StoneFly FastStack™ Cloud
StoneFly offers fully-managed Public and Private Cloud solutions by integrating its state of the art Enterprise-grade Storage technology, advanced and optimized hardware with leading Open Source Cloud frameworks
OpenStack® – backed with Scalable StoneFly Storage Appliance provides terabytes of scale out storage, enhanced data performance, redundancy and production grade resiliency in a single platform. Stonefly builds, deploys and Offers secure, scalable and efficient open source-as-a-service model to create a software defined infrastructure reducing the footprint and simplifying management.
Challenges for a Cloud Management System
OpenStack® as a Cloud management system envelops a number of tightly-coupled components that enable Storage, Networking and Compute of the Cloud Data Centers. OpenStack® aims to create abstracted pools of Storage, Networking and Compute resources that can be used to create virtual network infrastructure on top of the standard server hardware.
Increasing focus on OpenStack® as a Cloud management system within enterprises, bring challenges for the Cloud Architects on proper scoping, architectural design, data modularity and fault tolerance of the Cloud infrastructure.
Rapid increase in the storage requirement makes it imperative for the Cloud operators to design such storage systems which provide scalability, stability, high level of security and on top of it 99.99% availability to ensure smooth operation of Mission critical applications for business continuity. Some other associated concerns of IT organizations are agility, ease of use and cost structure.
These service agreements require a specialized storage system with on demand expansion, centralized management and redundancy. StoneFly fills this gap by providing a highly efficient storage system for the Cloud infrastructure.
StoneFly FastStack™ Cloud’s Value Addition
StoneFly Storage Concentrator Virtual Machine (SCVM™) adds great value to the OpenStack® storage infrastructure. It is fully compatible and can be easily plugged into the OpenStack® Cloud environments.
SCVM(s) can be deployed on one or all of the OpenStack Compute nodes. Each SCVM can create NAS volumes on the physical storage attached to the compute nodes. These NAS volumes can expand to one or more volumes across multiple nodes using a single namespace and no metadata. This creates a large virtual storage pool which can be used to provision storage to the OpenStack virtual machines. This virtual storage pool can expand with the addition of new nodes and the expansion is nearly limitless .
All or any of the OpenStack virtual machines can access this shared storage pool. This is perfect for managing large quantities of unstructured (file-based) data within a single global namespace and a single file system.
A common limitation when using Cinder is that although volumes can be added to increase storage, those volumes cannot be expanded. With FastStack™, volumes for Cinder Block Storage can easily be expanded across multiple compute nodes to create a virtual storage pool.
FastStack™ – System Architecture
StoneFly FastStack™ Cloud offers high-performance storage solution which can be used as a VM backend for OpenStack® Block or Volume Storage (Cinder), OpenStack® Container or Object Storage (Swift), as well as storage for the OpenStack® Image service (Glance). OpenStack® infrastructure then directly benefits from StoneFly’s always available and fault-tolerant system.
In addition, StoneFly Storage Appliance provides access to a bunch of other services – Snapshot, Synchronous Mirroring, Encryption and Failover Clustering.
Key advantages of using StoneFly Storage Appliance for OpenStack shared storage
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- Cost-effective alternative to using local storage
- Makes it possible to share storage for other purposes beyond OpenStack (NAS storage for regular physical and virtual servers in your datacenter)
- Ability to scale/expand and increase the performance of a particular volume since you are not limited by the number of disks in a single physical machine.
- Management and recovery of compute nodes running Nova is much easier because you do not have to maintain their state. Since storage is not tied to another node, compute nodes can just be restarted as a new instance.
- NAS – support for CIFS/NFS protocols
- NAS failover Clustering
- Advanced copy-on-write, delta-based snapshot technology
- Read/write snapshots
- Synchronous mirroring
- AES-256 block level volume-based encryption (optional)
- Comprehensive performance reporting and statistics
- Scalable without disruption
- Web-based intuitive user interface
- No downtime volume or Storage expansion
FastStack™ – Elastic Storage Model
Elastic Storage Model depicts that you can add any number of storage nodes to your existing FastStack™ Architecture; hence increasing the overall storage capacity as you deem necessary.
FastStack™ – Elastic Compute Model
Elastic Compute Model depicts that you can add any number of resource intensive OpenStack Compute nodes to your existing FastStack™Architecture; hence increasing the processing power as required.