Describe main components and features of the Scality object storage solution.

1. Scality Object
Storage Solution
corp-storage.skill-center@orange.com
Orange/INNOV/NET/CISS/IIE/CSE
Abdou EL HAJAOUI
Jacques DUVERNOIS

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The Challenges of Object Storage
• Object Storage is an innovation in the field of storing cold, or little modified data (backup,
archiving, etc.), and makes it possible to manage very large amount of data at a lower cost
• Why choosing Object Storage ? It respond 2 main issues :
1 – Exponential growth of the volume of data to be stored
2 - Financial drift in the current techno-economic model of data storage solutions
(Hardware appliances).

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Which object storage solution to use ?
Scality is the sourced object storage solution , recommended for cold data or little accessed data.
This solution use the standardized S3 Amazon protocol, the storage can be consumed using Resful API.
Scality key Benefits :
- Robustness : The solution is resilient thanks to its distributed archtiecture, that can span multiple
sites, and guarantees the preservation and integrity of data over very long periods of
time.
- Scalability : Grow as you need ! No theoretical capacity limitation, and capacity extension easily
achievable using standard servers, hot added to the ring without any down time.
- Economical : by leaving the appliance model, the cost of the Giga (Datadomain) is reduced by a factor
of 10 : 2 euros/GB/year vs 0,15/GB/year (OFR feedback).
efficient metadata model and data protection scheme, which lead to more usable
capacity than other solutions like Ceph.

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- Selfcare consumption : the customer is autonomous in the consumption of the service through
storage and management APIs.
- Object and File storage: using appropriate connectors, customer can store data with S3, NFS, SMB,
FUSE.
- Hardware agnostic: No vendor locking, The RING can be hosted on standard x86 servers on the
most popular Linux distributions  No Hardware Compatibility List,

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Solution Components
The Scality RING is composed of:
• Supervisor – This is the management server. One is required per RING, but a multi-geo
customer may wish to have a standby available to rebuild in the event of a failure. This is
most often installed on a virtual machine.
• Storage servers - This is the core of the system, storing the data as well as hosting the
connector processes. A minimum of six storage servers per RING is required. Growth in
steps of three storage servers per site is the standard.
• Connectors - These are generally installed directly on the storage server – requiring no
additional hardware. External physical or virtual machines can optionally be used when
supporting multiple protocols or segmented networks.

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RING Architecture
The Scality RING software is designed as a distributed, 100% parallel, scale-out architecture with a set of
intelligent services for data access and presentation, data protection and systems management.
To implement these capabilities, the RING provides a set of fully abstracted software services :
- Top-layer of scalable access services (Connectors) that provide storage protocols for applications.
- The middle layers are comprised of a distributed virtual file system layer, a set of data protection mechanisms to
ensure data durability and integrity, self-healing processes and a set of systems management and
monitoring services.
- The bottom of the stack, the system is built on a distributed storage layer comprised of virtual storage nodes and
underlying IO daemons that abstract the physical storage servers and disk drive interfaces.

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RING Architecture

9. RING Architecture
The 3 layer services imply :
- - RING is a cloud-scale, distributed software solution for petabyte-scale unstructured data storage.
- The RING software allow the creation of unbounded scale-out storage systems for the many petabyte-scale
applications and use cases, for both object and file.
- The system can be seamlessly scaled-out to thousands of servers with 100’s of petabytes of storage capacity,
starting with a minimum of 3 servers.
- RING has no single points of failure, and requires no downtime during any upgrades, scaling, planned
maintenance or unplanned system operations.

10. RING Architecture
- Provides data protection and resiliency through local or geo-distributed erasure-coding and replication, with
services for continuous self-healing to resolve expected failures in platform components such asservers and drives.
- scale-out object-storage layer distributes both the user data and the associated metadata across the underlying
nodes to eliminate the typical central metadata database bottleneck.
- the RING integrates a virtual file system layer through an internal NoSQL scale-out database system, which provides
POSIX-based access semantics using standard NFS, SMB and FUSE protocols with shared access to the files as objects using
the REST protocol.

11. Multi-Site Geo-Distribution
The Scality RING can be stretched across 2 to 3 sites within a Metropolitan area to provide full site failover.
The stretched architecture guarantees you no RTO and no RPO since the failover is automatized. This is the same thing
for the failback procedure since when the lost site is recovered, the system will recover automatically the data.
The 2 stretched sites + witness is an Active / Active replication system based on a synchronous replication.

12. Multi-Site Geo-Distribution
The 3 stretched sites is an Active / Active replication system based on a synchronous replication

13. Multi-Site Geo-Distribution
For high latency between sites, Scality supports the S3 2 Sites Full Asynchronous replication mechanism at Scale to enable
the replication of massive amount of data across the 2 sites. This system is based on the S3 CRR design to replicate a
bucket between 2 sites. For site replication, Scality developed its own system to support site replication instead of just
bucket. This feature enables the Disaster Recovery (DR) feature by providing Failover and Failback system to recover in
case of partial or fully (flooding, fire..) lost.
The 2 sites with high latency between them is an Active / Passive replication system based on an
asynchronous replication

14. System Monitoring and Management
- is enabled through a cohesive suite of user interfaces, built on top of a family of RESTful interfaces termed the
Supervisor API (“SupAPI”).
- SupAPI can be accessed from scripts for gathering statistics, metrics, health check probes and alerts, and for
provisioning new services on the RING.
- The SupAPI is also enabled with Role Based Access Control (RBAC), with 4 predefined Roles.
- Scality Supervisor : a browser-based portal for both systems monitoring and management of Scality
components  Dashbords, KPIs, Global Health, Performances, Forecasts …ect + provisioning capabilities.

15. System Monitoring and Management

16. System Monitoring and Management
The RING Supervisor also includes an “Advanced Monitoring” dashboard where all collected metrics
can be graphed and analyzed component per-component and per-server. This is based on a very
powerful graphing engine that has access to thousands of metrics :

17. System Monitoring and Management
A new “S3 Console” portal is provided to manage the integrated AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) model
of S3 multi-tenancy in the RING. This provides two-level management of Accounts, Users/Groups and IAM access control
policies.

18. System Monitoring and Management
A new “Scality S3 Browser” is also provided to browse S3 buckets, upload and download object data, and for managing
key S3 features such as bucket versioning, CORS, editing of metadata attributes and tagging. The S3 Browser is an S3 API
client that runs on the S3 user browser and is accessible to both the Storage administrator and also to the S3 end-user.

19. Summary
The RING is designed on a core set of principles to deliver true customer value: massive capacity
scaling, consolidation of multiple storage silos with reduced management costs, always on data
availability and the highest levels of data durability, all at the economics of cloud-scale data centers.
The RING provides a comprehensive software-defined storage (SDS) solution on industry-standard
platforms to enable these values

20. Thank you