Alex Gorbachev, Intelligent Systems Services Inc.

1. Future of Information Storage with
ISS SuperCore and Ceph
Intelligent Systems Services Inc.
Alex Gorbachev, President
Neal Purchase, Solutions Architect
Cindy Markee, Director of Technology Sales
Email: supercore@iss-integration.com

3. Data Storage Challenges
• Always. Need. More. GB TB PB EB
• RAID rebuild times now takes days per disk
• Limits on SAN array expansion (once you hit
the physical limits you have to buy more
arrays)
• Cost. Cost. Cost.
• Have to choose: Speed? Cost? Size?
• Upgrades mean downtime

4. Intro to Ceph
• Created as a Ph. D. thesis by Sage Weil in 2007
• Method for storing data that does not depend
on parity calculations, controllers or lookup
tools
• Pseudo Random Data Distribution
• CRUSH – Controlled Replication Under
Scalable Hashing
• Getting too weird?

5. Hotel with a Billion Rooms

6. Pseudo Random Hashing
Abel
Baker
Charlie
• Data location is based on data itself
• Secondary (Tertiary etc.) location computed
on the fly

7. Ceph RADOS
• Reliable Autonomic Distributed Object Store
• Block Device store without limitations on size,
scalability, performance

8. Why is this not everywhere?
• Focus on performance, features, scalability
• No SAN like interface
• Native drivers are not yet mainstream
• Cloud oriented rather than enterprise
• But RADOS is a mature, well performing
technology, so we developed…

9. Client Network and Fabric
Virtualization Servers
SuperCore Delivery Cluster
SuperCore Active Storage Nodes
SuperCore Control-Monitor
iSCSI
Fibre Channel
NFS
CIFS/SMB
Standalone Servers
SuperCore Backup

10. Basic Node Architecture

11. Control and Management Interface

12. Why we think this is AWESOME…

13. Resilience and Survival
• Replaces the outdated RAID technology with
distributed storage logic that (unlike RAID) delivers
limitless expansion and instant rebuild capability.
• Core and delivery EACH have separate redundancy
layers
• Self healing algorithm located and eliminates faults
on the fly without limitations (RAID systems can take
1-2 hits before data gets irreversibly corrupted, while
SuperCore can take many hits in different areas and
remain functional).

14. Replication and Optimization
• Ability to set placement rules for storage
(where does data go and how is it spread out
to protect the most against failures - rack, row,
data center, city, continent...)
• Highly available flash caching that can be
individually configured for every volume and
centralized tiered caching.
• Performance increases with growth vs.
traditional systems

15. Economy
• Different client systems can share the same
storage hardware while maintaining quality of
performance and separation of resources
• Ability to control storage overhead to meet
capacity and performance demands while
maintaining the required degree of protection
• On-demand provisioning (Thin Provisioning)
economizes storage use overall up to 40%

16. Questions?