StorONE system overview

The S1 system is a general-purpose single storage engine that manages storage resources for all use cases. It is part of the S1 operating system, which is installed on node servers that are configured and managed through a management server called a relay.

The S1 storage platform

The S1 system is a software solution storage platform that offers enterprise storage capabilities using off-the-shelf hardware components. It is a complete hardware-agnostic solution.

The S1 storage engine software is able to maximize the potential of all-flash, hybrid, and hard disk drive configurations, providing optimal efficiency with any combination of hardware components. With the S1 engine, you get maximum flexibility as it allows you to use hardware from a wide range of vendors.

General architecture

The S1 system consists of server nodes, which can be deployed as a single node or two nodes in a high availability (HA) configuration, and a number of JBOD enclosures. These server nodes run the S1 operating system, which manages the drive enclosures and system functionality. Users can access the S1 system through either a command-line interface (CLI) or a graphical user interface (GUI).

The StorONE system also uses an external cloud-hosted machine, called a relay or management station, to facilitate access to your StorONE system from any location.

Single storage engine

StorONE completely redesigned the storage software stack from top to bottom, creating a cutting-edge storage engine capable of driving a portfolio of powerful solutions:

• New efficient storage I/O engine
• New consistently performing auto-tiering
• New high-performance version of the erasure coding algorithm
• Storage provisioning via use-case specific Virtual Storage Containers (VSC)

StorONE provides a single storage-engine for all storage use cases. The StorONE system:

• Supports modern storage media, including HDDs, SSDs, and NVMe drives
• Supports multiple storage protocols, including iSCSI, NVMe-OF, SMB/CIFS, NFS, and Object
• Provides unmatched data resiliency
• Allows different Quality of Service (QoS) settings per application
• Supports per-volume encryption

Virtual Storage Containers (VSCs)

A Virtual Storage Container (VSC, also referred to as a volume in the user interfaces and documentation) is a self-contained storage volume managed by the S1 engine. A VSC provides the storage layer on top of the physical drives that allows you to pool and manage physical storage resources in a flexible, efficient, and cost-effective way. VSCs allow you to allocate storage resources to specific applications, workloads, or users depending on performance, capacity, and availability requirements. VSCs can be created on different types of physical storage devices depending on your requirements, such as solid-state drives (SSDs), hard disk drives (HDDs), and NVMe drives. VSCs also provide data protection, data management, and data mobility features, such as snapshots, replication, and auto-tiering.

The S1 engine supports a mix of media types, storage capacities, and servers. As a result, the S1 engine can provide a one-storage solution that addresses all the storage needs of the data center. Using the S1 engine you can:

• Group drives into pools
• Dynamically change storage capacity
• Configure data resiliency per use case
• Configure disaster recovery (DR) per VSC
• Configure immutable snapshot schedules
• Enable data encryption at the VSC level

Drive pools

VSCs are hardware agnostic. You can group drives of different capacities and manufacturers (but the same media type) together in the same pool. By providing an abstraction layer on top of physical hardware, VSCs allow maximum flexibility. You can increase the storage capacity of an existing pool simply by adding new drives to the pool. Data integrity is maintained by vRAID, even when VSCs share different capacity drives.

VSC auto-tiering can make use of different types of media pools by using faster media for the upper tier for performance, and larger capacity hard disks for the lower tier for cost efficiency. Frequently accessed data can be served quickly from the upper tier, while less active data is automatically migrated to the lower tier.

Dynamic storage capacity

The StorONE engine provides a cutting-edge single storage-engine solution to get the most out of your hardware. The StorONE engine, with its Virtual Storage Container technology, offers more control in allocating resources for specific Quality of Service (QoS) needs. With StorONE VSCs, you can meet the growing demands of your organization storage without the expenses of over-provisioning or the risk of under-provisioning.

StorONE VSCs offers the highest level of flexibility in storage management at the volume level. Unlike other systems where storage is managed at the group or system level, StorONE allows you to customize storage options at the logical volume level. You can adjust the redundancy level, snapshot frequency, replication options, and more for each VSC individually.

Customizable data resiliency

The S1 engine allows you to customize data resiliency settings per use case (by VSC). You can configure the StorONE vRAID settings (the number of data and parity disks per operation) separately for each VSC. You can also customize StorONE vSnap to set the frequency of snapshots and their retention length at a consistency group level.

You can also meet disaster recovery requirements with StorONE vReplicate technology per VSC. vReplicate enables you to replicate data to a secondary location, so that in case of a disaster the data can be recovered quickly. vReplicate allows you to have a disaster recovery plan that is tailored to your specific use case.