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he analysts all agree... storage is growing. In fact, over the past several years, storage has seen some explosive growth, especially as it expands to the cloud. Recent reports show that by 2020, the total volume of raw data stored in the cloud will have reached 35 zettabytes. A zettabyte is 1,000 exabytes or 1,000,000 petabytes. Overall, storage is seen as continuing to grow at an annual compound growth rate of 34% in North America year-over-year.H
ow companies plan to address this growth within their own organizations has begun to come to light thanks in part to the cloud. GoingThe key to understanding how storage is transforming our world.
forward, the logical extension of this is beginning to occur: storage and other key IT resources are being absorbed by the cloud. As more companies embrace this natural evolution of IT, software storage application providers and hardware providers are independently scrambling to meet the needs of B2B and
B2C customers. Unfortunately, this independence results in flawed deployments that do not allow for a graceful scale-out, or yield a flexible, turn-key solution that most customers are looking for. This is where working with a collaborative partner such as Cirrascale helps.
UNRAVELING
Direct Attached
Storage
TRADITIONAL
STORAGE TYPES
SNIA defines Direct Attached Storage (DAS) as one or more dedicated storage devices connected to one or more servers. This architecture is typically deployed as a server attached to multiple drive JBODs (Just a Bunch Of Disks). Simply stated, the storage drives (whether they are spinning or solid state) are directly connected
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he Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) is an industry trade group organization dedicated to highlighting new technologies related to Storage Networks. SNIA has seen the storage market have amazing growth in the last decade as the adoption of new technologies increased capacities, performance, and features while simultaneously reducing cost from 10’s of dollars per gigabyte to pennies per gigabyte. The SNIA definition of traditional storage architecture is a good place to start a discussion of existing storage network topologies as well as introducing those new technologies that will likelyPiecing together the segments that make up the storage landscape.
absorb and supplant ones in usetoday. Cirrascale is well suited to take four of these existing storage network topologies, and build them into impressive next
generation storage solutions.
Storage Area
Networks
Content
Addressable or
Object Storage
C o n t e n t A d d re s s a b l e Storage (CAS), also referred to most recently as Object-based Storage, is defined as a mechanism for storing information that can be retrieved based on its content, not its storage location. It is typically used for high-speed storage and retrieval of fixed content. As the limitations of block and file storage systems became more evident, CAS became a better option for storing data. CAS began to discard traditional protocols such as NAS and SAN,
and instead concentrated on application-focused APIs, HTTP transfers, and a universal naming standard for unique objects. Early on, applications treated CAS objects as simple files, but as the access method grew in popularity it was soon expanded to take advantage of the unique capabilities it offered. Common capabilities offered by CAS enable document management and archiving in a fashion not possible with a traditional SAN. It’s from this advancement that cloud storage and cloud storage applications took hold and a new era in storage began.
Network Attached
Storage
Network Attached Storage (NAS) is defined as storage elements that connect to a network and provide file access services to computer systems. These systems are physically remote from the devices, on which data is stored. The data storage devices are commonly connected to the computer systems via IP, using existing Ethernet connectivity. NAS has become popular for handling unstructured data sets, rather than Block I/O used in DAS and SAN environments. As storage technologies have grown and adapted, the storage market these systems commonly connect over multi-pathed networks using protocols such as FiberChannel, FCoE, or iSCSI.
began dividing between block-based DAS and SAN, and file-based NAS. This division led to the creation and expansion of CAS or Content Addressable Storage.
DID YOU KNOW?
Cloud Storage
EMERGING
STORAGE APPLICATIONS
Simply put, storage in the cloud is now better, faster, and less expensive. Cloud Storage is conveniently flexible, always available and near-infinitely scalable. It is storage for the
How cloud storage and its application are changing the landscape
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s the cloud grew and application integration and programmability began to take hold, the true image of cloud storage began to come to light. Companies started to add much needed features, from replication to indexing to media transcoding, each of which can be called by applications through vendor specific APIs. As Cloud storage evolved, the access methods coalesced around already proven Internet protocols such as HTTP and SSL. The real benefit from cloud storage becomes obvious when applications begin to take advantage of its powerful distribution, collaboration, and programming capabilities.Cirrascale has identified several specific challenges that can be resolved utilizing storage software applications residing on its highly scalable and densely configured storage racks. This is achieved by integrating the right software stack for the task at hand with the right hardware so that together they can enable an easy scale-out storage solution.
