VirtualStor™ Scaler

Currently there are several pressing concerns facing IT administrators, with the foremost being rapid data growth, rapid response to storage requests, and finding a cost effective efficient solution to handle their infrastructure's needs. While the amount of data that businesses are generating is ever increasing, IT budgets are not keeping pace with what traditional storage would cost to facilitate handling big data. Traditional storage solutions scale up which means that heavy investment and massive over provisioning is the solution to capacity planning.

Over time data centers can become a mix and match of many different types of storage platforms and devices: such as SAN, NAS, or Object Storage. This is due to budgets, availability of storage devices, immediate resource needs, and storage requirement needs. For example, a company in the media and broadcasting industry performs many different kinds of processes, such as collection, editing, broadcasting, archiving and content management. Different processes demand different characteristics for storage, such as protocols, performance and availability, and over time the company will implement different storage technologies and platforms across their workflows. This will produce a negative effect of creating "islands" or "silos" of different storage platforms, where the same data used in different stages of a workflow must be manually copied between each storage platform, increasing workflow complexity, duplicating data, and wasting time and resources.

As software defined storage, VirtualStor™ Scaler scales out to increase capacity. More capacity can be effortlessly added simply by adding more VirtualStor Scaler appliances, which seamlessly become part of the single massive decentralized storage entity.

VirtualStor Scaler is able to unify different storage platforms and devices, consolidating any type of traditional storage (SAN, NAS, and DAS) into a single massive storage entity, with Bigtera's unique storage virtualization technology. VirtualStor Scaler can be configured into storage of any type by abstracting the storage hardware from the control layer, and supports network attached storage (NAS) and storage area networks (SAN) that can run simultaneously. These storage types are supported by several storage protocols: iSCSI / FC (SAN), CIFS / NFS (NAS), and Amazon S3 / OpenStack Swift / OpenStack Cinder RBD (Object Storage). These different storage systems – now virtually aggregated – can then be easily managed and monitored through a single dashboard, reducing management complexity and operation costs.

VirtualStor™ Scaler can use RAID-5 together with two replica copies or N+M Erasure Coding, so as to provide more efficient space utilization than other software defined storage with 3 replica copies. Administrators can also assign various services on Bigtera's unique multi-tenant storage technology "Virtual Storage" to virtually extend the available space, and enable compression and data deduplication for backup or archiving. VirtualStor™ Scaler also automates efficient optimization of storage resources: Thin Provisioning functionality provides resources just as they are needed, and storage resources are balanced across storage nodes so no single node carries more than their fair share of the load.

VirtualStor™ Scaler features a high-performance back-end storage engine – BigteraStore – that significantly increases the I/O performance of a distributed storage system by using SSD to support cache and log storage for random I/O, breaking the bottleneck of scale-out storage systems that are traditionally not good at handling random reads.

VirtualStor™ Scaler also features SSD acceleration technology such as data caching and merging small I/Os into sequential I/Os to further improve IOPS. Running on GIGABYTE server hardware, featuring Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors and 10GbE to 100GbE network connectivity to maximize the compute and networking resources required for high I/O and throughput, VirtualStor™ Scaler brings blazing fast scale-out storage to your data center.

VirtualStor™ Scaler data availability functions include data replication, erasure coding, self-repairing, and RAID features. Erasure coding offers administrators an alternative to data replication, to ensure that there is no single point of failure for any of the data blocks. VirtualStor™ Scaler uses round-robin DNS and IP takeover services. Round-robin DNS uses a list of IP addresses for workload balancing: if any of the appliances encounter issues, the remaining appliances take over application and workload services seamlessly by taking over the IP of the appliance that encounters issues. VirtualStor™ Scaler object storage can support Server Side Encryption (SSE) to protect the object data stored with S3 API, and uses Intel® AES-NI encryption technology to accelerate Server Side Encryption (SSE). Encryption can be enabled for critical data or applications, while data that has a lower level of confidentiality can be left unencrypted.

Users can utilize VirtualStor™ Scaler to unify and extend the capacity of their existing storage systems, or can seamlessly migrate data from their legacy storage devices to build a new storage system almost without any service downtime. Users can set up a new VirtualStor™ Scaler storage system with as little as 3U of rack space and 48TB of storage capacity, or can scale out to achieve multi-petabyte storage capacity.