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Announcing the Dell ObjectScale Appliance!
Tue, 21 Nov 2023 20:14:23 -0000
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‘A major element fueling the ascent of object storage is the emergence of all-flash object storage and organizations’ growing recognition of the value “fast object” can provide them. All-flash object storage is clearly playing a key role in providing the modern infrastructure necessary to support these new initiatives.‘
This assertion is verified by a report produced by Scott Sinclair of ESG research.
Our latest ObjectScale release features the XF960, an enterprise-class, scale-out, high-performance, all-flash storage system built for the toughest applications and workloads. The XF960 hardware stack includes the server, switch, rack-mount equipment, and appropriate power cables, all optimized to run the ObjectScale software. It is built on Dell Technologies’ PowerEdge R760 server (new 16th generation).
We’re taking the ObjectScale experience to the next level by providing the latest software innovation as a fully integrated, turnkey solution.
Built with NVMe disks on Dell PowerEdge R760 servers, capacity for the ObjectScale appliance begins at 2.95PB raw capacity and scales up to 11.79PB raw capacity per rack to support the most data-intensive workloads, such as AI, machine learning, IoT, and real-time analytics applications.
ObjectScale appliance configurations include:
- 2U form factor
- Dual Intel processor with 32 cores per processor
- 256GB memory
- 30TB with 24*NVMe TLC drives
- Dual mirrored boot drives
- Network:
- 100Gb Back-end switches (Dell provided)
- 25Gb Front-end switches (customer-provided and supported)
Note: The ObjectScale appliance supports a minimum of 4 node deployment and max 16 nodes in a single rack cluster.
Two major performance enhancements with ObjectScale 1.3 and XF960 enable application development teams and data science teams to innovate even faster:
- 16G PowerEdge server performance with full-stack NVMe connectivity. The XF960 embraces the NVMe over TCP protocol for its blazing fast 100Gb backend network, accelerating node-to-node communication and unlocking the true potential of the all-flash system’s throughput rate, especially in large-scale deployments.
- We introduce shared memory in the NVMe IO path of the datahead service in the ObjectScale appliance running software version 1.3 to increase S3 throughput performance.
The ObjectScale appliance offers self-encrypting drives (SEDs), NVMe SSDs that transparently encrypt all on-disk data using an internal key and a drive access password. This encryption protects the system from data theft when a drive is removed. ObjectScale now only supports Secure Enterprise Key Manager (SKEM) in the iDRAC.
The ObjectScale appliance supports encryption for:
- Boot Drive
- Data Drive (providing better hardware deployment performance compared to software based D@RE)
- Software based D@RE (enabled at a system or bucket level)
The ObjectScale appliance supports hardware monitoring by leveraging the iDRAC from servers. It can be enabled and disabled from the UI or API directly. The alerts include a detailed description of the issue with Severity type, Reason, and Impacted resource.
The following workflow summarizes how the hardware monitoring works:
- UI or REST clients issue calls to manage hardware alerts.
- ObjectScale enables hardware alerts.
- iDRAC publishes alerts to the event listener and K8s events.
- The event is finally delivered to SNMP and Dell Support.
- ObjectScale pulls alerts every 60 seconds that display in the UI.
The ObjectScale appliance is deployed with the latest ObjectScale 1.3 software bundle package. For more information about Dell ObjectScale 1.3, see the latest Dell ObjectScale: Overview and Architecture white paper.
Conclusion
The Dell ObjectScale appliance gives organizations flexibility in deploying and managing enterprise-grade object storage. ObjectScale is a distributed system that has a layered architecture: every function is built as an independent layer, which provides horizontal scalability across all nodes and enables high availability. The ObjectScale software provides optimum protection, geo-replication, greater availability, and secure data access.
Resources
The following Dell Technologies documentation provides additional information about Dell ObjectScale. Access to these documents depends on an individual’s login credentials. For access to a document, contact a Dell Technologies representative.
- ObjectScale and ECS white papers:
- Dell Support resources:
Author: Jarvis Zhu