Scale-Up vs. Scale-Out Storage: What’s the Difference?

In the evolving landscape of enterprise storage, the distinction between scale-up and scale-out storage architectures remains a focal point. As organizations face exponential data growth, understanding the nuances of these architectures is crucial for efficient storage management and expansion.

Storage capacity is the primary benchmark for evaluating storage devices, closely followed by the ease of capacity expansion. The urgency of scaling is a critical concern for storage administrators, often requiring a choice between adding hardware to an existing system or architecting a more complex solution such as a new data center. The former, known as scale-up, and the latter, scale-out, are differentiated by their inherent architectural designs.

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The Traditional Scale-Up Model

Scale-up storage has been the traditional approach. It typically involves a central pair of controllers overseeing multiple shelves of drives. Expansion is linear and limited; when space runs out, additional shelves of drives are integrated. The limitation of this model lies in the finite scalability of the storage controllers themselves.

As storage demands increase, the scale-up model encounters bottlenecks. New systems must be introduced to manage additional data, leading to increased complexity and isolated storage silos. This architecture also struggles with resource allocation inefficiency, as determining the optimal location for workloads becomes increasingly challenging.

RAID technology underpins drive failure protection in scale-up systems. However, RAID does not extend across multiple storage controllers, anchoring the drives to a specific controller and consequently cementing the scalability challenge of this architecture.

Figure 1 – Modular/Scale-up Storage Architecture

As an organization’s data volume grows, completely new systems need to be added to cope with the additional demands. Ultimately, this architecture becomes highly complex to manage. Inefficient resource allocation becomes an issue in deciding where workloads need to reside.

Figure 2 shows the potential for storage system sprawl.

Figure 2 – Modular/Scale-up Storage Silos

The Modern Scale-Out Strategy

In contrast, scale-out storage architectures, particularly those utilizing object storage, offer a dynamic alternative. Constructed with industry-standard servers, storage is linked to each node, reminiscent of Direct Attached Storage (DAS). Object storage software on each node unifies the nodes into a single cluster, creating a pooled storage resource with a unified namespace accessible to users and applications.

Protection against drive failure in a scale-out environment is not reliant on RAID but on RAIN (Redundant Array of Independent Nodes), which offers data resilience across nodes. RAIN supports several data protection methods, including replicas and erasure coding, which mirror RAID’s data safeguarding principles but are optimized for multi-node environments.

Figure 3 – Object/Scale-out Storage Architecture

Scale-Out with Cloudian HyperStore

Cloudian HyperStore exemplifies the scale-out storage solution. HyperStore utilizes object storage technology to enable seamless scalability, providing a storage platform that expands horizontally by adding nodes. Each node addition enhances storage capacity, as well as compute and networking capabilities, ensuring that performance scales with capacity.

HyperStore’s architecture allows for simple integration of new nodes, which the system then incorporates into the existing cluster. Data is intelligently distributed across the new configuration, maintaining performance and reliability without the limitations of traditional scale-up architectures.

In a multi-data center setup, Cloudian HyperStore’s geo-distributed capabilities shine. Nodes can be deployed across various geographical locations, and thanks to HyperStore’s geo-awareness, data can be strategically placed to optimize access speeds. Users access storage through a virtual address, with the system directing requests to the closest or most optimal node. This ensures fast response times and consistent data availability, irrespective of the user’s location.

HyperStore’s innovative approach not only addresses the immediate scalability challenges but also provides a future-proof solution that accommodates the ever-increasing volume and complexity of enterprise data. Its efficient use of resources, simplified management, and robust data protection mechanisms make it a compelling choice for enterprises looking to overcome the traditional hurdles of storage expansion.

In summary, the evolution from scale-up to scale-out storage, epitomized by solutions like Cloudian HyperStore, marks a significant transition in enterprise storage. Organizations can now address their data growth challenges more effectively, with architectures designed for the demands of modern data management.

For more information, watch our overview video on object storage or read the first part of our series on object storage vs. file storage.

You may also be interested in:
Using Storage Archives to Secure Data and Reduce Costs

 

Storage for a Multi-cloud World

Just about every organization is evaluating or using cloud in some fashion. When you look at various enterprises, there’s a wide range of deployment options to consider, but one thing is certain: as cloud spend continues to increase, some form of multi-cloud will be part of most enterprise cloud strategies, so it’s essential to have the right storage infrastructure in place to support multi-cloud.

 

 

Henry Chu, Director of Solution Management, Cloudian

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Storage for a Multi-cloud World

Just about every organization is evaluating or using cloud in some fashion. When you look at various enterprises, there’s a wide range of deployment options to consider: on-premises private cloud, hybrid using on-premises private cloud and public cloud, colo-services, or a mix of various public clouds. But one thing is certain, that as cloud spend continues to increase, some form of multi-cloud will be part of most enterprise cloud strategies, so it’s essential to have the right storage infrastructure in place to support multi-cloud.

