Quantastor Overview

Quantastor is Software Defined Storage (SDS) platform designed for cloud providers to allow customers to build out dedicated, flexible storage.  Quantastor is extremely flexible, allowing you to provide true thin provisioned volumes that grown with usage, allow you to cut your storage to the right sizes and right types on the fly.

When installed on relevant hardware you will have an appliance that can provide (grabbed from SoftLayer’s Knowledge Layer):

• NAS (NFS & CIFS) file storage with Active Directory integration
• SAN (iSCSI) block storage with active/active multipathing for redundancy and improved performance
• Snapshots, compression, and thin-provisioning supported for network shares and storage volumes
• SSD caching for reads and writes boosts IOPS for IO intensive workloads like virtualization
• Built-in QuantaGrid technology that enables scale-out management of your appliances across datacenters from the QuantaStor Manager web interface.
• Scale-out NAS with integrated GlusterFS technology allows you to span appliances to deliver highly-available multi-petabyte NAS storage in a single namespace
• Remote-replication for replicating mission critical workloads and easy Disaster-Recovery (DR) failover to another appliance at another site/datacenter.
• Integrated hardware RAID management for efficient set-up and maintenance of underlying storage pools
• Automatic snapshot schedules that make it easy to recover deleted files from your CIFS/NFS network shares
• Multi-tenancy with Role Based Access Controls
• Integrated backup policy engine makes it easy to set up automatic backups for any CIFS/NFS share on your private network. Parallelism in the scanning and backup engine makes it possible to do backups of NAS filers with 100s of millions of files.
• NAS gateway to SoftLayer Cloud Storage provides a means for backing up data into object storage. All the data is encrypted, compressed and reduplicated to minimize footprint and object storage costs.
• Private-network ONLY server

For the full list of current feature please see http://www.osnexus.com/quantastor-features

The fine print

This offering provides functions similar to very expansive SAN/NAS systems, with a very small price tag, the only problem is the way you solution it.

Everyone needs a friend to share the load.

You need to be very careful when solutioning a Quantastor in a production environment as it is a single point of failure if provisioned solo, recommend any production storage be scaled across at least 2 appliances using built in or aftermarket replication.  If CPU, memory, mainboard, back plane, RAID controller or anything else fails in the server you are off the air until the part can be changed out, which in Softlayer is under 2 hours.  If you have to patch the Quantastor OS then all systems being serviced by it will be offline.

IOPS, consider this before array size.

The other consideration is IOPS, if you fill a chassis with 20 x 7,200 RPM, 3 TB SATA drives at RAID 5 you will not get huge IOPS I’d guess about 1000 IOPS.  Although this a great, cheap configuration for a low IOPS backup/archive location.

You have to look at the type of drives you are putting into the array, simple rule if they are cheap they are slow.  In my opinion:

SLOW: SATA for boot drives and long term, low access storage

MEDIUM: SAS for medium – high performance, high access storage

HIGH: SSD for the extreme performance all round, and for read or write cache drives.

Cache, it wont fix your IOPS but will help.

Quantastor allows you to select some high speed drives to use are cache to boost the IOPS, I recommend at least 2 drives (SSD best) in RAID 1 for Write cache and 1 drive for read cache (again SSD best).  This can be the boost that brings an unacceptable performing volume to right on the money, just don’t expect it to fix a poorly designed solution.

Bottlenecks

You will have a bottle neck of the single RAID controller on a single appliance; you won’t get 100,000 IOPS from 20 x 800 GB SSD.

Network Interface Cards, have 2 of them and make sure they are 10 GbE.  You shouldn’t bond the two NICs together instead run them on separate subnets.

Compute and RAM, a good minimum is about 12 cores and 96 GB of RAM, for standard, but if your going to be snapshotting, replicating and more then look for a more powerful chassis.

More information

Link to Youtube video by Eamonn Killian – Tutorial Eighteen – Part 1 – QuantaStor Storage

Link to Youtube video by Eamonn Killian – Tutorial Eighteen – Part 2 – QuantaStor Storage

Link to Youtube video by Eamonn Killian – Tutorial Eighteen – Part 3 – QuantaStor Storage

Link to OSNEXUS’s (the makers of Quantastor) Solution Design Guide, it is well worth a read before beginning to design a solution. http://wiki.osnexus.com/index.php?title=Solution_Design_Guide

OSNEXUS’s forum is good to get some qualified information from staff http://forum.osnexus.org/