1. White Paper
Technology
STORAGE ARCHITECTED FOR THE
NEW-AGE DATACENTERS
CloudByte ElastiStor makes Storage Predictable, Affordable and Easy
even as Datacenters Scale to Thousands of Applications

2. Table of Contents
Executive Summary ……………………………………………………………………………………. 3
Legacy Solutions are a Misfit in the New-Age Datacenters …………………….. 4
CloudByte Technology
TSM Architecture ……………………..…………………………………………………………. 5
Heuristics Based Performance Control ……………..………………………………… 6
CloudByte Deployment Architecture …………………….……..………………………….... 7
ElastiStor: Key Features …………………….……..……………………………..………………….. 8
ElastiStor: Standard Storage Features ……..…………………………………………………. 9
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3. Executive Summary
Legacy storage solutions fail to scale up to the demands of new-age datacenters, which are
witnessing a rapid increase in number of applications and new levels of performance requirements.
While virtualization has made rapid strides on the server side, storage technology witnessed just
incremental innovations in the past decade. By baking in advanced technologies of virtualization
and software-defined intelligence, ElastiStor is architected to make storage predictable, affordable,
and easy, even as datacenters scale to thousands of applications.
CloudByte ElastiStor controllers are built for multi-tenancy i.e., every application hosted on a
shared storage platform is completely isolated and dedicated its own set of storage resources.
ElastiStor intelligently provisions these storage resources based on an application’s performance
(QoS) demands. This allows datacenters to realize the cost efficiencies of shared storage, while
delivering guaranteed QoS to every application.
In addition to affordably delivering performance to a large number of applications, ElastiStor offers
complete security, comprehensive management tools and superior reliability, that’s expected in
carrier-grade storage solutions. Software-only and software-defined, ElastiStor is installable on
industry-standard servers. With zero-proprietary hardware and OpenStorage, ElastiStor frees
datacenters from any proprietary lock-in and allows storage infrastructure to be custom-built,
whether it’s SATA, SAS or SSD.
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4. Legacy Solutions are a Misfit in the New-Age Datacenters
Legacy storage solutions were designed to handle stable workloads from applications hosted on
dedicated physical servers. However, with server virtualization and the new class of enterprise
applications, datacenters have to deal with rapidly increasing number of applications, new levels of
performance demands, which are often dynamic and hosted on virtual servers. Due to their
architecture limitations, legacy solutions cannot scale well in these virtualized environments.
Tradeoff between Performance and Affordability
Legacy solutions are restricted by monolithic controller architecture, making it impossible to
completely isolate applications within shared storage. As a result, applications contend for the
shared storage resources and due to this noisy neighbor effect, no application can be guaranteed
performance. In short, to ensure predictable performance, applications require dedicated physical
storage. The cost structure and complexity to host these dedicated storage islands is prohibitively
high, especially with rapidly increasing number of applications. Datacenters are forced to choose
between delivering predictable performance and balancing their cost structure.
Current workarounds include overprovisioning shared storage resources, grouping similar
workloads together, and dedicating storage to performance-sensitive applications. These are far
from perfect and fail to either deliver predictable performance or optimally utilize resources.
Management Nightmare
With legacy solutions, provisioning performance (QoS) requires hardwiring of storage, which is just
not scalable with today’s dynamic workloads. Fragmented management of multiple storage islands
can be tedious and daunting even for datacenters with large management overheads. Further,
within shared storage, legacy solutions are incapable of providing granular resource usage
analytics, leading to complexities in identifying bottlenecks and billing customers (for a CSP).
Several storage management tools have popped up over the last decade due to the sheer number
of inefficiencies in the legacy systems. While they help alleviate the above-mentioned pain points,
none of them address the core problems– eliminating the need for storage fragmentation or
enabling on-demand provisioning.
Security
Storage assigned to a customer/application must be free from data snooping, unauthorized
manipulation, and deletion. In many scenarios, data confidentiality maybe required even from the
service provider or enterprise IT. With the lack of complete isolation and encrypted access, legacy
solutions do not meet these standard security requirements.
In the SAN world, LUN masking is used to some extent to separate an application’s storage at the
switch level. However, this is neither comprehensive nor scalable. Service providers cannot provide
comprehensive security without expanding their physical infrastructure.
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5. CloudByte Technology: Patented TSMTM Architecture
Legacy Architecture
Legacy storage solutions are restricted by their monolithic controller, where applications share the
same access layer, file system and disk subsystem. Further, physical resources of a controller such
as CPU and memory are shared without any reference to an application’s performance needs. With
the monolithic approach, it is impossible to guarantee QoS to applications within shared storage.
CloudByte TSM Architecture
The CloudByte storage controller is designed and built from the ground up for multi-tenancy. In a
CloudByte controller, each application is fully isolated at all storage stack levels and unified under a
Tenant Storage Machine (TSM). With completely isolated applications, controller resources allotted
to each application can now be easily monitored, controlled, and provisioned.
As we’ll see in detail in the next section, CloudByte also intelligently provisions controller resources
to each application, based on the application’s QoS requirements (IOPS, latency and throughput).
Further, each application’s data can now be optionally encrypted to provide additional security.
Figure 1: Legacy Monolithic Architecture vs. ElastiStor TSM Architecture
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6. CloudByte Technology: Heuristics Based Performance Control
CloudByte Intelligence Dynamically Provisions Resources based on QoS Requirements
For the first time ever, CloudByte delivers tailored QoS (IOPS, throughput, latency) to every
application within shared storage. CloudByte software includes an intelligent heuristics daemon
which continuously learns the quantity of various controller resources needed to deliver the
required QoS and accordingly provisions them to each application.
