Storage Whitepaper

Introduction

The UNEOS Datacentre/Edge Attached Storage (DAS/EAS) provides simplified, highly available and performant storage for both block and object services.

DAS/EAS offers customers low TCO with simple pay-what-you-use pricing.

Specifications

DAS/EAS is delivered to customers via existing network edge fabrics or dedicated cross-connect paths within datacentres. These paths can either be provisioned as a single or a dual cx for redundancy.

The DAS/EAS system offers the following capabilities:

DAS/EAS is delivered at either 10G, 25G, 40G or 100G directly into a layer 3 switch or capable router, or via suitable network connections (ie. Equinix Fabric). Direct connections into servers or other devices are also supported.

DAS/EAS volumes can be provisioned via restful APIs or storage portal web interfaces. Wholesale customers have access to the wholesale/whitelabel API in which they can provision storage for their own tenants directly.

Storage classes

DAS/EAS offers three major storage classes:

  • General Purpose SSD
  • High-performance provisioned IOPS SSD
  • General Purpose HDD

General Purpose SSD

DAS/EAS General Purpose offers volumes between 1GiB and 16TiB with an average maximum of 17,000 IOPS per volume. DAS/EAS-GP Storage is suitable for most standard workloads, including databases, webservers, mail and file servers.

General Purpose SSD specifications:

Volume Size: 1GiB – 16TiB

Maximum IOPS (16KiB I/O) 17,000

Maximum Throughput per volume: 1000MiB/s

Multi-Attach: Yes

Boot Volume: Yes

Snapshots: unlimited provided pool size availability.

Throughput bursting: Yes

High-performance provisioned IOPS SSD

DAS/EAS High-performance provisioned IOPS SSD offers volumes between 1GiB and 16TiB with sustained IOPS performance of up to 64,000 IOPS per volume. DAS/EAS-IOPS Storage is suitable for more specific workload requirements such as HPC, High performance Game Servers, Data warehouse analysis, large scale hyperconverged datasets, and other storage sensitive workloads.

High-performance provisioned IOPS SSD specifications:

Volume Size: 1GiB – 16TiB

Maximum IOPS (16KiB I/O) 64,000

Maximum Throughput per volume: 1000 MiB/s

Multi-Attach: Yes

Boot Volume: Yes

Snapshots: Yes, unlimited provided pool size availability.

Throughput bursting: Yes

General Purpose HDD

DAS/EAS General Purpose HDD offers volumes between 1GiB and 16TiB with an average maximum of 8000 IOPS per volume. DAS/EAS-GPH Storage is a lower cost per GB than SSD and is suitable for slower workloads or archival spaces where high and/or frequent retrieval is not necessary.

General Purpose HDD specifications:

Volume Size: 1GiB – 16TiB

Maximum IOPS (16KiB I/O) 8000

Maximum Throughput per volume: 1000 MiB/s

Multi-Attach: Yes

Boot Volume: Yes

Snapshots: Yes, unlimited provided pool size availability.

Throughput bursting: Yes

Availability & Redundancy

The DAS/EAS volume and block storage services are offered at 99.9999% availability, Object and NFS storage is offered at 99.999% availability. These numbers reflect single-zone availability which can be further increased by the use of geo-redundancy.

System redundancy is achieved by utilizing erasure coding to stripe a block across multiple fault domains, consisting of multiple machines and storage devices for each fault domain. With EC combined with automated self-replication healing, we can achieve a high level of data continuity and access resilience.

DAS/EAS employs automated scrubbing and bit rot detections to automatically restore failed stripes and to maintain redundancy during hardware loss scenarios.

Snapshots

Customers can choose to take any number of snapshots as long as there is enough space in their data pool to contain it. A snapshot is a read-only logical copy of a volume at a particular point in time: a checkpoint. Snapshots can also be used to restore/copy/clone a volume to quickly spin up a new server or VM.

Data Pools

Customers using DAS/EAS will be assigned one or more data pools. These pools are assigned a storage class, within this assigned data pool, customers may create as many volumes and snapshots as you’d like.

Billing

DAS/EAS Billing is based on a per hour – consumption-based model. You will only be billing for storage you consume for the period in which you use it. Each day the system will tally the consumption metrics of the last 24 hours and summarize that into a daily figure.

DAS/EAS is a very affordable low CapEx and low TCO service, delivering high throughput, safe storage for its users.

Object storage and NFS

DAS/EAS provides native S3 compliant object storage and NFS services via the NFS v4 and v4.1 protocols.

Customer can access object storage via either private CX or public access. Public access to the object storage will be charged at standard data rates.

Private access is limited only by your cx throughput and object storage limitations.

NFS is only provided by private CX due to the security limitations of the product.

Security and compliance

All DAS/EAS services are protected by multiple layers of hardware and software security. IP Whitelisting of ISCSI and Block mounting is enforced and is only available via the assigned private CX that customers connect with DAS/EAS.

Object storage features WAF protection as well as minimum password policies.

Administratively DAS/EAS is an air gapped system.

More details