+ IBM Cloud Overview
QuantaStor 5 SDS on Bare Metal servers delivers new levels of agility to IT organizations seeking dedicated, highly-secure and hyper-scale storage across the IBM Cloud. Featuring unified file, block and object protocol support, and unique grid management technology, QuantaStor storage appliances address a broad set of workloads including server virtualization, big data, cloud backup, media editing, deep archive, and high-performance compute applications. QuantaStor 5 is designed, integrated and certified for use with all Mass Storage Servers in IBM Cloud datacenters worldwide
Solutions
QuantaStorSAN/NAS servers provided block (iSCSI) and file (NFS/SMB) storage for a wide variety of use cases including server virtualization, data analytics, backup storage and databases/OLTP. Hybrid configurations leverage a combination of HDDs and SSDs to provide fast and reliable, storage with cost-efficient IBM Bare Metal hardware.
QuantaStor Scale-Out storage clusters provide block and S3 compatible object storage using erasure-coding and replica based data distribution technology to achieve high-availability and fault-tolerance.
QuantaStor NAS gateway appliances can be configured to periodically back-up local NAS storage to IBM Cloud Object Storage as objects or cache metadata as a pure NAS pass-thru gateway to IBM Cloud Object Storage.
QuantaStor scale-out NAS Archive configurations provide highly-available file storage suitablearchive applications with lower performance requirements. SSD is added to each appliance to accelerate write performance and each NAS Archive cluster must contain a minimum of 3x appliances.
QuantaStor Software Defined Storage appliances are designed with high-availability and scale-out features needed for mission-critical desktop and server virtualization solutions. QuantaStor storage servers provide VMware certified NFS and iSCSI storage with advanced features including encryption, compression, and remote-replication.
Solution Matrix
| Scale-Up | Scale-Out | Scale-Out | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Solution | SAN / NAS Appliances | Scale-Out Block & Object | Scale-Out File |
| File System | ZFS | Ceph | Gluster |
| Protocol Support | Block Storage (iSCSI / FibreChannel)File Storage (CIFS/NFS/SMB) | Block Storage (iSCSI)Object Storage (S3/Swift) | File Storage (CIFS/NFS) |
| File System Features | Snapshots / Bit-rot protection Remote Replication / Compression | High Availability | High Availability |
| Benefits | Lower latency / Lower $/TB hardware costs | Greater expandability within a single namespace | Greater expandability within a single namespace |
| Use Cases | Virtualization / DatabasesHigh Performance ComputeArchive / Media Editing | Virtualization / Archive / Unstructured Data | Archive Only |
| Architecture | Standalone servers, with unified grid management | Clustered servers, min 3xUnified grid management | Clustered servers, min 3 xUnified grid management |
| Performance | between 400MB/sec and 1.6GB/sec,depending on block size and number of disk;adding SSD will increase IOPS to 10k-20k;all-flash appliances will deliver 100k+ sustained R/W IOPS | between 400MB/sec and 1.2GB/sec,depending on block size;adding servers will boost performance | |
| Grids | SAN/NAS configurations can scale up to 432 TB raw by adding HDD to a 36-bay storage server | Scale-Out configurations can scale up to multi-petabyte in size by adding new servers to the QS grid | Scale-Out configurations can scale up to multi-petabyte in size by adding new servers to the QS grid |
| Reference Configuration | SAN/NAS Storage Servers | (link) | (link) |
Deployment
The QuantaStor Provisioning Guide provides easy-to-follow instructions for the optimal configuration and set up of your QuantaStor solutions in the IBM Cloud. The Guide includes reference configurations for each of the QuantaStor 5 on IBM Cloud Bare Metal solutions, including SAN/NAS Appliances, Scale-out Block & Object appliances and NAS Gateway appliances.
