StorPool recently announced version 21 of its storage platform, offering improvements across data protection, efficiency, availability, and compatibility. I had the opportunity to speak to Boyan Krosnov and Alex Ivanov and wanted to share some thoughts.
“Magic” Scale-out Erasure Coding
One of the main features announced with Version 21 was “magic” scale-out erasure coding. Previously, StorPool offered triple replication protection of data across nodes. Now, with at least five all-NVMe storage servers, you can take advantage of this new erasure coding. Key capabilities include:
- Near-zero performance impact even for Tier 0/Tier 1 workloads;
- Data redundancy across nodes, as information is protected across servers with two parity objects so that any two servers can fail and data remains safe and accessible;
- Great flexibility and operational efficiency. With per-volume policy management, volumes can be protected with triple replication or Erasure Coding, with per-volume live conversion between data protection schemes;
- Always-on, non-disruptive operations – up to two storage nodes can be rebooted or brought down for maintenance while the entire storage system remains running with all data remaining available; and
- Incremental mesh encoding and recovery.
Other New Features
But that’s not all. There’s also been work done in the following areas:
- Improved iSCSI scalability – with support for exporting up to 1000 iSCSI targets per server
- CloudStack plug-in improvements – introduces support for CloudStack’s volume encryption and partial zone-wide storage that enables easy live migration between compute hosts.
- OpenNebula add-on improvements – now supports multi-cluster deployments where multiple StorPool sub-clusters behave as a single large-scale primary storage system with a unified global namespace
- OpenStack Cinder driver improvements – Easy deployment with Canonical Charmed OpenStack and OpenStack instances managed with kolla-ansible
- Deep integration with Proxmox Virtual Environment – introduces end-to-end automation of all storage operations in Proxmox VE deployments
- Additional hardware and software compatibility – increased the number of validated hardware and operating systems resulting in easier deployment of StorPool Storage in customers’ preferred environments
Thoughts and Further Reading
It’s been a little while since I’ve written about StorPool, and the team continues to add features to the platform and grow in terms of customer adoption and maturity in the market. Every time I speak to Alex and Boyan, I get a strong sense that they’re relentlessly focussed on making the platform more stable, more performance-oriented, and easier to operate. I’m a fan of many of the design principles the company has adopted for its platform, including the use of standard server hardware, fitting in with customer workflows, and addressing the needs of demanding applications. It’s great that it scales linearly, but it’s as equally exciting, at least to me, that it “fades into the background”. Good infrastructure doesn’t want to be mentioned every day, it just needs to work (and work well). The folks at StorPool understand this, and seem to working hard to ensure that the platform, and the service that supports it, meets this requirement to fade into the background. It’s not necessarily “magic”, but it can be done with good code. StorPool has been around since 2012, is self-funded, profitable, and growing. I’ve enjoyed watching the evolution of the product since I was first introduced to it, and am looking forward to seeing what’s next in future releases. For another perspective on the announcement, check out this article over at Gestalt IT.