Preview

Maxta – Storage Field Day 7 Preview

Primary Data – Storage Field Day 7

Springpath – Storage Field Day 7 Preview

Transporter – Storage Field Day 7 Preview

VMware – Storage Field Day 7 Preview

Exablox – Storage Field Day 7 Preview

Cloudian – Storage Field Day 7 Preview

Catalogic Software – Storage Field Day 7 Preview

CopyData yeah… Long live Data Virtualization

Hyperconverged vendor Maxta announces SDN partnership

Chris M Evans

Storage Field Day 7 – 11-13 March 2015

Storage Field Day 7 – Initial Thoughts

SFD7 – Catalogic Software Addresses Data Copy Management

SFD7 – Connected Data, Transporter and Private “Cloud” Storage

SFD7 – Primary Data and Data Virtualisation

Arjan Timmerman

The Storage Field Day 7 Delegates

Software Defined Dockerized Springpath HALO at #SFD7

Finally, thanks again to Stephen, Claire (and Tom in absentia). It was a great few days and I really valued the opportunity I was given to attend.

Storage Field Day 7 – Day 3 – Cloudian

Posted on 2015-04-13 by dan

For each of the presentations I attended at SFD7, there are a few things I want to include in the post. Firstly, you can see video footage of the Cloudian presentation here. You can also download my raw notes from the presentation here. Finally, here’s a link to the Cloudian website that covers some of what they presented.

Overview

Michael Tso, CEO and co-founder of Cloudian, provided us with a brief overview of the company. It was founded about 4 years ago, and a lot of the staff’s background was experience with hyper-scale messaging systems for big telcos. They now have about 65 staff.

Cloudian offers a software version as well as a hardware appliance that runs their HyperStore software. The hardware appliance comes in 3 different flavours:

Entry Level;
Capacity Optimised; and
Performance Optimised.

The software is supported on RedHat and CentOS.

Architecture

Paul Turner, Chief Marketing and Product Officer, gave us an introduction to the architecture behind Cloudian. Their focus is on using commodity servers, that provide scale out capability, are durable, and simple to use. “If you don’t make it dead easy to add nodes or remove nodes on the fly you don’t have a good platform”.

The platform uses

Erasure Coding;
Replication; and
Compression

Here’s a picture of what’s inside:

Features include:

Natively S3;
Hybrid Storage Cloud;
Extreme durability;
Multi-tenant;
Geo-distribution;
Scale out;
Intelligence in Software;
Smart Support;
Data Protection;
QoS;
Programmable; and
Billing and Reporting.

They also make use of an Adaptive Policy Engine (multi-tenant, continuous, adaptive, policy engine), which offers:

Policy controlled virtual storage pools (buckets like Amazon);
Scale / reduce storage on demand;
Multi-tenanted with many application tenants on same infrastructure;
Dynamically adjust protection policies;
Optimise for small objects by policy; and
Cloud archiving by virtual pool.

Here’s a diagram of the logical architecture.

They use Cassandra as the core metadata and distribution mechanism. Why Cassandra? Well it’s

Scalable

Supports 1000s of nodes
Adds capacity by adding nodes to running system
Distributed shared-nothing P2P architecture, with no single point of failure

Reliable

Data durability, synced to disk
Resilient to network or hardware failures
Multi-DC replication
Tuneable data consistency level

Provides Features such as

Vnodes, TTL, secondary indexes, compression, encryption

Performant

Write path especially fast

Multiple data protection policies, including:

NoSQL DB, Replicas, Erasure Coding

Policy features

ACL, QoS, Tiering, versioning, etc.

vnodes

Nodes remapped to physical disks. then one disk failure only affects those nodes;
Maximum 256 nodes per physical node. no token management. tokens randomly assigned;
Parallel I/O across nodes;
Increased repair speed in case of disk or node failure; and
Allows heterogeneous machines in a cluster.

