ESG Lab Review CloudByte ElastiStor Date: February 2014 Author: Tony Palmer, Senior Lab Analyst Abstract: This ESG Lab review documents the hands-on evaluation of CloudByte ElastiStor unified storage on commodity hardware at cloud scale for enterprises and service providers. The Challenges IT management, along with senior executives and line-of-business stakeholders, continue to look for ways to improve resource efficiency and ROI. The challenge is exacerbated by the adoption of modern cloud and virtualization technology and a shortage of professionals with the proper skill sets. As part of ESG s 2013 IT Spending Intentions Survey 1 of IT managers at midmarket and enterprise organizations, respondents were asked to identify the most important of NIST s five essential cloud computing characteristics (see Figure 1). 2 Though mutually distinct from server virtualization, private cloud technology allows IT organizations to augment their extensive virtual server deployments with orchestration and centralized management software in order to deliver the fundamental tenets of cloud computing internally to their own end-users. Figure 1. Ranking of the Five Essential Characteristics of Cloud Computing Which of five essential characteristics of cloud computing do you believe is the most important attribute of a private cloud infrastructure (i.e., a more highly virtualized and dynamic IT infrastructure)? (Percent of respondents, N=351) Measured service (i.e., usage-based tracking/billing), 7% On-demand selfservice, 16% Don t know, 1% Rapid elasticity (i.e., ability to add or remove IT resources as needed), 30% Broad network access, 21% Resource pooling, 24% Source: Enterprise Strategy Group, 2014. 1 Source: ESG Research Report, 2013 IT Spending Intentions Survey, January 2013. 2 http://www.nist.gov/itl/csd/cloud-102511.cfm# The goal of ESG Lab reports is to educate IT professionals about data center technology products for companies of all types and sizes. ESG Lab reports are not meant to replace the evaluation process that should be conducted before making purchasing decisions, but rather to provide insight into these emerging technologies. Our objective is to go over some of the more valuable feature/functions of products, show how they can be used to solve real customer problems and identify any areas needing improvement. ESG Lab s expert third-party perspective is based on our own hands-on testing as well as on interviews with customers who use these products in production environments. This ESG Lab report was sponsored by CloudByte.
ESG Lab Review: CloudByte ElastiStor 2 Nearly one-third (30%) of respondents identified rapid elasticity the ability to add or remove IT resources as needed as the most important characteristic of a private cloud infrastructure. Resource pooling ranked second, while on-demand self-service ranked fourth. These responses indicate that IT is facing increasing pressure to improve efficiency while delivering always-on application and data access, and they reflect the challenge of individual organizations to provide private cloud services. These challenges also extend to service providers, who implement public cloud, private cloud, and public/private hybrid cloud services for their customers. The Solution: CloudByte ElastiStor and CloudByte ElastiCenter CloudByte ElastiStor is a multi-tenant storage software solution architected for large scale enterprise and service provider deployments. Running on commodity hardware, ElastiStor isolates users, applications, and tenants or enterprise groups through the use of a virtualized storage controller, the Tenant Storage Machine. This solution is managed by CloudByte ElastiCenter, a web-based centralized management console that can communicate with and manage all of an organization s ElastiStor implementations worldwide. Figure 2. CloudByte ElastiStor and ElastiCenter Architecture As illustrated in Figure 2, ElastiStor is a software solution that runs on commodity storage hardware. Unlike traditional storage architectures, ElastiStor provides an abstraction layer at the storage controller level, allowing administrators to create independent virtual storage systems called Tenant Storage Machines (TSMs). Each TSM encapsulates the entirety of a storage system: a storage engine to manage data; a quality of service engine to manage resources; multiple storage protocols including NFS, CIFS, Fibre Channel, and iscsi, each with unique addresses, for communication to storage consumers; and a management API.