 

Multi-Cloud Obstacles

What are some of the obstacles of doing multi-cloud? There are quite a lot, but let’s focus on a specific area. Data storage — specifically, object storage offerings across the clouds, as it provides the vast majority of capacity needs for multi-cloud environments. If you don’t have the right object storage solution, it can present significant challenges.

Most customers and cloud applications look for S3 compatibility as it is fast becoming the de facto standard for cloud storage. However, not every provider has an S3 service, and even if a provider does have one, the S3 APIs often are not the same or do not have the same compatibility, depending on where they’re deployed. As a result, APIs and UX differences can impact an organization’s processes and applications.

For example, API and UX differences among S3-compatible storage systems might require that applications and tools in a DevOps environment be changed or rewritten. This can lead to increased development and operational costs, such as those involving code changes to apps or admins having to change their tools to make things work with these incompatible services or APIs.

Managing multi-clouds can be another challenge. Because each provider has its own APIs and tools to manage cloud resources, this raises the question of how you manage a service across multiple clouds.

Finally, there’s the cost of operating across multiple clouds. Some providers impose additional egress charges for moving data out of their cloud, which can make certain operations cost prohibitive. Also, some storage platforms’ methods of providing data replication or availability across multiple clouds can generate additional egress charges.

Cloudian’s Multi-cloud S3-compatible Storage

Going to a multi-cloud deployment provides some inherent benefits:

  • Data locality: Ability to distribute the data closer to the application, where it’s needed.
  • Data Availability: Ability to protect your enterprise data by leveraging the hyperscalers as a second location, or use one hyperscaler with another hyperscaler as a DR site.
  • Cost benefits: Path to reduce TCO by leveraging cost advantages of different clouds.

With Cloudian HyperStore, the benefits are further enhanced. HyperStore provides a cloud-agnostic S3 object storage. Same S3 service, with unified management and access across any cloud deployments. Because it’s fully S3-compatible object storage, HyperStore can also be deployed on-prem and across any/all the major hyperscalers (AWS, Google, Azure).

With Hyperstore, you can have a single namespace and same S3-compatible service across all clouds, giving you the same S3 APIs and UX. It’s worth pointing out that Hyperstore has the most compatible S3 APIs compared with AWS S3. The S3 API is part of HyperStore’s core design, resulting in the highest levels of compatibility. And because S3 is the de facto standard for cloud storage, most — if not all — cloud applications will likely be compatible with HyperStore out of the box.

With HyperStore object storage in a multi-cloud deployment, you can enable cloud services such as Backup-as-a-Service, Archive-as-a-Service and Storage-as-a-Service as well as deploy data lakehouse solutions leveraging data locality from different cloud providers. In addition, HyperStore has the industry-leading S3 Object Lock implementation for data immutability — protecting data across any/all clouds from ransomware.

Broader Benefits of Cloudian HyperStore

With HyperStore, you get a simple but flexible configuration across all clouds.

As mentioned above, HyperStore provides a single namespace across all types of clouds, from on-prem private clouds to hyperscalers, and a single common management interface.  And with Cloudian’s HyperIQ, you get single-view-monitoring and analytics.

HyperStore can be deployed in a single region or multi-region configuration, and with multi-region, there’s the option of cross-region replication.

In terms of scale, HyperStore users can start small with just 3 nodes and scale up to an exabyte without interruption

S3 endpoint is flexible in that it can go to a single region, multi-region or even down to a specific data center (DC). Cloudian can also distribute S3 requests to a specific DC or across different regions with its HyperBalance load balancer.

The regions can be comprised of on-prem, AWS, Google, Azure, or any combination.

Cloudian has a wide range of storage policies that are configurable on a per S3 bucket basis. Storage policies define the protection for a bucket, using replication factor or erasure coding. The objects can then be distributed to different DCs or be kept at a single DC.

Additionally, the way HyperStore handles distribution of data across DCs defined by storage policies minimizes egress when writing object data into a HyperStore cluster. HyperStore distributes the PUT requests among each individual node that resides on each public cloud.  This provides a more efficient way to replicate data across multiple clouds by using more ingress and minimizing egress. In contrast, a store-and-forward method to replicate data across multiple clouds would use not only ingress but egress for the data that is being replicated, incurring additional egress charges.

As mentioned above, in a multi-region configuration, Cloudian can replicate across the regions with cross-region replication. This means remote sites can be used for DR or data backup and restore at any point in time.

