Open Storage

Solution Overview

Open Storage solution is based on Open Source software, operating systems, volume managers and file systems, and uses commodity hardware components that can be sourced from any reputed hardware OEM. Use of standard hardware eliminates the risk of vendor lock-in, which most proprietary technologies demand. Open Source software eliminates expensive storage software license costs. Use of commodity hardware ensures that the benefits of falling prices of most standardized core components of storage systems such as CPUs, memory, disk drives, RAID controllers and so on are passed on to users. It provides high levels of availability and minimizes data loss by providing all possible RAID configurations, snapshots, replication, backups and disaster recovery. The solution is designed for horizontal scalability, allowing users to add to storage capacity and enhance system performance at any time. This makes it possible for this solution to give high levels of scalability, system uptime, data protection and disaster recovery at significantly lower costs.  

Business Challenges

Companies are facing ever increasing demand for storage, driven by diverse requirements like regulatory compliances, environmental concerns, data security and business continuity. The volume of data to be stored, such as office documents, data bases, emails, user generated content, multimedia, security logs is continually rising. This leads to increasing need for storage capacity creating a huge cost implication for enterprises.  Open storage solution aims at providing low cost and highly reliable SAN NAS solution.

Technical Details

The components required for this system are:

• Storage controller: x86 server, typically a 1U or 2 U server
• Disks Array: JBOD or just a bunch of disks is used as data storage device. SAS and/or SATA hard disk drives can be used as the storage devices
• Storage management software: Storage Management activities include creation of storage pools or logical volumes, create block devices, file shares, snapshots and replication of snapshots for Disaster recovery. All these functions are achieved via ZFS. Storage monitoring is done using Zabbix.
• Ethernet connectivity: 1/10 Gbps LAN