Shortly before its acquisition by Western Digital, one of its historical shareholders, Amplidata unveiled its new generation of object system, called Himalaya, designed to meet the needs of the "hyperscale" type and based on the same fundamentals as Amplistor.
Active Archive: a ready-to-use object storage system based on the Amplidata platform
It is based on Himalaya that Western Digital has developed the Active Archive solution. Active Archive is a hardware appliance that ships the Himalaya code and book to customers, ready to use. The appliance is in the form of a 42 U rack system integrating all the elements (controllers and JBOD) allowing the implementation of an object storage system .
From a technical point of view, each rack is optimized to deliver an optimal Himalaya system. At the top of the rack are 3 control nodes (1U Supermicro servers) running the Amplidata BitSpread software, the metadata controller and the node administration software).
Then there are six storage nodes (again 1U Supermicro servers), each connected to one of the JBOD specially developed by HGST. These disc drawers are capable of accommodating 98 8TB helium hard drives (Helio-Seal range) in 4U. The rest of the space in the rack is occupied by smart PDUs and network switches that provide the interconnection between the nodes, but also provide interconnection with the outside. It is thus possible to aggregate multiple Rack Active Archive into a massive archive system of several hundred petabytes.
4.7 petabytes of raw capacity per rack
According to HGST a 42U rack is designed to deliver a raw capacity of 4.7 Po. But the actual capacity of the system, when configured to use the BitSpread algorithm, is about 28% lower to this total. And it degrades even more, if we implement the mechanism of replication between several datacenters (GeoSpread), etc.
According to HGST, Active Archive natively supports the S3 object storage protocol and can also provide NAS access (NFS and CIFS) if paired with an Avere NAS gateway.
According to HGST a 42U rack is designed to deliver a raw capacity of 4.7 Po. But the actual capacity of the system, when configured to use the BitSpread algorithm, is about 28% lower to this total. And it degrades even more, if we implement the mechanism of replication between several datacenters (GeoSpread), etc.
According to HGST, Active Archive natively supports the S3 object storage protocol and can also provide NAS access (NFS and CIFS) if paired with an Avere NAS gateway.
Active Scale: a storage system for more "modest" needs
Western Digital recently completed its offering by unveiling the P100 ActiveScale, a smaller but more economical system, available in three versions capable of storing between 720 TB of data in 6U and 19.4B of data in 5 racks. Public prices for the new system start at 22 cents per GB against 49 cents for the Active Archive System.
HGST recommends the P100 ActiveSystem for customers who need less than 2PB of data. The manufacturer aims to meet the needs of media streaming, backup and archiving applications. It also targets the massive unstructured data storage market.
To do this, the ActiveSystem P100 is certified and integrated with several solutions on the market as the archiving software Versity, the cloud gateways CTERA or backup solutions Veritas and CommVault. Like its big brother, it can also serve as a low-cost storage back-end for Avere NAS acceleration bridges.
Modular configuration
The system consists of a minimum of three ingestion nodes (1U x86 servers for ingesting data, performing erasure coding and data distribution operations) and storage nodes (which are responsible for persistence of data). These storage nodes are delivered in blocks of six 1U servers - QuantaGrid D51PH servers, manufactured by Quanta Cloud Technologies - each capable of hosting 12 HStart UltraStar HelioSeal 10TB capacity drives. The system can evolve in several dimensions. Performance is increased by increasing the number of ingestion servers and capacity is increased by adding new slices of six storage servers in increments of 720 TB of gross capacity. In the cluster, the different servers are interconnected via 10G Ethernet switches.
According to Western Digital, the payload per 720 TB storage block varies between 480 TB and 508 TB depending on the level of erasure coding used for data protection. This choice also affects the durability of the data, which varies between 11 new (99,999,999,999%) and 15 new, as well as the performances. The ActiveScale P100 is not capable of replicating its data to another ActiveScale, but it is possible to disperse data across multiple data centers through the WD 3-Geo geo-distribution mechanism to protect against a disaster. It is therefore necessary to implement ActiveScale P100 systems in three different sites ...
As with the Active Archive System, the ActiveScale P100 can be supervised via the Western Digital ActiveScale CM cloud analytics tool. This cloud portal tracks the health of the system, predicts the necessary evolutions of capabilities, and proactively manages storage on the system.
The initial setup for an Active Scale system has a retail price of $ 150,000, but customers are expected to pay an average of just under $ 100,000, according to Dave Tang, General Manager of Western Data Data Systems.
Western Digital recently completed its offering by unveiling the P100 ActiveScale, a smaller but more economical system, available in three versions capable of storing between 720 TB of data in 6U and 19.4B of data in 5 racks. Public prices for the new system start at 22 cents per GB against 49 cents for the Active Archive System.
HGST recommends the P100 ActiveSystem for customers who need less than 2PB of data. The manufacturer aims to meet the needs of media streaming, backup and archiving applications. It also targets the massive unstructured data storage market.
To do this, the ActiveSystem P100 is certified and integrated with several solutions on the market as the archiving software Versity, the cloud gateways CTERA or backup solutions Veritas and CommVault. Like its big brother, it can also serve as a low-cost storage back-end for Avere NAS acceleration bridges.
Modular configuration
The system consists of a minimum of three ingestion nodes (1U x86 servers for ingesting data, performing erasure coding and data distribution operations) and storage nodes (which are responsible for persistence of data). These storage nodes are delivered in blocks of six 1U servers - QuantaGrid D51PH servers, manufactured by Quanta Cloud Technologies - each capable of hosting 12 HStart UltraStar HelioSeal 10TB capacity drives. The system can evolve in several dimensions. Performance is increased by increasing the number of ingestion servers and capacity is increased by adding new slices of six storage servers in increments of 720 TB of gross capacity. In the cluster, the different servers are interconnected via 10G Ethernet switches.
According to Western Digital, the payload per 720 TB storage block varies between 480 TB and 508 TB depending on the level of erasure coding used for data protection. This choice also affects the durability of the data, which varies between 11 new (99,999,999,999%) and 15 new, as well as the performances. The ActiveScale P100 is not capable of replicating its data to another ActiveScale, but it is possible to disperse data across multiple data centers through the WD 3-Geo geo-distribution mechanism to protect against a disaster. It is therefore necessary to implement ActiveScale P100 systems in three different sites ...
As with the Active Archive System, the ActiveScale P100 can be supervised via the Western Digital ActiveScale CM cloud analytics tool. This cloud portal tracks the health of the system, predicts the necessary evolutions of capabilities, and proactively manages storage on the system.
The initial setup for an Active Scale system has a retail price of $ 150,000, but customers are expected to pay an average of just under $ 100,000, according to Dave Tang, General Manager of Western Data Data Systems.