Resilient Virtual Storage Containers (VSC)

Storage resiliency refers to the ability of a storage system to withstand and recover from various types of failures, such as hardware failures, power outages, cyber attacks, and network disruptions, without losing data or causing significant downtime. By implementing an erasure coding algorithm, the StorOne engine protects the built-in virtual storage container (VSC), resulting in a solid and robust storage resilient storage system.

Storage pools

A pool may contain different types of drives, however the best practice is to use drives with similar performance. The technology behind the drive (NVME, SSD, or HDD) is the most crucial factor in determining its performance behavior.

The S1 storage engine provides storage through the use of logical volumes . Each logical volume gets its storage resources from VSCs or pools, but it is treated as separate entity.

Thus each logical volume is defined with its own features such as redundancy level, performance optimization, replication scheme, backup policy, etc.

A single “pool” can provide space for multiple logical volumes.

• There is an unlimited number of logical volumes allowed per storage pool. To optimize performance, it is recommended to use fewer than 34 volumes per storage pool.
• The pool is dynamic: Physical drives can be added or removed from the pool as needed.
• There is no limit on the number or type of physical drives that can be made available for the pool.
• There is no need to format physical drives. A pool can utilize raw storage space from physical drives based on your predefined settings. This means that a specific physical drive can be used by the pool only with your approval.

Warning:

When you approve a physical drive for a pool, all of its free space becomes available for this pool. When the pool loses one of its physical drives, all information is recovered and spread across all the remaining physical drives. However, if the pool runs out of space, VS-containers may lose redundancy level and become degraded. Data compromise may occur in VS-Containers without redundancy.

Erasure coding

Erasure coding (EC) is an algorithm for encoding data. It implements advanced mathematical formulas to regenerate missing data from pieces of known data, called parity blocks. vRAID is StorOne patented technology that implements erasure coding in a unique way. StorONE storage engine uses vRAID technology to provide:

• Better availability
• Efficient storage
• Efficient disk recovery

StorOne’s S1 Unified Enterprise Storage (UES) platform implements erasure coding to provide data resiliency and fast drive rebuild time. Unlike traditional erasure coding, S1 technology is more efficient. It minimizes CPU utilization overhead and storage stack complexity, thus, delivering high performance and low latency.

Reliability

StorONE allows you to create a resilient virtual storage container (VSC) using less storage space for redundant information than a traditional parity RAID. StorONE uses erasure coding to save recovery data across all approved drives in the pool. As a result:

• Reliability is not dependent on the number of physical drives.
• Users can define the level of resiliency.
• Physical drives can be added or removed from the pool without compromising the reliability of data in the pool.
• High system tolerance. Depending on your settings, multiple physical drives can fail simultaneously without losing data.

Data availability

With erasure coding, data are fragmented, encoded, and stored across all approved drives, often located in different areas. Erasure coding enables faster data recovery, much faster than traditional RAID storage. StorONE provides the lowest possible latency, resulting in high data availability.

• Data rebuild within hours, not days
• Fast recovery from corrupted data
• Data recovery from ransomware take minutes
• Zero time spent on storage refresh or migration

Storage efficiency

RAID mandates allocating space in advance. Traditional RAID also mandates the same redundancy level on all of its volumes. These mandatory requirements have a profound impact on the rebuild time. In the event of a disk failure, the disk recovery process (the rebuild time) becomes very slow. To increase reliability, traditional RAID uses hot spares (preallocated disks), forcing the user to dedicate space that sits idle until drive failure occurs. As a result, a large amount of volume space remains unused. In addition, when a drive failure occurs, the whole drive rebuilds on a single hot spare drive. Rebuilding the entire drive on a single drive becomes a slow operation.

In contrast, VRAID technology implements erasure coding. Highly reliable technology that does not require hot spares for reliability. VRAID technology allows each logical volume to have its own level of redundancy. VRAID uses thin provisioning and dynamic allocation of storage space. Any of the approved drives in the logical volume can store redundant data. When a disk failure occurs, the logical volume rebuilds the data across all the remaining storage drives in the logical volume.
With VRAID there is no need to rebuild the entire disk; only the lost information needs to be rewritten. This information is written to the remaining functional disks in the volume. Without excessive writing and without overloading a single hot spare disk, recovery time is much faster with StorONE.

Performance

Traditional RAID volume relies on a fixed number of disks for data recovery. On the other hand, vRAID technology implements erasure coding. Data are spread out on all approved drives in the volume, eliminating disk or traffic overload. Recovery data become a “joint effort” of multiple approved drives, often located in different areas. The vRAID technology is built into the StorONE storage engine. As a result, StorONE provides

• Better bandwidth balance when recovering data.
• No bandwidth problem in NAS during data recovery.
• Fewer computing resources are needed for recovery
• Faster rebuild of a replacement disk, much faster than traditional parity check.