Finally, HyperStore can tier to remote public clouds like AWS, GCP, or Azure even if the remote site does not have HyperStore, providing the option to move metadata and data to public clouds and have bimodal access.

In summary, for any enterprises that are adopting any form of multi-cloud — whether it be on-prem private cloud, hybrid, or any mix of public clouds — Cloudian HyperStore provides the common S3 service in a single namespace across all clouds. With the highest S3 API compatibility, it helps ensure application compatibility with S3 is maintained.

We will be diving further into HyperStore compatibility and other multi-cloud topics in future blogs. In the meantime, see our multi-cloud demos to learn more about the benefits of deploying Cloudian for these environments.

How to Get Full GitHub Benefits On-Premises

GitHub has traditionally been known as a commonly used cloud service to store, manage and share code using tools like Git. It is this service that’s most familiar to many developers. However, GitHub also has an offering that provides the ability to use GitHub on-premises with GitHub Enterprise Server (GHES) for enterprises that require a solution behind their firewall due to network restrictions or generally want tighter control over their data and access to it.

 

Henry Chu, Director of Solution Management, Cloudian

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How to Get Full GitHub Benefits On-Premises

GitHub has traditionally been known as a commonly used cloud service to store, manage and share code using tools like Git. It is this service that’s most familiar to many developers. However, GitHub also has an offering that provides the ability to use GitHub on-premises with GitHub Enterprise Server (GHES) for enterprises that require a solution behind their firewall due to network restrictions or generally want tighter control over their data and access to it. GHES includes GitHub Actions and GitHub Packages, both of which can use not only public cloud storage but also on-prem S3-compatible object storage, which is what’s needed for a complete on-prem deployment of GHES. Cloudian HyperStore provides a validated on-prem object storage for GHES with the highest levels of S3 compatibility. In addition, HyperStore can also be deployed across multiple public clouds, providing a distributed S3 service for GHES with a single namespace across multi-cloud infrastructure.

This blog focuses on how to deploy HyperStore with GitHub Actions and GitHub Packages on-prem.

GitHub Actions

GitHub Actions automates CI/CD workflows and are created from building, testing, pull, and deploying requests. Cloudian HyperStore provides the on-prem S3-compataible object storage for GitHub Actions to store data such as artifacts and logs.

Cloudian has validated the necessary S3 operations used by GitHub Actions with HyperStore (see Cloudian’s validation at GHES Storage Partners). Using GitHub’s ghe-storage-test.sh, all storage operations have passed.

To configure GitHub Actions with Cloudian HyperStore, go to GHES Site admin interface.

On Site admin, go to Management console.

At the Management console, go to Applications and Enable GitHub Actions. Under Artifact & Log Storage, choose Amazon S3.

Enter the following fields:

  • AWS Service URL: Enter the S3 endpoint configured for your HyperStore Cluster.
  • AWS S3 Bucket: Enter the name of the bucket to be used for GitHub Actions
  • AWS S3 Access Key: Enter the access key for the HyperStore user for the given bucket
  • AWS S3 Secret Key: Enter the secret key for the HyperStore user for the given bucket

Click on Test storage settings to validate the configuration. Then save the settings.

GitHub Packages

GitHub Packages gives you a safe way to publish and share application packages within your organization. With Cloudian HyperStore, you can achieve a complete on-prem deployment.

To configure GitHub Packages with HyperStore, go to Management console and then to Packages. Enable GitHub Packages.

Choose Amazon S3 for your storage.  Enter the following fields:

  • AWS Service URL: Enter the S3 endpoint configured for your HyperStore Cluster.
  • AWS S3 Bucket: Enter the name of the bucket to be used for GitHub Packages.
  • AWS S3 Access Key: Enter the access key for the HyperStore user for the given bucket
  • AWS S3 Secret Key: Enter the secret key for the HyperStore user for the given bucket

Click on Test storage settings to validate the configuration and then save the settings.

Summary

With GitHub Enterprise Server and Cloudian HyperStore, enterprises now have a solution to store, manage, and share code with full control behind the security of their firewall. HyperStore provides the S3-compatible object storage on-prem (or distributed over multi-cloud) for GitHub Actions, a solution for CI/CD workflows. Similarly, HyperStore can also be used as a storage target for GitHub Packages, a repository for application packages.

To learn more about HyperStore’s features and benefits, go to Scalable Enterprise Object Storage | Cloudian HyperStore.

Path to Data Insights – Data Observability Platform with an S3-Compatible Data Lake

Organizations today face the challenge of not only storing large data volumes but also being able to ingest, access and analyze the data to get insights on demand. That’s why they’re turning to observability solutions backed by scalable S3-compatible data lakes.