Further Reading and Final Thoughts

If you’re doing a bit with cloud storage, I think these guys are worth checking out. I particularly like the use case for Cloudian deployed as an on-premises S3 cloud behind the firewall. There’s also a Community Edition available for download. You can use HyperStore Community Edition software for:

For product evaluation;
Testing HyperStore software features in a single or multi-node install; and
Building 10TB object storage systems free of charge.

I think that’s pretty neat. I also recommend checking out Keith’s preview of Cloudian.

Storage Field Day 7 – (Fairly) Full Disclosure

Posted on 2015-03-15 by dan

My full disclosure post will be nowhere near as epic as Justin’s, although he is my role model for this type of thing. Here are my notes on gifts, etc, that I received as a delegate at Storage Field Day 7. I’m going to do this in chronological order, as that was the easiest way for me to take notes during the week. While every delegate’s situation is different, I’d also like to clarify that I took 3 days of vacation time and 2 days of training / work time to be at this event.

Saturday

I travelled BNE -> SYD -> SFO. A period of time passed and I consumed plane “food”. This was included in the price of the ticket. Alcoholic beverages were not, but I stuck with water. United (economy class) is all about the destination, not the journey.

Tuesday

On Tuesday night we had the delegate dinner at Dasaprakash Indian Restaurant. They specialise in Southern Indian Cuisine and you can check out their menu here. I had a bit of everything, and two cokes. I think one was diet. They may have been trying to tell me something. As part of the gift exchange I received a beautiful home-made jewellery set from Claire. Let’s be clear that this is for my wife, not me. I also had one Dos Equis at the hotel bar after dinner. [edit: Keith also pointed out that Claire gave us all a care pack of various American snacks, including some cookies and “diet” beverages].

Wednesday

At Kaminario’s presentation on Wednesday morning I was given a pen and USB portable battery. Primary Data gave me a portable whiteboard, notepad and tiny little briefcase (useful for storing business cards in). The SFD networking event was held at BowlMor in Cupertino. I had a variety of snack food (including those tiny hamburgers) and a Stella Artois. Manish Apte from SanDisk gave me a 16GB USB stick at the networking event on Wednesday night as well.

Thursday

Thursday morning we had a continental breakfast at VMware. I had a coffee and a doughnut. They also gave us a Captain VSAN t-shirt. Connected Data provided us with a Greek lunch. They also very kindly provided each delegate with a Transporter 1TB private cloud appliance (worth approximately $249 US RRP), and a 4GB Drobo USB stick. SpringPath gave us a pen, a sticker, a travel mug, and a USB car charger.

For dinner on Thursday we went to Billy Berk’s. I had a mix of starters and the Mojito Skirt Steak as a main. I also had 3 Stella Artois beers. We then went and watched “Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade” at the Camera 12 Downtown in San Jose. Tech Field Day covered everything, including the bottle of water and Reese’s Pieces. Here’s a picture.

Friday

On Friday we had breakfast at the hotel. Cloudian provided me with a leather folio and pen. Exablox gave me a great espresso courtesy of Sean Derrington. Exablox also provided lunch in the form of a gourmet sandwich and Lays crisps from Specialty’s Cafe. It was great. Maxta gave us a wooden Maxta Jenga box and a pen / 2GB USB drive. We then had drinks and snacks (happy hour) at Maxta afterwards. I had two bottles of water and a whole bunch of prawns (shrimp). Tech Field Day then made sure I got to SFO safely.

Conclusion

I’d like to extend my thanks once again to the Storage Field Day organisers and the companies presenting at the event. I had a great time. Since I can’t think of a good way to wrap up this post I’ll leave you with a photo.

PenguinPunk.net

I like punk rock and storage arrays

Tag Archives: cloudian

Cloudian Announces HyperFile, Makes Object Better

Cloudian Announces HyperStore 4000 – Gets Super Dense

Storage Field Day 10 – Wrap-up and Link-o-rama

Cloudian Does Object Smart and at Scale

Storage Field Day 10 – (Fairly) Full Disclosure

Storage Field Day 10 – Day 0

Storage Field Day 7 – Wrap-up and Link-o-rama

Storage Field Day 7 – Day 3 – Cloudian