ESG Lab Tested ESG Lab Review: CloudByte ElastiStor 3 ESG Lab performed a hands-on evaluation of ElastiStor and ElastiCenter at a CloudByte facility in Cupertino, CA. ESG Lab focused on key areas of interest to distributed enterprises and service providers. ESG Lab set out to evaluate the capabilities of ElastiStor s Tenant Storage Machine and quality of service features, as well as the management features of ElastiCenter. Getting Started ESG Lab installed ElastiStor on a virtual machine to evaluate the installation experience. Installation of the software took approximately ten minutes. ESG Lab spent another five minutes configuring the storage system by creating a site, creating a high-availability (HA) group, adding the storage node to the HA group, and exporting a storage volume. At that point, the system was ready for use. ESG Lab evaluated a pre-installed CloudByte ElastiStor solution using v1.2.3 of ElastiStor running on a Dell R710 with an MD1220 JBOD containing four Smart 400GB SSDs and 13 SAS 10K 300GB drives. The storage system was initially configured with an SSD pool using two of the 400GB SSDs configured as a mirrored pair, along with an HDD pool with 11 SAS drives configured as RAID double parity. Client testing was performed using two Dell 1950 Servers running Microsoft Windows 2008R2. Tenant Storage Machine and Quality of Service The fundamental level of abstraction of the ElastiStor software is the Tenant Storage Machine (TSM), which is a virtualized storage system. Each TSM contains all the features and functionality needed to provide a complete storage solution, including data storage services, storage protocols (NFS, CIFS, iscsi, FC), quality of service, and a management API. A key feature of the CloudByte ElastiCenter web-based management console, is three levels of administrative account types site-wide administrators, HA group administrators, and account administrators. This is crucial for service providers who can create a TSM for each of their customers, provision that TSM with a specific capacity of storage and performance resources, and then delegate the administration of that TSM to the customer, provisioning account-level administrative access. These administrators are given permission to manage a specific set of TSMs, and cannot create TSMs or manage the entire ElastiStor environment. Figure 3. Tenant Storage Machine Dashboard
ESG Lab Review: CloudByte ElastiStor 4 The TSM dashboard provides the administrator with an at-a-glance status overview of the TSM. As seen in Figure 3, two key critical statistics are displayed graphically, with the amount of storage allocated and used shown on the left-center. In this example, the TSM is out of capacity, with all provisioned storage being consumed, so the situation is highlighted in red. On the right-center is the amount of IOPS provisioned and consumed by the TSM. On the far right is the Action menu, providing administrators the ability to back up, migrate, and configure the TSM. Within this environment, a delegated administrator has free reign and can carve up the allocated storage into as many volumes as required. Each volume can be isolated from others for performance by limiting the IOPS consumed, ensuring that heavyweight or rogue applications do not consume all available resources and do not disrupt other applications or users a situation often called the noisy neighbor. ElastiStor administrators using ElastiCenter have visibility into all TSMs, along with their allocated storage and IOPS, as shown in Figure 4. Figure 4. Tenant Storage Machine Capacity and IOPS QoS Limits To evaluate how ElastiStor uses QoS to isolate environments, ESG Lab configured a TSM as it would be provisioned in a typical service provider scenario. The TSM was allocated 1TB of capacity and 1,000 IOPS of performance, and control was handed over to the tenant-designated storage administrator. ESG Lab, acting as the TSM administrator, created two volumes for two applications. The first application and its associated volume was allocated 800 IOPS, while the second application and its associated volume was allocated 200 IOPS, thereby consuming all available IOPS from the TSM. ESG used the industry-standard Iometer storage workload utility to generate 4Kbyte sequential read and write transactions to ElastiStor to emulate the two applications. Over time, it was determined that the first application was over resourced and did not need all 800 IOPS. Thus, ESG lab reduced the QoS limit for volume 1 to 600 IOPS, while keeping all other constraints at their original values. As can be seen in the left side of Figure 5, volume 1 is consuming 600 IOPS, volume 2 is consuming 200 IOPS, and there is 200 IOPS of available performance, often called headroom. To take advantage of the available headroom, ESG Lab enabled an ElastiStor feature that allows a volume to exceed its predefined QoS limits if there are available resources. This feature, known as Grace, was enabled with just a few mouse clicks, and the results can be seen on the right hand side of Figure 5. The TSM was still limited to 1,000 IOPS, and volume 1 was still limited to 600 IOPS, leaving 400 IOPS of available resources. Volume 2 was limited to 200 IOPS, but, with Grace enabled, volume 2 was allowed to temporarily exceed its QoS limits and consume additional resources, in this case a total of 400 IOPS.