 

Steve Connors, Senior Alliances Manager, Cloudian

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Path to Data Insights – Data Observability Platform with an S3-Compatible Data Lake

 More than 90% of all data in the world was generated in just the last few years, and, according to IDC, the amount of data generated annually is expected to nearly triple from 2020 to 2025. This incredible growth presents the challenge of not only storing large data volumes but also, more importantly, of being able to ingest, access and analyze the data to get insights on demand. That’s why organizations are turning to data observability solutions backed by scalable S3 data lakes to break the silos and get business insights.

Monitoring vs Observability

Let’s first distinguish between monitoring and observability.

Monitoring refers to the processes and systems used by organizations to flag data for performance degradation and/or potential security breaches. Organizations can then configure these systems to send alerts and also automate the types of responses to certain events. Useful as it is, monitoring typically stays at one layer, either application or infrastructure and is only a partial solution.

Observability, on the other hand, provides full visibility into the health and performance of each layer of your environment. It starts with the capability to connect and ingest data from multiple sources into multiple tools and gives IT teams full visibility into their environment, from applications to infrastructure assets. Organizations are then able to observe their entire IT environment together and get insights to forecast future trends and outcomes which helps save time and money.

The Cloudian-Cribl Observability Platform

Cribl—a leading data analytics company and a key Cloudian technology alliance partner—has developed cutting-edge technology to solve the challenge of ingesting, managing and analyzing data more productively as well as efficiently. Cribl’s Stream product is an observability pipeline that connects to various sources of data, like networks, servers, applications, and software agents, and centralizes all of your observability data with full fidelity into an S3 data lake with Cloudian HyperStore object storage. This forms a modern observability platform based on a scale-out S3-compatible data lake designed for managing massive amounts and varieties of data, giving IT teams full control over every aspect of the data. The data is stored in HyperStore and always available for search and analysis. Cribl then allows customers to Replay (Cribl function) the data in Cloudian – applying filters and transformations as required – and feed it to higher level analytic tools like Splunk, Elastic and others.

The observability solution is also hybrid cloud-compatible, enabling organizations to reduce costs by having both on-prem and cloud assets simultaneously. Together, the solution built on Cribl and Cloudian lets you parse, restructure, and enrich data in flight – ensuring that you get the right data, where you want, and in the format you need. This provides organizations the opportunity to discover and understand their dynamic environments in real time and use the resulting data insights to make better informed decisions.

To learn more about the newly minted Cloudian-Cribl partnership how it can help you, register for the upcoming Cribl-Cloudian webinar on Nov. 9, 8am PST. You can also read more about the Cribl-Cloudian solution here.

Supporting Multiple Tenants with Bucket-Level Object Storage Policies

The ability to create and manage multiple control plane configuration sets (or storage policies) is needed to support multiple tenants and use cases in an object storage system.

Gary Ogasawara

 

 

Gary Ogasawara, CTO, Cloudian

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Supporting Multiple Tenants with Bucket-Level Object Storage Policies

The ability to create and manage multiple control plane configuration sets (or storage policies) is needed to support multiple tenants and use cases in an object storage system. Cloudian’s HyperStore object storage software supports multiple, bucket-level storage policies as a fundamental architectural principle. The following sections describe some design choices we made in how to manage and use those storage policies.

Why Bucket-Level Storage Policies

Multiple Bucket-Level Storage Policies

Figure 1: Multiple, bucket-level storage policies

In object storage systems (e.g., Amazon S3), there are two main concepts to organize data: objects and buckets. Objects, such as text files, images, videos, etc., are the data to be stored. Buckets are containers for objects used to group objects together. When creating a new object, the user specifies the bucket to use. Each object belongs to exactly one bucket. Applying an operation to a bucket can affect all the objects in that bucket. For example, access control settings on a bucket dictate user access to the objects in the bucket.

{

“Version”:”2012-10-17″,

“Statement”: [

{

“Sid”:”GrantAnonymousReadPermissions”,

“Effect”:”Allow”,

“Principal”: “*”,

“Action”:[“s3:GetObject”],

“Resource”:[“arn:aws:s3:::awsexamplebucket1/*”]

}

]

}

Figure 2: An example bucket policy that grants anonymous GET Object access to the bucket “awsexamplebucket1”.  From Overview of managing access – Amazon Simple Storage Service

In addition to the data plane of operations on objects and buckets such as storing an object, there are control plane operations that determine how that data is managed on the system. When the object storage system is managed directly by the user, the user must determine the control plane configuration settings. For example, a replication policy on the number of object replicas stored can be set for the system. There are many other control plane configurations for data, including compression type, encryption, geo-distribution across availability zones and regions, data consistency level, and more.

