It’s not enough to invest in perfectly coded infrastructure and risk losing it all with a weak storage system. Data security is risky business, and when it comes to your business’ data, there is no such thing as too secure. Give your data the VIP treatment with a secure and scalable software defined storage solution to keep your most precious data in safe hands.
In addition to traditional enterprise-class storage technology, many organisations now have a variety of storage needs with varying performance and price requirements. With this in mind, Aptira can provide a cost efficient, scaleable and secure software defined storage solution, customised to meet your requirements.
Our storage solutions easily integrate with enterprise storage platforms (one of our favourites is SUSE Enterprise Storage), as well as open source solutions Swift, Ceph, GlusterFS and more. We can also support live migrations and secure your data as part of a Managed Cloud strategy.
Taking the right approach to software defined storage will give you a highly scalable solution that radically reduces your storage costs in terms of both capital cost and operation expenditure. This solution also has to be simple, robust, and flexible – all while delivering industry-leading functionality.
There are various commodity storage back end technologies available. Depending on your cloud user’s needs, you can implement one or many of these technologies in different combinations. OpenStack clouds explicitly support three types of persistent storage: Object Storage, Block Storage, and File-based storage. You can learn more about OpenStack Storage Concepts here.
For enterprise-level businesses, the demand for additional data storage is growing too fast for traditional storage options to continue to be an affordable solution. Continuing down this path means you’ll be forced to increase your budget dramatically in order to keep up with your data needs.
However, there is another answer—SUSE Enterprise Storage. This intelligent software defined storage solution, powered by Ceph technology, enables you to transform your enterprise storage infrastructure and reduce costs while providing unlimited scalability. The result is an affordable and easy-to-manage enterprise storage solution.
Becoming a Solution Partner in the SUSE Partner Program is no mean feat – it is a status awarded to select partners. As the highest partner tier in the Program, it recognises partners who have the deep technical expertise and commitment to building only the best solutions that provide maximum efficiency and high availability to demanding enterprise business clients.
Aptira has been a partner since 2016, – and is SUSE’s first solution partner in APJ – sharing our expertise across a range of different Open Source projects, most recently within the Tertiary education sector with SUSE Enterprise Storage. We like to partner with like-minded companies. In SUSE, we have a mutually complementary portfolio, and a joint desire to concentrate on offerings that are commercially better for customers.
Ceph is a scalable storage solution that replicates data across commodity storage nodes.
Ceph utilises an object storage mechanism for data storage and exposes the data via different types of storage interfaces to the end user it supports interfaces for: – Object storage – Block storage – File-system interfaces
Ceph provides support for the same Object Storage API as swift and can be used as a back end for the Block Storage service (cinder) as well as back-end storage for glance images.
Ceph supports thin provisioning implemented using copy-on-write. This can be useful when booting from volume because a new volume can be provisioned very quickly. Ceph also supports keystone-based authentication (as of version 0.56), so it can be a seamless swap in for the default OpenStack swift implementation.
Ceph’s advantages include:
There is a special place in our hearts at Aptira for the OpenStack Object Storage project/service known as Swift. Many of us had prior experience with it when we came to Aptira and since we started we’ve done a whole bunch of interesting implementations for our customers in Australia and APAC. Internally and amongst most of the other implementers that we speak with in the OpenStack community is that Swift has always represented the gold standard for what we feel an OpenStack service should be:
Object storage is implemented in OpenStack by the Object Storage service (swift). Users access binary objects through a REST API. If your intended users need to archive or manage large datasets, you should provide them with Object Storage service. Additional benefits include:
You should consider using the OpenStack Object Storage service if you eventually plan on distributing your storage cluster across multiple data centers, if you need unified accounts for your users for both compute and object storage, or if you want to control your object storage with the OpenStack Dashboard. For more information, see the Swift project page.
The Block Storage service (cinder) in OpenStack. Because these volumes are persistent, they can be detached from one instance and re-attached to another instance and the data remains intact.
The Block Storage service supports multiple back ends in the form of drivers. Your choice of a storage back end must be supported by a block storage driver.
Most block storage drivers allow the instance to have direct access to the underlying storage hardware’s block device. This helps increase the overall read/write IO. However, support for utilizing files as volumes is also well established, with full support for NFS, GlusterFS and others.
These drivers work a little differently than a traditional block storage driver. On an NFS or GlusterFS file system, a single file is created and then mapped as a virtual volume into the instance. This mapping and translation is similar to how OpenStack utilizes QEMU’s file-based virtual machines stored in /var/lib/nova/instances.
In multi-tenant OpenStack cloud environment, the Shared File Systems service (manila) provides a set of services for management of shared file systems. File-based storage supports multiple back-ends in the form of drivers, and can be configured to provision shares from one or more back-ends. Share servers are virtual machines that export file shares using different file system protocols such as NFS, CIFS, GlusterFS, or HDFS.
The Shared File Systems service is persistent storage and can be mounted to any number of client machines. File-based storage can also be detached from one instance and attached to another instance without data loss. During this process the data are safe unless the Shared File Systems service itself is changed or removed.
Users interact with the Shared File Systems service by mounting remote file systems on their instances with the following usage of those systems for file storing and exchange. The Shared File Systems service provides shares which is a remote, mountable file system. You can mount a share and access a share from several hosts by several users at a time. With shares, you can also:
Aptira can offer Disaster Recovery services by deploying a second site that will allow your business operations to continue should Aptira’s primary site fail catastrophically. This site has completely separate infrastructure for power and Internet connectivity, allowing you to survive everything but the most catastrophic scenarios.
Data will be copied to the second site on a daily or weekly basis or in real-time by implementing mirroring between these two sites. These backups will be stored on a backup server, and will be ready for restoration to a production grade disk array at all times. If a disaster occurs, we will activate the last backup as soon as practical, and commence restoring services.