IOPS ESG Lab Review: CloudByte ElastiStor 5 Figure 5. QoS IOPS Limits and Grace Increasing Volume IOPS Limits 1,000 TSM IOPS Limit 900 800 700 600 Vol 1 IOPS Limit 500 400 300 200 Vol 2 IOPS Limit 100 0 QoS Limits TSM: 1,000 IOPS Vol1: 600 IOPS Vol2: 200 IOPS Total Used Vol 1 Vol 2 QoS Limits TSM: 1,000 IOPS Vol1: 600 IOPS Vol2: 200 IOPS + Grace Next, ESG Lab evaluated the effects of increasing the TSM QoS limits, simulating the behavior of a service provider or IT organization providing additional resources to a tenant. The left side of Figure 6 shows the original situation, with the TSM limited to 1,000 IOPS, volume 1 limited to 600 IOPS, and volume 2 limited to 200 IOPS. Because volume 2 was configured with Grace, it was exceeding its QoS limits, consuming all available IOPS up to the TSM limit. ESG Lab then increased the TSM IOPS limit from 1,000 to 10,000. Volume 1 continued to consume up to its limit of 600 IOPS. Volume 2, however, with Grace enabled, consumed all available resources up to the 10,000 IOPS limit of the TSM, as shown in the middle of Figure 6. As a follow-on, ESG Lab again increased the TSM limit from 10,000 IOPS to 20,000 IOPS. Like before, as shown on the right side of Figure 6, volume 2 consumed all available resources. However, the maximum IOPS available on the storage system using this workload was 19,674, and was achieved before being capped by the TSM IOPS limit.
IOPS ESG Lab Review: CloudByte ElastiStor 6 Figure 6. QoS IOPS Limits and Grace Increasing TSM IOPS Limits 20,000 TSM IOPS Limit 15,000 10,000 TSM IOPS Limit 5,000 Vol 1 IOPS Limit Vol 2 IOPS Limit TSM IOPS Limit 0 QoS Limits TSM: 1,000 IOPS Vol1: 600 IOPS Vol2: 200 IOPS + Grace QoS Limits TSM: 10,000 IOPS Vol1: 600 IOPS Vol2: 200 IOPS + Grace Total Used Vol 1 Vol 2 QoS Limits TSM: 20,000 IOPS Vol1: 600 IOPS Vol2: 200 IOPS + Grace Why This Matters Companies and service providers face enormous challenges when tasked with cost-effectively meeting service level agreements for business-critical applications, especially for I/O-intensive deployments with strict performance requirements. The challenge is intensified by the need to scale the infrastructure to meet the requirements of rapidly changing business climates. As a result, ESG research shows, rapid elasticity ranks as the characteristic of cloud computing chosen by the largest percentage of respondents as the most important. 3 Traditional disk-based storage architectures over-provision to meet peak performance demands this is not just a waste of money and resources: it increases the difficulty and cost of scaling the infrastructure as the demands change. CloudByte ElastiStor provides quality of service controls to offer predictable and controllable performance with a variety of applications. More importantly, with Tenant Storage Machines, ElastiStor provides each organizational group or service provider tenant with its own virtualized storage system. ESG Lab validated that ElastiStor, by virtualizing the storage environment, simultaneously isolated each tenant while providing the ability to scale capacity, performance, and additional tenants. 3 Source: ESG Research Report, 2013 IT Spending Intentions Survey, January 2013.