Legacy object storage systems support a single, static control plane configuration for the data. However, for users that want to use objects for different purposes, a single configuration is insufficient. For example, the same user may have a use case that requires strong consistency, such as data used for transactions, while another use case – such as historical log data – can be stored with eventual consistency. Another common situation is that the storage system may have multiple tenants where each tenant has different requirements on data durability and availability. In addition, both the use cases and the tenants may change over time. Having the option to create new storage policies to match the changing use of the storage system is critical.

Assigning a Storage Policy to Data

One of the first questions we addressed was how should a storage policy be assigned to data. Because the primary concepts of an object storage system are simply an object and a bucket, those two concepts were considered. If object granularity were used, then each object can be assigned to its own storage policy. This can be set in an HTTP header when the object is uploaded, e.g, “x-amz-storage-policy: eu4policy”, but this requires the client to know the different storage policies. It also makes comprehending the different storage policies more difficult because each object, even different versions of the same object, may have different storage policies.

Alternatively, assigning a storage policy to a bucket is a good cognitive fit because buckets are already used to group objects together. Then the workflow is when a bucket is created, a storage policy is selected for the bucket and applied to all objects to be created in the bucket. A user can then split their data by storage policies by selecting a bucket and creating a new bucket if a different storage policy is warranted. These considerations made it clear that a per-bucket or bucket-level storage policy was the best choice.

The Configuration Content of a Storage Policy

Some control plane configuration settings were mentioned earlier. The tradeoff was to avoid having an overly verbose and complex policy by including every setting vs. providing enough control to the user to be useful. In this case, user feedback was needed to understand how they wanted to use multiple storage policies. We interviewed several existing users for this purpose. Some configuration settings were unanimously cited, including replication strategy (replicas or erasure coding, number of fragments, geo-distribution) and data consistency level (read, write, multiple availability zones). One interesting learning was that users wanted flexibility to handle use cases that were not yet known. As a result, the set of configuration settings grew over time as more control to handle new use cases was requested.

Creating a new storage policy

Figure 3: Creating a new storage policy

Managing a Storage Policy

When it came to managing a storage policy, considerations included how to create, view, edit, and delete storage policies, how to manage access, and how to present this capability in an easy-to-use, functional user experience. An HTTP API was first designed that provided all the functionality to manage both a single storage policy and multiple storage policies. Then various iterations of a user interface were developed. The user interface was allowed to only use the existing API. This ensures that users can develop their own software to use the API and have full functionality.

Bringing It All Together

An illustrative example of multiple, per-bucket storage policies is a hub-and-spoke model where the hub is a central data center and multiple satellite offices are connected to the hub by the spokes as depicted in Figure 4.  A large satellite office (DC1) is configured with a storage policy that stores 3 replicas of each object in the satellite office data center and 1 replica in the central data center (DC0). A small satellite office (DC2) is configured with a storage policy with 1 replica in the satellite office and 1 replica in the central data center.

Storage policies for a hub-and-spoke model

Figure 4: Storage policies for a hub-and-spoke model

Next Steps

The bucket-level storage policies functionality has been an important discriminator of Cloudian’s HyperStore object system. It “future-proofs” the system since new users and groups and new use cases can be accommodated by adding new storage policies to a running system.

Future work includes how much flexibility is allowed to change existing storage policies that may already apply to millions of objects and to associate different billing rates to different storage policies.

For further information on Cloudian HyperStore and its multiple storage policies, please request a demo or download a free trial.

Meeting Hybrid Cloud Demands: Microsoft AzureStack HCI and Cloudian HyperStore

Microsoft and Cloudian enable organizations to leverage the benefits of public cloud while keeping some infrastructure, applications and data on-premises, behind the firewall and fully under the organization’s control.

 

Steve Connors, Senior Alliances Manager, Cloudian

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Meeting Hybrid Cloud Demands: Microsoft AzureStack HCI and Cloudian HyperStore

Over the last two years, hybrid cloud has become the dominant IT deployment model, with 82% of IT leaders saying they’ve adopted it in a Cisco report earlier this year.[1] It enables organizations to leverage the benefits of public cloud while keeping some infrastructure, applications and data on-premises, behind the firewall and fully under the organization’s control. Reflecting the increasing adoption of hybrid cloud, global hyperscalers have introduced new services to meet the demand and ensure a seamless experience across public and private clouds. Here we take a look at the Microsoft AzureStack HCI service and how Cloudian’s HyperStore object storage works with the service.

According to Microsoft, “AzureStack HCI is a hyperconverged infrastructure host platform integrated with Azure. Run Windows and Linux virtual machines on-premises with existing IT skills and familiar tools. Delivered as an Azure subscription service, Azure Stack HCI is always up-to-date and can be installed on your choice of server hardware.”

