IBM Scale Out Network Attached Storage

Highlights

• Provides extreme scalability to accommodate capacity growth for up to 21 petabytes (PB)
• Manages multiple PB of storage and billions of files in a single file system
• Provides excellent performance for a single file system
• Enables ubiquitous access to files from across the globe quickly and cost effectively with IBM Active Cloud Engine
• Achieves operational efficiency with automated, policy-driven tiered storage
• Lowers Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) by up to 40 percent with automated lifecycle management and migration to tape
• Satisfies bandwidth hungry applications with scale-out performance
• Supports both random access and streaming workloads
• Enables disaster recovery (DR) and business continuity with asynchronous replication
• Allows fileset snapshots and file cloning for increased availability
• Offers ease of use and manageability.

The demand to manage and store massive amounts of file data continues to challenge data centres. IBM Scale Out Network Attached Storage (SONAS) is designed to embrace and deliver cloud storage in the petabyte (PB) age. SONAS can meet today’s storage challenges with quick and cost-effective IT-enabled business enhancements designed to grow with enormous scale.

SONAS can also deliver storage services that make the supporting technology almost invisible. It allows applications and services to be uncoupled from the underlying infrastructure, enabling businesses to adjust to change quickly. As a result, SONAS can easily integrate with your organisation’s strategies to develop a more dynamic enterprise.

Ideal Cloud Storage: The IBM Active Cloud Engine in SONAS

The unique IBM Active Cloud Engine at the core of SONAS gives users the ability to manage large numbers of files efficiently, locate the data of interest rapidly and get that data to where it is needed seamlessly. It is a ‘policy-driven’ engine tightly coupled with file system that enables you manage ‘file’ data with ease, efficiency and at a scale. This unique capability of SONAS (offered at no charge) enables ubiquitous access to files from across the globe quickly and efficiently. It localises file data where it is needed. The Active Cloud Engine offers clients not only high-performance file serving function, but also reduced network costs. It can cache files to remote sites in advance of that file request coming in. This provides for high availability (HA) and very fast access of those files at remote sites. It also eliminates unnecessary replication of files to remote sites thereby lowering network and storage costs significantly.

SONAS leverages an advanced, clustered scale-out architecture that is flexible, available and high performing. Unlike single-tier architectures which provide limited customisation, SONAS has a two-tier architecture that allows tailoring to a customer's exact use case, balancing throughput and capacity as required.

SONAS is the only clustered file system in the industry that can offer the performance to not only handle large files but also smaller random access file workloads, all under a single file system. SONAS systems can grow based on your needs by adding interface nodes in the front or by independently adding storage pods on the backend, or both. This capability lets you sustain high performance during capacity growth and allows you to handle small file, random access workloads and large file data driven by high-performance computing applications. Examples of small file random input/output (I/O) workloads include home directories, large Internet mail serving, web-based commerce, online transaction processing, securities trading, financial applications and general-purpose file serving.