Active Archive
Enterprise Storage
When data needs to be alwaysbe available, never needing to be restored from a tape backup, then Active Archive is the solution. Active Archive is a method of tiered storage which gives the user access to data across a virtualized file system that migrates data between multiple storage systems and media types. The result of an active archive implementation is that data can be stored on the most appropriate media type for the given retention and restoration requirements of that data. Active archive applications came about as a result of the
Reliable, expandable on-premise storage is how many Enterprises are choosing to maintain their data. Rather than having each department or group be responsible for their own data, These Cloud Storage services
are available from Cirrascale in tandem with partners such as Zadara Storage and Piston Cloud Computing.
growing amount of unstructured data in the typical data center and the need to be able to manage and efficiently store that data. As a result, active archive applications tend to be focused on file systems and unstructured data, rather than all of the collective data; however, many have features and functionalities which address traditional backup needs as well. Cirrascale’s Active Archive solutions are powered by Amplidata’s AmpliStor software producing a turnkey solutions that is more reliable than systems ten times the cost.
IT is able to take advantage of low cost, multi-petabyte storage in combination with robust data storage techniques and high-speed access methods to consolidate all of the storage into a central location. Tiered data, and aggressive use of caching allows for high aggregate performance, while ensuring data integrity and centralizing management. Cirrascale has tapped its partners, Nexenta and Zadara Storage, to provide this scalable yet highly performing storage system.
DID YOU KNOW?
Front to Back Cooling
Front to back cooling is a method where cool air is drawn in through the front of the server and pushed out the back. Cirrascale’s VCT enables added benefits over this traditional cooling method.
Vertical Cooling Technology (VCT)
Air is drawn into the bottom of the rack and flows over the blades on each level. The air moves at a rate of up to 4500CFM to create a high-velocity, powerful cooling engine allowing for increased density and versatility.
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irrascale engineers developed its patented Vertical Cooling Technology™ (VCT) which enables creating solutions that solve the most complex data center infrastructure issues... and that includes storage. Cirrascale’s VCT coupled with its modularplatform designs allows flexible and scalable approaches to storage design. The blade modularity allows for multiple platforms within a common infrastructure, so scale up and scale out can meet organization’s needs without forklift upgrades. Cirrascale’s VCT enables
Better cooling, higher density, increased reliability and so much more.
WHY CHOOSE
CIRRASCALE FOR STORAGE
increased compute and storage density and reduces total power consumption and CRAC load. By utilizing common off-the-shelf components, Cirrascale customers can experience increased reliability and can access new technology faster than their competitors.
Cool Air Aisle Hot Air Aisle
T
echnology advances at a record rate each year and staying up to speed with those changes can be difficult. Cirrascale works tirelessly with vendors and partners to ensure technology advances are understood, integrated and communicated as they become available for deployment in data centers worldwide. Unlike other companies, Cirrascale strives to build collaborative relationships that add value instead of merely selling cookie-cutter white box product that doesn’t scale-out. Cirrascale works diligently to offer comprehensive, meaningful services to support companies in their streamlining of the development and deployment of compute and storage solutions.Cirrascale’s team of experts helps to define needs and tailor flexible and robust blade storage solutions that integrate some of the industries greatest storage software developers such as Nexenta, Amplidata, Zadara and more. Cirrascale has worked with a range of leading Fortune 500 companies to assist in resolving their individual storage challenges. Whether it
Customers choose Cirrascale for a collaborative approach.
HOW CIRRASCALE CAN
DELIVER A TOTAL SOLUTION
Modular Blade Chassis (MBC) Platform
S
ince not all storage needs are the same, Cirrascale developed the ability to start small and scale as capacity or deployment needs increase. The Cirrascale Modular Blade Chassis allows for cross-compatibilityData center infrastructure that scales to meet every company’s needs.
with the BladeRack 2 Series and FOREST Container platforms. This enables customers to move blades from one platform to the next, preserving their initial storage investment. The MBC is a unique rackmountable chassis
OUR SCALABLE PLATFORMS
Perfect for traditional NAS and SAN deployments. Employs patented Vertical Cooling Technology.
Ideal for smaller installations or as a storage appliance.