Cloudian HyperStore, a leading scale-out storage system, has been validated to work with Azure Stack HCI, enabling customers to store and protect large amounts of unstructured data on prem and use the Azure public cloud for real-time, on-demand computing power, which is more cost effective than buying additional hardware.

HyperStore employs policy-based tools to replicate or tier data to Azure for offsite disaster recovery, capacity expansion or data analysis in the cloud. HyperStore offers limitless scalability, multi-tenancy and military-grade security. This includes the ability to isolate storage pools using local and remote authentication methods such as Password, AD, LDAP, IAM and certificate-based authentication.

Deploying Cloudian HyperStore on Azure Stack HCI provides the following key benefits:

  • Turnkey HCI solution – network, compute, storage and virtualization
  • Hybrid cloud readiness – seamless movement of data across on-prem and public cloud environments
  • Unified view of data – a single namespace across multiple locations
  • Reduced operational costs – savings on data egress and bandwidth charges

To learn more about the Cloudian HyperStore-Azure Stack HCI hybrid cloud solution, go to cloudian.com/microsoft/#azure.

[1] Report: 82% of IT leaders are adopting the hybrid cloud, Tech Republic, May 25, 2022

On-prem S3 Data Lakehouse for Modern Analytics and More

The modernization of the data analytics architecture started in the cloud, but not everyone is able to or willing to move their data to the cloud, for data gravity, security, and/or compliance reasons. Organizations can now implement an S3 data lakehouse and get the same benefits with greater control.

amit rawlani

 

 

Amit Rawlani, Director of Solutions & Technology Alliances, Cloudian
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On-prem S3 Data Lakehouse for Modern Analytics and More

Data Lakehouse Origin

The modernization of the data analytics architecture started in the cloud. This was driven by the limits of traditional data warehouses with a conventional appliance-based approach, which could not provide the needed scalability, was cumbersome to work with and expensive, and could only serve one use case.  In response, companies such as Snowflake and Databricks took the traditional OLAP operations and showed the benefits of combining the flexibility, cost-efficiency, and scale of a data lake built on cloud storage (based on the S3 API) with the data management and ACID transactions of a data warehouse, thereby giving us the modern data lakehouse.

However, not everyone is able to or willing to move their data to the cloud, for data gravity, security, and/or compliance reasons. Customers – especially enterprise customers – have started replicating the same architecture that Snowflake pioneered within their own data centers and/or in hybrid cloud configurations. Specifically, by using S3-compatible object storage platforms like Cloudian HyperStore, customers can now implement an S3 data lakehouse and get the same efficiencies with greater control.

The Many Benefits of a Data Lakehouse Architecture

An on-prem data lakehouse solution offers the same cloudification of the data analytics environment, but behind the security of users’ firewalls. This gives organizations full control to implement the right security protocols, compliance measures, and audit-logging for their needs.

In addition to providing public cloud-like scalability, the data lakehouse architecture also gives customers the ability to scale the data lake (storage) independent of the compute, a big difference from the shared-everything architectures that bogged down the big data world a few years ago.

Standardization on the S3 API — the de facto storage standard of the cloud — enables enterprises to continue to build and reuse applications already built for the cloud with their on-prem data lakehouse. Standardization also allows for use cases beyond analytics, such as a repository for Splunk data and immutable backup storage for ransomware protection — generally a repository for all unstructured data (media, images, videos, etc.) — and all supported in the same S3 data lakehouse.

These are just a few reasons for considering S3-compatible storage such as Cloudian for your data lakehouse solution. You can read about others at 7 Reasons to Run Data Analytics on a Cloudian S3 Data Lakehouse. In addition, to learn more about data lakehouses and how Cloudian can help you meet your data analytics needs, please visit https://cloudian.com/solutions/data-lakehouse/

Cloudian Enhances MSP Partner Program

Organizations face a range of challenges in managing and protecting their data, providing new market opportunities for service providers. Cloudian’s enhanced MSP program ensures MSP partners are well-positioned to capitalize on these opportunities by delivering greater value-add to their customers and driving increased growth and profit.

Cloudian Enhances MSP Partner Program

Organizations face a range of challenges in managing and protecting their data. Unstructured data is growing more than 50% annually, and users expect access to their files anytime and anywhere. At the same, ransomware continues to pose a major threat — attacks rose 92.7% in 2021 compared to 2020* — showing how important it is to increase data security protections on different levels. In addition, regulatory requirements such as GDPR and HIPAA, along with concerns about data sovereignty, are imposing new constraints on how data is stored and handled. Finally, IT budgets are under increasing pressure, and hiring needed IT expertise is often difficult in today’s labor market.

