Dell ObjectScale on Red Hat OpenShift
Tue, 10 Oct 2023 09:55:24 -0000
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Introduction
ObjectScale is a software-defined object storage offering from Dell Technologies. It is designed to deliver enterprise-grade, high-performance object storage in a Kubernetes-native environment.
ObjectScale has a layered architecture, with every function in the system built as an independent layer, making the functions horizontally scalable across all nodes and enabling high availability. The S3-compatible ObjectScale software forms the underlying cloud storage service, providing protection, geo-replication, and data access.
Red Hat® OpenShift® Container Platform is a Kubernetes distribution that provides production-oriented container and workload automation. Its declarative deployment approach, dynamic scaling, and self-healing capabilities make OpenShift a suitable platform to host ObjectScale.
The following diagram shows the ObjectScale topology:
Deployment overview
The deployment of ObjectScale consists of three steps:
- Installing Bare Metal CSI drivers
- Installing the ObjectScale instance
- Creating ObjectStore
The bare-metal CSI drivers deployed as part of ObjectScale provide enhanced performance and serviceability. ObjectScale instance provides an easy-to-use web portal for its configuration and management. ObjectStores, user accounts, and buckets are some of the resources that are required to be created before the storage is ready to be consumed.
ObjectStores are independent storage systems with an individualized life cycle. One or more ObjectStores are deployed by each ObjectScale instance. ObjectStores are created, updated, and deleted independently from all other ObjectStores, and managed by the shared ObjectScale instance. Cluster resources such as storage, CPU, and RAM are defined for each ObjectStore based on workload demand inputs that are specified at ObjectStore creation. Resources that are reserved for an ObjectStore at creation may be adjusted at any time.
The minimum requirements for each OpenShift compute node are:
- 4 physical CPU cores
- 1 x 960 GB (or larger) unused SSD
- 128 GB RAM
- 200 GB of free space in /var/lib/kubelet
- 5 unused disks per node of identical storage class (minimum for a single object store), preferably the same size
Dell PowerEdge R750 and R7525 servers hosting the Red Hat OpenShift 4.8 are validated for ObjectScale deployment. The validated environment consisted of three compute nodes, each having 12 X 800 GB SSDs. The OpenShift NodePort service was used to access the ObjectScale UI.
Use cases
ObjectScale supports several modern and traditional use cases. Common use cases on OpenShift container platform are:
- ObjectScale for OpenShift internal image registry
- ObjectScale for OpenShift Quay
- ObjectScale for storing backups
- ObjectScale for building a data lake
- ObjectScale for Splunk SmartStore
Conclusion
The ease of deployment, scalability, fault tolerance, and security capabilities of OpenShift make it a preferred choice for hosting ObjectScale to fulfill object storage demands. ObjectStores running inside OpenShift, can be co-located and managed with the applications they support. This help reduce CapEx and deployment costs while improving time-to-market.
References
Authors
Indira Kannamedi (indira_kannamedi@dell.com)
Nitesh Mehra (nitesh_mehra@dell.com)