Controller resources needed to deliver a specific QoS are not static, but vary depending on factors
such as the configuration of disks, the location of tenant data on disks, the amount of data in
cache, and the amount of data that needs to be fetched from the disks. The equation continually
changes and this pattern is learnt by CloudByte heuristics daemon. This pattern is then used to
provision the resources of the storage controller such as CPU, memory, cache lengths in the file
system, and network bandwidth. While the heuristics learning happens at the storage controller
level, resource enforcement happens at the TSM level.
Figure 2: Resource provisioning to achieve QoS requirements
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7. CloudByte Deployment Architecture
Figure 3: CloudByte deployment architecture
Scale to Thousands of Applications
An ElastiStor controller is built by deploying ElastiStor OS on industry-standard server. These
controllers can be linearly scaled to form an ElastiStor cluster, with one ElastiStor controller
dedicated as an administration node. With each controller supporting several applications/VMs, an
ElastiStor cluster can scale to thousands of applications.
With zero-proprietary hardware and OpenStorage, ElastiStor frees datacenters from any proprietary
lock-in and large upfront investments. Further, infrastructure can be custom-built based on the
datacenter demands, whether it’s SATA, SAS or SSD.
Storage made Predictable, Affordable, and Easy
For the first time ever, ElastiStor delivers guaranteed QoS to every application right from shared
storage, eliminating the need for any dedicated storage islands. By un-fragmenting storage islands
and optimally utilizing resources, ElastiStor steeply cuts down datacenters’ storage footprint,
leading to 80-90% cost savings over 3-5 years. With its on-demand provisioning, ElastiStor breaks
the need for hardwiring storage to deliver an application's performance. Further, ElastiStor makes
storage management incredibly easy with vCenter-like administration, delegated administration
and REST APIs (see “key features” for more details).
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8. ElastiStor: Key Features
QoS-Configurable Storage Endpoints
Share your storage and deliver predictable performance to every application.
For the first time ever, ElastiStor allows storage LUNs to be defined beyond
capacity, in terms of IOPS, throughput and latency. This allows applications
with diverse workloads to be guaranteed QoS right from a shared storage
platform. Together with linear scaling, a single extensible shared storage
platform from ElastiStor can now replace legacy solutions’ dedicated storage
islands. By un-fragmenting storage islands and optimally utilizing resources,
ElastiStor steeply cuts down your storage footprint, leading to 80-90% cost
savings over 3-5 years.
On-Demand Storage Provisioning
Do you still manually configure hardware to provision storage for any new
application? Break the need for hardwiring storage with ElastiStor's
on-demand provisioning. Just enter the required SLA/QoS parameters and let
ElastiStor automate node selection and resource allocation for you. ElastiStor
includes an intelligent heuristics daemon which continuously learns the
quantity of various controller resources needed to deliver the required QoS.
vCenter-like Administration Console
ElastiStor makes managing storage as easy as managing VMs, even when as
you scale to hundreds of applications. Storage admins can now comprehen-
sively manage the entire storage cluster, spanning across multiple sites, from
a single web-based console. Further, ElastiStor gives you unprecedented ac-
cess and control over resource usage within shared storage, right down to
the application-level granularity.
REST APIs and Plugins for Easy Integration
Every action performed at ElastiStor admin console translates into a REST
based API call in the backend, enabling admins to fully manage ElastiStor
right from their existing portals. Our plugin for VMware vCenter (also based
on REST API) enables storage management right from the vCenter, right from
setting QoS policies to monitoring resource usage.
N-way High Availability
ElastiStor enables N-way High Availability, exponentially increasing reliability
(mean time to failure), compared to the standard 2-way HA provided by
existing solutions. CloudByte's storage un-fragmentation and its patented
TSM architecture make N-way HA affordable and feasible.
Delegated Administration
A much requested feature from the cloud service providers, delegated
administration empowers both CSPs and its customers to monitor and
control storage, as necessary. Management privileges vary based on the
admin functionality – for example, a super admin can manage the entire
storage cluster, whereas a customer admin can manage just the storage
resources allotted to that particular customer.
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9. ElastiStor: Standard Storage Features
Scalability 128-bit file system
Zettabyte storage capacity
Unlimited file size
Access Protocols NFSv3, NFSv4, CIFS, iSCSI, FC
Storage Connectivity SAS JBODS, iSCSI targets, FC targets
Storage Resilience RAIDZ1, RAIDZ2
Storage Efficiency De-duplication
Compression
Thin provisioning
Backup Efficient Snapshots, Unlimited
Efficient Clones, Unlimited
Tape Backup
Availability N-way high availability (N-way HA)
Partial failure transfer to the available node
Active-Active mode
HA with/without storage redundancy
Disaster Recovery Tenant level disaster recovery
High availability across primary and DR sites
Block level replication
Synchronous mirroring
Asynchronous mirroring
RPO—Last minute
RTO—Few minutes
Data Integrity Protection against silent data corruption
Fixes corrupt block without having to take the file system offline
CloudByte’s file system is built on ZFS and hence, it inherits all the standard ZFS features
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10. multi-tenant storage
Service Providers can now provide full benefits of dedicated
storage to their customers on a shared storage platform
For more information, visit www.cloudbyte.com or follow us on Twitter @CloudByteInc
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