ESG Lab Review: CloudByte ElastiStor 7 CloudByte ElastiStor Management CloudByte provides ElastiCenter as the management console for the ElastiStor storage machine. ElastiCenter is a webbased management system that communicates with ElastiStor s management APIs. Using standard web browsers, administrators can manage multiple world-wide ElastiStor systems. The ElastiStor administrator can create a delegated administrator with permission to manage a specific subset of ElastiStor systems or Tenant Storage Machines. Once authenticated and authorized, the administrator is presented with the ElastiCenter dashboard, providing an at-aglance overview of the state and health of the system. As shown in Figure 7, the dashboard is arranged in a 4x4 grid. The top left box provides a listing of the most recent alerts. The top right box provides a green-yellow-orange-red thermometer view of the physical storage volumes. The bottom left box graphically displays storage capacity, while the bottom right box displays the consumption of storage IOPS. The dashboard also includes summary information. The bottom of the dashboard shows the number of ElastiStor sites, high availability groups, nodes, storage pools, user accounts, TSMs, and storage volumes that are currently being managed by ElastiCenter. Figure 7. ElastiCenter The ElastiStor Management Console Using the menu on the left side of the console, administrators can manage both logical and physical aspects of the storage system. The physical management points include storage pools, storage nodes, high availability groups, and entire sites. Selecting HA groups will bring up the HA group management dashboard (see Figure 8). From this dashboard, administrators can manage the capacity and IOPS consumed for the HA group as well as for each storage pool in the group.
ESG Lab Review: CloudByte ElastiStor 8 The node dashboard provides visibility to the capacity and IOPS available and consumed for a specific node. In addition, at the bottom left of the node dashboard, administrators are given an at-a-glance graphical view of the disks in the node, with color providing disk status information. Figure 8. Hardware Management Dashboards Figure 9 shows the dashboard for configuring storage volumes and storage pools. The storage volume dashboard provides real-time graphs showing the recent history of resource usage. This covers throughput, IOPS, block size, read and write access, cache efficiency, and access latency. These critical graphs provide the administrator with quick-tointerpret measures of the performance of the storage subsystem and guide the administrator in tuning the system for the best performance based on actual resource utilization. Also shown in Figure 9 is the storage pool dashboard. In addition to showing the capacity and IOPS for the storage pool, the dashboard displays how the pool is carved up into volumes and allocated to different TSMs, along with the QoS limits for each volume.
ESG Lab Review: CloudByte ElastiStor 9 Figure 9. Storage Volume and Storage Pool Dashboards To aid in the performance tuning of the storage system, ElastiStor provides the ability to migrate a TSM. TSMs can be migrated from one storage pool to another storage pool. These pools can reside on the same storage node or on different storage nodes. TSMs can also be migrated from one site to a completely different site. Migrating the TSMs allows the storage administrator to optimize the resource utilization and QoS limit across the entire CloudByte infrastructure. TSM migration is initiated from the TSM dashboard, where the administrator configures the migrant TSM s site, storage pool, storage capacity, and QoS Limits, and the migration schedule. Once the migration starts, the TSM migration dashboard page shows the migration status (see Figure 10). Figure 10. Tenant Storage Machine Migration
ESG Lab Review: CloudByte ElastiStor 10 Why This Matters ESG research has found that among surveyed organizations that support or plan to support highly virtualized or private cloud environments, faster storage provisioning and increased simplicity of implementation and management is consistently among the top-cited prerequisites for doing so. 4 ESG Lab validated that the CloudByte ElastiStor storage system was easy to configure and manage using ElastiCenter. Using a standard web browser, only a few mouse clicks were required to create and provision a Tenant Storage Machine, and to export storage volumes to clients. ElastiCenter provides at-a-glance dashboards to show the administrator the current configuration and health of all aspects of the storage system. Using delegated administrators, in combination with Tenant Storage Machines, ElastiCenter gives service providers and IT organizations the ability to provide business units and clients with dedicated and isolated storage systems. Delegated administrators are given complete control over their own storage system, and they can make configuration changes and tune their storage system for optimum performance without affecting other groups or clients. System tuning was made simple by graphs showing both current utilization and imposed resource limits, enabling administrators to quickly spot resource contention and make painless changes in configurations. The ElastiCenter interface was complete and robust, enabling total management of the ElastiStor storage infrastructure directly from any web browser. 4 Source: ESG Research Report, The Evolution of Server Virtualization, November 2010.