All of this creates opportunities for Managed Service Providers (MSPs) to help customers address these challenges, and Cloudian’s newly enhanced MSP partner program ensures our partners are well-positioned to capitalize on these opportunities.

Providing a Leading S3 Data Management Platform

Cloudian’s HyperStore object storage solution offers many benefits, including:

  • Feature-rich management tool set – Integrated tools such as billing and quality of service controls make it easy for MSPs to manage their business and service delivery.
  • Secure multi-tenancy – Keeping one customer’s data separated from others while leveraging a shared infrastructure is a must-have feature for any cloud storage service. HyperStore allows multiple users and applications to share the same infrastructure while ensuring no-compromise data protection. Role-Based Access Controls (RBAC) also give MSPs’ customers management access within their environments.
  • Customized SLAs – HyperStore manages data at the bucket level, allowing MSP partners to build different storage and protection policies based on data durability, efficiency, and cost.
  • Native S3 API compatibility – HyperStore is fully S3 compatible. That means it supports all S3-compatible applications and can provide seamless data management across on-premises and public cloud environments.
  • Military-grade security – Features include Object Lock-based data immutability for ransomware protection, b, encryption for data at rest and in flight, and RBAC/IAM access policies and authentication. Certifications include Common Criteria EAL-2, FIPS 140-2, SEC Rule 17a-4(f), FINRA Rule 4511 and CFTC Rule 1.31(c)-(d).
  • Limitless, modular scalability – Unlike many other object storage providers requiring users to over-provision, Cloudian lets you start small and grow without limitations. As more capacity is needed, you can non-disruptively add additional nodes or even new sites, and that capacity becomes part of the available storage pool.
  • Global data fabric, single namespace – With HyperStore, you can manage data as a single storage pool, no matter where the data resides. That means petabytes of capacity can be spread across regions and data centers and still be managed from a central location.
  • Cost-effective capacity – HyperStore offers cost savings of up to 70% compared to traditional disk-based storage systems, enabling users to add significantly more capacity for the same budget.

Foundation for High-Value Services

Cloudian’s MSP Partner Program enables MSPs to create innovative offerings for various high-value use cases, either stand-alone or in conjunction with Cloudian’s technology partners. These services include:

  • Storage-as-a-Service (STaaS) – Provide additional storage capacity on a subscription or consumption (VMware VCPP) basis to help customers address their growing volumes of data. Seamlessly integrate with VMware Cloud Director.
  • Backup-as-a-Service (BaaS) – Deploy HyperStore as the backup target for leading backup platforms such as Veeam, Commvault, Rubrik, and Veritas.
  • Ransomware Protection-as-a-Service (RPaaS) – Leverage HyperStore’s Object Lock-based data immutability to prevent cybercriminals from encrypting or deleting data, thereby enabling quicky recovery of the unchanged data in the event of a ransomware attack, without paying ransom.
  • Archive-as-a-Service (AaaS) – With HyperStore’s limitless scalability and data durability (up to 14 nines), provide an ideal long-term data repository.
  • Disaster Recovery-as-a-Service (DRaaS) – Help customers avoid the risks of the business and organizational disruptions resulting from disasters by keeping a copy of their data offsite.
  • Big Data-as-a-Service (BDaaS) – Leveraging Cloudian’s rich metadata tagging, facilitate the application of machine learning and analytics to large data sets, enabling new insights, discoveries, and operational efficiencies.
  • Containers-as-a-Service (CaaS) – With Cloudian’s fully native S3 compatibility, provide persistent, enterprise-grade storage for Kubernetes environments.
  • Office 365-Backup-as-a-Service (ObaaS) – Help your clients address the urgent need to protect their Office 365 data with HyperStore as a secure backup repository.

Besides HyperStore, MSP partners can also incorporate Cloudian’s HyperIQHyperFile, and HyperBalance solutions into their service offerings. In addition, MSP program partners get access to Cloudian training, technical support, and collateral.

MSP Partner Testimonials

Here is just a sampling of what partners say about our solutions:

“Cloudian and VMware are helping us compete with the largest public cloud providers on a level playing field.” – Peter Zafiris, Senior Infrastructure Engineer, AUCloud (Read more about AUCloud and Cloudian here.)

“Our Cloudian partnership has enabled us to pursue new market opportunities, deliver enhanced value to our customers and drive more profitable growth.” – Adam Svoboda, principal cybersecurity strategist, Eagle Technologies (Read more about Eagle Technologies and Cloudian here.)

To learn more about Cloudian MSP Partner program, visit https://cloudian.com/msp-partners/.

To sign up for the program, go to https://cloudian.com/reseller-partners/.


