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.
Eliminate Your Storage Islands
VirtualStor Scaler, a software defined storage (SDS) platform from Bigtera, is able to unify these 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.
Scale Out With GIGABYTE Storage Appliances
More capacity can be effortlessly added simply by adding more VirtualStor Scaler appliances, which seamlessly become part of the single massive decentralized storage entity. Bigtera has collaborated with GIGABYTE and Intel to offer a range of turnkey storage appliances ready for immediate deployment to scale out your VirtualStor Scaler storage cluster.
Each appliance is equipped with two 2nd Generation Intel® Xeon® Scalable Processors, Intel® Solid State Drives (Intel® SSDs) for data center solutions and 10GbE Intel® Ethernet that supports excellent IOPS and throughout performance numbers. VirtualStor Scaler also includes several inbuilt performance enhancing features such as using Intel SSDs to support cache storage for random I/O, breaking the bottleneck of scale-out storage systems that are traditionally not good at handling random reads, and SSD acceleration technology such as data caching and merging small I/Os into sequential I/Os to further improve IOPS. These enhancements can greatly improve data workload and application performance compared with a standard open source storage platform.
These appliances are also available in a range of turnkey configurations for companies wishing to migrate their data to a new storage infrastructure, from as little as 3U of rack space with 48TB of storage capacity to petabytes of storage capacity, where VirtualStor Scaler has been validated with a range of GIGABYTE servers in a spectrum of sizes and capacities.
The appliances offer an extremely cost-effective “all in one” architecture by combining together MON, MDS and OSD in a single server, reducing the number of servers and the rack capacity needed to set up or scale out a storage cluster.
Conclusion & Further Information
It’s time to eliminate the pain points associated with storage. Bigtera VirtualStor Scaler, together with 2nd Generation Intel Xeon Scalable Processors, Intel SSDs, and other portfolio of technologies combined with GIGABYTE servers, offers a storage platform with flexibility, simplicity and scalability to comprehensively support and unify the different storage requirements of your organization.
For further information on the range of VirtualStor storage appliances available from GIGABYTE using Intel technology, please download the following solution brief:
https://www.gigabyte.com/FileUpload/Global/multimedia/103/file/524/945.pdf
For further information on Bigtera VirtualStor Scaler, please visit their website here:
http://www.bigtera.com/