You can increase the capacity of an object store in ObjectScale through horizontal expansions and vertical expansions.
- Horizontal expansion increases the number of storage server replicas, thereby increasing the number of nodes with data disks in an object store. During the horizontal expansion, ObjectScale confirms that the Kubernetes environment has enough nodes and resources to schedule the newly added pods. The ObjectScale sizer tool integrated with the Edit Object Store wizard ensures that all component replica counts are increased as appropriate, according to the object store's new storage server replica count.
- Vertical expansion increases the number of persistent volumes per storage server replica, thereby increasing the number of data disks per node in an object store. During the vertical expansion, ObjectScale confirms that sufficient storage is available to allocate to the newly added persistent volumes.
Guidelines for expansions include:
- Only one expansion operation may run at a time—either horizontal or vertical.
- Horizontal expansions do not change the erasure coding (EC) scheme used by the object store.
- For example, if the object store was deployed with 12+4 EC, it will remain so for the life of the object store, regardless of the number of nodes added later.
- Increasing the number of nodes may provide better I/O performance and increase data fragment dispersal.
- If you create an object store using the ObjectScale portal UI, capacity expansions for that object store can only be enacted using the UI.