* https://www.securitymagazine.com/articles/97166-ransomware-attacks-nearly-doubled-in-2021

Fight Kubernetes Ransomware with Kasten and Cloudian

Adam BerghAdam Bergh
Cloud Native Technical Partnerships at Kasten by Veeam
LinkedIn Profile

amit rawlani

Amit Rawlani
Director Technology Alliances, Product & Solution Marketing, Cloudian Inc.

LinkedIn Profile

The threat of ransomware should be thought of as serious problem for all enterprises. According to an annual report on global cyber security, there were 304 million ransomware attacks worldwide in 2020 — a 62% increase from 2019. While most IT organizations are aware of the continuously rising threat of ransomware on traditional applications and infrastructure, modern applications running on Kubernetes are also at risk. The rapid rise of critical applications and data moving into Kubernetes clusters has caught the attention of those seeking to exploit what is perceived to be a new and emerging space. This can leave many organizations ill prepared to fight back.

Kubernetes Vulnerabilities

Kubernetes itself and many of the most common applications that run in Kubernetes are open-source products. Open-source means that the underly code that makes up the applications is freely available for any to review and find potential vulnerabilities. While not overly common, open-source products can often lead to exploitable bugs being discovered by malicious actors. In addition, misconfigured access controls can unintentionally lead to unauthorized access to applications or even the entire cluster. Kubernetes is updated quarterly, and some applications as often as every week, so it’s crucial for organizations to stay up to date with patching.

Surprisingly, many organizations that use Kubernetes don’t yet have a backup and recovery solution in place — which is a last line of defense against an attack. As ransomware becomes more sophisticated, clusters and applications are at risk of being destroyed, and without a means to restore them, you could suffer devastating data and application loss in the case of an attack.

What to Look for In a Kubernetes Ransomware Protection Platform

When looking to an effective defense against ransomware in your K8s environment, think about these four core capabilities:

  1. Backup integrity and immutability: Since backup is your last line of defense, it’s important that your backup solution is reliable, and it’s critical to be confident that your backup target storage locations contain the information you need to recover applications in case of an attack. Having guaranteed immutability of your backup data is a must.
  2. High-performance recovery: No one wants to pay a ransom because it was faster to unencrypt your data than recover it from your backup system. The ability to work quickly to recover resources is critical, as the cost of ransom typically increases over time. Being confident that your recovery performance can meet target requirements even as the amount of data grows over time.
  3. Operational Simplicity: Operations teams must work at scale across multiple clusters in hybrid environments that span cloud and on-premises locations. When you’re working in a high-pressure environment following a ransomware attack, simplicity of operations become paramount.

Cloudian and Kasten by Veeam Have the Solution

Kasten By Veeam and Cloudian have teamed to bring a truly cloud native approach to this mission critical problem. The Kasten K10 data management software platform has been purpose-built for Kubernetes. K10’s deep integrations with Kubernetes distributions and cloud storage systems provide for protection and mobility of your entire Kubernetes application. Cloudian’s HyperStore is an enterprise-grade S3-compatible object storage platform running in your data center. Cloudian makes it easy to use private cloud storage to protect your Kubernetes applications with a verified integration with Kasten. With native support of the cloud standard S3 API, including S3 Object Lock data immutability, Kasten and Cloudian offer seamless protection for modern applications at up to 70% less cost than public cloud.

Kasten Cloudian blog diagram 1

Fast recovery: Cloudian provides a local, disk-based object storage target for backing up modern apps using Kasten K10 over your local, high-speed network. The solution lets you backup and restore large data sets in a fraction of the time required for public cloud storage, leading to enhanced Recovery Point Objectives (RPO) and Recovery Time Objectives (RTO).

Security and Ransomware Protection

Cloudian is a hardened object storage system that includes enhanced security features such as secure shell, encryption, integrated firewall and RBAC/IAM access controls to protect backup copies against malware. es in a shared-storage environment. In addition, to protect data from ransomware attacks, Cloudian HyperStore and Kasten support Object Lock for air-tight data immutability all the way up to the operating system root level.

Kasten-Validated Solution

Cloudian is Kasten-validated to ensure trouble-free integration. Kasten’s native support for the S3 API enables seamless integration with Cloudian HyperStore.

Easy as 1-2-3

Setting up Kasten K10 and Cloudian Ransomware Protection is as simple as 3 easy steps:

1. Create a new target bucket on Cloudian HyperStore and enable Object Lock.

Kasten Cloudian blog diagram 2


2. After Kasten K10 installation, check the “Enable Immutable Backups” box when adding a target S3 object storage bucket.

Kasten Cloudian blog diagram 3


3. Validate the Cloudian object storage bucket and specify your protection period.

Kasten Cloudian blog diagram 4

GET STARTED WITH KASTEN K10 TODAY!