The Bigger Truth ESG Lab Review: CloudByte ElastiStor 11 As IT continues to shift to private cloud infrastructure and implement advanced capabilities, along with traditional services such as server virtualization, storage systems become more complex, with tens or hundreds of thousands of LUNs, file shares, snapshots, and backups. This complexity is multiplied by the rapid growth in the sheer amount of data being managed, and increases the demands on both the capacity and performance of the storage infrastructure. As a result, IT is feeling more pressure to provide advanced solutions, and simple storage solutions with spreadsheet management systems are no longer sufficient. In addition, IT is feeling significant pressure to more effectively support the business, increase asset utilization, and improve information management and security all while holding down costs across the board. With the shift to the cloud, organizations absolutely must be able to support their applications' I/O requirements within and across systems, scale the infrastructure with the business, control both capital expenditures and asset lifecycle management costs, and provide highly available infrastructure for critical business applications. As a result, ESG research reveals, rapid elasticity and resource pooling were ranked highest among the five essential cloud computing characteristics. ESG Lab was impressed with the scalability and elasticity of the CloudByte ElastiStor storage system. CloudByte truly virtualizes the entire storage infrastructure with its Tenant Storage Machine, which is designed to support multitenancy. Each tenant is isolated with its own TSM, which features a full storage stack, multiple storage protocol engines, and dedicated resources. Individual TSMs can be scaled for both capacity and performance, while the entire storage system can scale by rapidly creating new TSMs for new tenants or applications. In addition, TSMs can be migrated across storage pools and ElastiStor systems to balance resource utilization across the entire world-wide infrastructure. Creating and managing TSMs and managing world-wide ElastiStor systems is simple and easy using ElastiCenter, the CloudByte management application. Accessed using any web browser, ElastiCenter can manage all aspects of multiple storage systems. ElastiCenter supports delegated administrators, allowing tenants to manage their own TSMs, relieving the management burden of service providers and large IT organizations. ElastiCenter enables the rapid tuning of the storage system by graphically showing current resource utilization and limits, which can be quickly and easily reconfigured on the fly with a few clicks of the mouse. ElastiStor storage is based on simple blocks of commodity hardware, which enables elasticity and scaling of the storage system to meet the ever-changing demands of cloud computing. Rapid deployment and scaling combined with easy-touse web-based management tools as well as storage isolation and virtualization in the form of Tenant Storage Machines provides a powerful and flexible approach to scalable storage for enterprise private clouds and service providers. Service providers that need flexible and scalable storage for their customers as well as organizations that are implementing private cloud services should seriously consider CloudByte ElastiStor storage architecture. All trademark names are property of their respective companies. Information contained in this publication has been obtained by sources The Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG) considers to be reliable but is not warranted by ESG. This publication may contain opinions of ESG, which are subject to change from time to time. This publication is copyrighted by The Enterprise Strategy Group, Inc. Any reproduction or redistribution of this publication, in whole or in part, whether in hard-copy format, electronically, or otherwise to persons not authorized to receive it, without the express consent of The Enterprise Strategy Group, Inc., is in violation of U.S. copyright law and will be subject to an action for civil damages and, if applicable, criminal prosecution. Should you have any questions, please contact ESG Client Relations at 508.482.0188.