BladeRack 2 Series Platform
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irrascale developed the BladeRack 2 Series platform to handle the ever increasing storage and compute demands being placed on IT resources. Where the Modular Blade Chassis handles 9 blades, the Cirrascale BladeRack 2 XL can handle up to 72 blades. Since the BladeRack 2 XL accepts blades on both thefront side and rear side of the rack, data center density is increased dramatically without sacrificing cooling. Additionally, blades can be moved from the MBC to the BladeRack 2 XL without reconfiguration. This design reduces waste and allows additional scale-out options when compared to proprietary systems developed
by Tier 1 manufacturers. This flexible platform also enables combining compute and storage servers within the same rack for the ultimate in versatility. The combination of extreme density and efficiency drive the total cost of ownership of the BladeRack 2 XL far below that of competing solutions while gaining an increase in performance and reliability. Additional BladeRack Series models are available to ensure the perfect fit for any enterprise storage need.
KEY FEATURES
• Holds up to 72 blades. • Over 3.4PB of storage capacity available. • Perfect for enterprise storage or active archive installations. • Can be tailored and customized to fit any storage need.
Perfect for cloud storage and active archive deployments. Employs patented Vertical Cooling Technology.
FOREST Containerized Data Center
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he FOREST Container was designed to meet the needs of a rapidly expanding data center. FOREST is an acronym meaning Flexible, Open, Reliable, Energy efficient, Scalable and Transportable. It is a modular, portable data center that is deployable virtually anywhere supporting up to 60PB of raw storage or 1,440tailored blade servers. This negates the need to purchase or lease expensive land or to build custom facilities with special requirements to support traditional data centers. Energy use is dramatically reduced by the FOREST Container’s ultra efficient power subsystems and patented Vertical Cooling Technology™ boosting reliability
and performance. The flexibility of the Cirrascale FOREST Container addresses your storage or data consolidation needs. Engineered as a customizable IT solution, the Cirrascale FOREST Container truly delivers the ability to deploy and support massive compute and storage installations and supports third-party hardware unlike similar solutions. The FOREST Container has been deployed by leading companies for cloud storage initiatives including NASA’s Nebula project.
KEY FEATURES
• Holds up to 1,440 blades.
• Up to 57.6PB of storage capacity available. • Ideal for large cloud storage installations. • Can be configured and deployed worldwide.
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hile Cirrascale works directly with customers and partners to create customized solutions, new solutions can leverage alreadysuccessful Storage Appliances as a starting point. Over the next several pages, you’ll discover real world solutions that we have developed with
Working with ISV’s and Partners to deliver turnkey solutions.
DELIVERING
TURNKEY SOLUTIONS
our software storage partners to help understand and start the process of creating the right customized, turnkey solution for your company.
Enterprise Petascale Appliance Powered by NexentaStor ZFS
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his Petascale appliance is built utilizing Nexenta’s very successful enterprise class storage product. NexentaStor is a fully featured NAS/SAN software platform that brings Software Defined Storage to commodity hardware. Cirrascale leveragesthat technology to provide a high performance NAS/SAN platform, independently scalable for greater storage capacity or fast I/O performance. This advanced platform leverages ZFS (Zettabyte File System) to yield a flexible 128- bit file
system that can detect and correct data corruption in ways not possible with traditional file systems and RAID arrays. Flexible access methods are available to connect to storage pools via NFS, CIFS, WebDAV, and FTP. Additionally, traditional
SAN topologies are enabled by support for iSCSI and FC. ZFS brings features typically available only with expensive proprietary storage systems to commodity hardware, such as unlimited snapshots, block level de-duplication of data to save space, synchronous or asynchronous replication, and on-the-fly data compression. The resultant platform is a rugged, responsive and cost effective solution that can start small and can scale up as needed. Systems can be installed with as little as one Storage Head Node and a one
12 Drive Storage Blade. As data storage requirements begin to increase, this solution can grow with it scaling to a full 3.4PB rack. As needs increase beyond that, it can continue to scale to multiple racks or a container full of racks, all the while acting as a single pool of managed storage. When access to data absolutely cannot be interrupted, this Enterprise Petascale Appliance can be configured with a high-availability option. Multiple Head Nodes can work in concert to manage access to large amounts of storage, and can seamlessly
Active Archive Solutions Powered by AmpliStor Software
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nstructured content, accessed as objects with potentially large amounts of unique meta-data, is common for hosted or cloud based applications. Additionally, it continues to be one of the largest sectors of storage growth. Interfaces such as Amazon’s S3 or Google’s Drive have demonstrated the value in CAS as a data access method. A massively scalable active archive appliance, utilizing Amplidata’s AmpliStor Software, can provide such an interface for enterprise applications to store their data reliably and with greatly reduced overhead compared to traditional SAN or NAS systems. In the past, data survived withRAID, but was difficult to scale up to very large sizes. If the data needed to survive a disaster more than the failure of just one or two disks, the entire RAID array would need to be replicated. If a RAID had 20% overhead, it then became 40% with the replication of the entire RAID set, doubling the cost per gigabyte for reliable data storage. At a smaller level, if a drive failed in a large RAID array, it might take several days to rebuild after it was replaced – time that the data is at risk of subsequent disk failures which would render the data irretrievable. This scalable Active Archive solution powered by AmpliStor changes all that. By using erasure coding, rather
than data replication, AmpliStor can survive large numbers of simultaneous disk failures, without risk of permanent data loss. Working at a larger scale, multiple data centers can spread the risk even further. If the data is split among multiple locations, an entire datacenter could go offline without compromising data integrity or access, and without the expense of replicating data and hardware. Cirrascale and Amplidata have worked together to provide a better solution. Data can now be accessible anytime, even if it is distributed across multiple disk drives, servers, or data centers.
