Running PowerScale OneFS in Cloud - APEX File Storage for AWS
Wed, 28 Feb 2024 20:58:19 -0000
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PowerScale OneFS 9.6 now brings a new offering in AWS cloud — APEX File Storage for AWS. APEX File Storage for AWS is a software-defined cloud file storage service that provides high-performance, flexible, secure, and scalable file storage for AWS environments. It is a fully customer managed service that is designed to meet the needs of enterprise-scale file workloads running on AWS.
Benefits of running OneFS in Cloud
APEX File Storage for AWS brings the OneFS distributed file system software into the public cloud, allowing users to have the same management experience in the cloud as with their on-premises PowerScale appliance.
With APEX File Storage for AWS, you can easily deploy and manage file storage on AWS, without the need for hardware or software management. The service provides a scalable and elastic storage infrastructure that can grow or shrink, according to your actual business needs.
Some of the key features and benefits of APEX File Storage for AWS include:
- Scale-out: APEX File Storage for AWS is powered by the Dell PowerScale OneFS distributed file system. You can start with a small OneFS cluster and then expand it incrementally as your data storage requirements grow.
- Data management: APEX File Storage for AWS provides powerful data management capabilities, such as snapshot, data replication, and backup and restore. Because OneFS features are the same in the cloud as in on-premises, organizations can simplify operations and reduce management complexity with a consistent user experience.
- Simplified journey to hybrid cloud: More and more organizations operate in a hybrid cloud environment, where they need to move data between on-premises and cloud-based environments. APEX File Storage for AWS can help you bridge this gap by facilitating seamless data mobility between on-premises and the cloud with native replication and by providing a consistent data management platform across both environments. Once in the cloud, customers can take advantage of enterprise-class OneFS features such as multi-protocol support, CloudPools, data reduction, and snapshots, to run their workloads in the same way as they do on-premises. APEX File Storage for AWS can use CloudPools to tier cold or infrequently accessed data to lower cost cloud storage, such as AWS S3 object storage. CloudPools extends the OneFS namespace to the private/public cloud and allows you to store much more data than the usable cluster capacity.
- High performance: APEX File Storage for AWS delivers high-performance file storage with low-latency access to data, ensuring that you can access data quickly and efficiently.
Architecture
The architecture of APEX File Storage for AWS is based on the OneFS distributed file system, which consists of multiple cluster nodes to provide a single global namespace. Each cluster node is an instance of OneFS software that runs on an AWS EC2 instance and provides storage capacity and compute resources. The following diagram shows the architecture of APEX File Storage for AWS.
- Availability zone: APEX File Storage for AWS is designed to run in a single AWS availability zone to get the best performance.
- Virtual Private Cloud (VPC): APEX File Storage for AWS requires an AWS VPC to provide network connectivity.
- OneFS cluster internal subnet: The cluster nodes communicate with each other through the internal subnet. The internal subnet must be isolated from instances that are not in the cluster. Therefore, a dedicated subnet is required for the internal network interfaces of cluster nodes that do not share internal subnets with other EC2 instances.
- OneFS cluster external subnet: The cluster nodes communicate with clients through the external subnet by using different protocols, such as NFS, SMB, and S3.
- OneFS cluster internal network interfaces: Network interfaces that are located in the internal subnet.
- OneFS cluster external network interfaces: Network interfaces that are located in the external subnet.
- OneFS cluster internal security group: The security group applies to the cluster internal network interfaces and allows all traffic between the cluster nodes’ internal network interfaces only.
- OneFS cluster external security group: The security group applies to cluster external network interfaces and allows specific ingress traffic from clients.
- Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instance nodes: Cluster nodes that run the OneFS filesystem backed by Elastic Block Store (EBS) volumes and that provide network bandwidth.
Supported cluster configuration
APEX File Storage for AWS provides two types of cluster configurations:
- Solid State Drive (SSD) cluster: APEX File Storage for AWS supports clusters backed by General Purpose SSD (gp3) EBS volumes with up to 1PiB cluster raw capacity. The gp3 EBS volumes are the latest generation of General Purpose SSD volumes, and the lowest cost SSD volume offered by AWS EBS. They balance price and performance for a wide variety of workloads.
Configuration items | Supported options |
Cluster size | 4 to 6 nodes |
EC2 instance type | All nodes in a cluster must be same instance size. The supported instance sizes are m5dn.8xlarge, m5dn.12xlarge, m5dn.16xlarge, or m5dn.24xlarge. See Amazon EC2 m5 instances for more details. |
EBS volume (disk) type | gp3 |
EBS volume (disk) counts per node | 5, 6, 10, 12, 15, 18, or 20 |
Single EBS volume sizes | 1TiB - 16TiB |
Cluster raw capacity | 24TiB - 1PiB |
Cluster protection level | +2n |
- Hard Disk Drive (HDD) cluster: APEX File Storage for AWS supports clusters backed by Throughput Optimized HDD (st1) EBS volumes with up to 360TiB cluster raw capacity. The st1 EBS volumes provide low-cost magnetic storage that defines performance in terms of throughput rather than IOPS. This volume type is a good fit for large sequential workloads.
Configuration items | Supported options |
Cluster size | 4 to 6 nodes |
EC2 instance type | All nodes in a cluster must be same instance size. The supported instance sizes are m5dn.8xlarge, m5dn.12xlarge, m5dn.16xlarge, or m5dn.24xlarge. See Amazon EC2 m5 instances for more details. |
EBS volume (disk) type | st1 |
EBS volume (disk) counts per node | 5 or 6 |
Single EBS volume sizes | 4TiB or 10TiB |
Cluster raw capacity | 80TiB - 360TiB |
Cluster protection level | +2n |
APEX File Storage for AWS can deliver 10GB/s seq read and 4GB/s seq write performance as the cluster size grows. To learn more details about APEX File Storage for AWS, see the following documentation.
Author: Lieven Lin