ST Mar-Apr 2021

TECHNOLOGY: OBJECT STORAGE
"Object storage solutions that deliver both economical capacity
and high performance at scale do exist. However, DCIG knows
of only a few solutions that leverage all three features
mentioned here to deliver on these enterprise expectations.
Enterprises should be wary of any solutions that have existed for
over 10 years. Many have introduced flash media into their
systems to host metadata on flash to help improve their
performance. It certainly helps, but how well?"
Feature #2: Scales performance
independently of capacity
Storing object metadata on flash media
represents only the first part of the key to
delivering performance at scale. Object
storage solutions typically scale out capacity
and performance simultaneously by
introducing new server nodes into the cluster.
Each server node may contain both flash
media and HDDs with fixed amounts of both
media types.
Unfortunately, the available performance in
the storage solution cluster may not meet
application or user expectations. Two ways
exist to increase performance.
1. Add more nodes to the cluster. Each node
adds more capacity and performance to the
cluster. This may improve the situation, though
organisations will buy un-needed capacity.
2. Select a solution that frees them to scale
performance independently of capacity. Using
this architectural approach, an organisation
may install new flash media in existing nodes.
They may introduce performance-centric
nodes that primarily contain flash media and
few or no HDDs. This provides the targeted
performance boost they need without paying
for unneeded capacity.
Feature #3: Stores large objects in chunks
and processes them in parallel
While organisations may one day store their
object data on flash media, that day has not
yet arrived. In the meantime, organisations
will continue to store their object data on
HDDs. This may present a performance
challenge, especially when storing and
reading large objects from HDDs.
Individual objects may grow into the
hundreds of GBs if not TBs in size. Using a
single process to read object data from
HDDs on cluster nodes will take significant
time to complete. To improve response
times, identify solutions that perform two
tasks.
First, they should break large objects into
smaller chunks before writing them to
multiple nodes and disks.
Second, they should use multiple parallel
processes to read back the object data.
These techniques serve the following
purposes. Spreading large objects across
multiple nodes and disks enables the
solution to both write and read objects back
more quickly. This accelerates performance
at scale.
NEWER OBJECT STORAGE
SOLUTIONS BETTER ACCOUNT FOR
FLASH MEDIA
Object storage solutions that deliver both
economical capacity and high performance at
scale do exist. However, DCIG knows of only
a few solutions that leverage all three features
mentioned here to deliver on these enterprise
expectations.
Enterprises should be wary of any solutions
that have existed for over 10 years. Many
have introduced flash media into their systems
to host metadata on flash to help improve
their performance. It certainly helps, but how
well?
Unfortunately, it remains unclear to what
extent taking this step alone helps at scale.
The early evidence seems to suggest it does
not translate very well.
Those organisations scaling into the
petabytes will be better served by identifying
and choosing object storage solutions with
more modern designs. These newer solutions
better account for flash media, scale
performance and capacity independently, and
parallelise I/O to deliver performance even as
data stores scale to multiple petabytes.
More info: www.dcig.com
www.storagemagazine.co.uk
@STMagAndAwards Mar/Apr 2021
STORAGE
MAGAZINE
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