SAN and NAS as a Service powered by Zadara Storage
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lthough not growing as fast as object storage, SAN and NAS are still some of the most ubiquitous storage networking architectures in use today. Many common applications are either not object aware or deal with data that isn’t easily accessed via an object interface, and thus rely on block and file even when they are moved into a cloud or hosted environment. When applications move into the cloud, their I/O requirements might not be satisfied with typical cloud storage offerings. When your online database needs particularly robust and consistent performance, you can now connect that virtualSQL server to its own Virtual Private Storage Array (VPSA™). Cirrascale’s partnership with Zadara™ Storage makes it possible to bring Virtual Private Storage Array SAN and NAS to cloud providers and Enterprises. Each VPSA is a highly available iSCSI and NFS storage array and is provisioned from the Zadara Storage Cloud, comprising of Cirrascale-based storage blades. It can scale as demand does, eventually reaching up to 2.7PB per rack. The Zadara Storage Cloud also offers tenant-dedicated and isolated resources for each VPSA, even when hosted somewhere other than an Enterprise data center. Data is encrypted, and a unified
management interface can create new VPSAs and storage volumes, size them, add disks, and configure appropriate data redundancy levels. Operators of the Zadara Storage Cloud have multiple billing models available, including per hour metering. Working together, Cirrascale and Zadara Storage are creating one of the most robust and scalable Storage-as-a-Service solutions available for deployment in any data center.
Perfect for on-demand SAN and NAS as a service. Built specifically for clouds: public and private. Simplified multi-tenant management and accounting.
DID YOU KNOW?
Private Cloud Infrastructure with Piston Enterprise OS (pentOS)
Perfect for deploying near-infinite storage capacity. Helpful for deploying AWS S3 compatible storage. Accepts new storage technologies (Swift, Nexenta, Ceph)
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i r r a s c a l e ’s e a r l y involvement with the creators of OpenStack, (the open source alternative to Amazon Web Services) will benefit enterprises that are trying to deploy their own private cloud. Deploying robust and secure private cloud infrastructure can be difficult. Questions such as How much CPU to network ratio should there be? or What minimum VM performance is sufficient? can be difficult to answer. Cirrascale’s cooperation with the software developers of OpenStack allowed NASA to deploy their own private cloud utilizing the Cirrascale FOREST containerized data center. NASA recognized the multiple benefitsof Cloud infrastructure: robust creation, management of virtual machines, scalable storage of file, block and object, as well as integrated security. As more and more enterprises are seeing their traditional IT servers migrate to the cloud, Administrators are concerned about security, costs, and storage reliability. Cirrascale is proud to partner with Piston Cloud Computing enabling you
a standard white box solution. Don’t settle for the status quo. Contact us today to begin the process of learning how we can help you.
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irrascale specializes in providing a tailored solution that meets the growing needs of our customers specific applications. In order to determine our customer’s needs, we worktogether to collaborate with our vendors and software partners in providing the right solution. We have helped customers just like you with very specific needs that can not be solved by using
To discover how Cirrascale can help you, please contact us at (888) 942-3800 or (858) 874-3800, or email us at [email protected]
