Lenovo Object Storage Powered by Cloudian

By Charlii Collins, global technical alliance manager, storage team, Cloudian, Inc.

Lenovo Object Storage powered by Cloudian is an exabyte-scale, SDS platform that provides a cost-effective, on-premises solution for large scale enterprise and service provider environments.

Designed to meet the need for large, secure, highly resilient and flexible storage infrastructure at a low cost, Object Storage allows organizations to consolidate, store, manage and protect data in a single storage pool. It is for capacity intensive use cases like data protection, data lakes, data analytics, media repository and generally as shared storage for all unstructured data.

Available as ready-node bundles, Object Storage powered by Cloudian provides unlimited capacity scalability, intuitive management tools, data protection and the industry’s compatible S3 API implementation – all at 70% less cost than traditional disk-based storage systems.

Introduction
Accommodate your most capacity-intensive workloads with Object Storage powered by Cloudian software-defined storage. Get the scalable, S3-compatible storage you need for use cases such as big data, media archives, healthcare records, and video surveillance. Available with ready-node configurations, Object Storage provides intuitive management tools and built-in data protection that make it easy to manage and grow.

Figure 1. Lenovo Object Storage powered by Cloudian

Lenovo Object Storage powered by Cloudian capabilities:

In this section:

S3-Compatible and Hybrid/Multi-Cloud Ready
Uncompromising Data Durability
Object Lock for Immutable
Integrated Multi-Site Capability
Scalable Performance
Security
Hybrid Storage Policies
Multi-Tenancy
Intuitive Management
Variable-size Metadata Tags

S3-compatible and hybrid/multi-cloud ready
Cloudian’s native S3 API implementation offers the industry’s highest level of S3 interoperability, letting you capitalize on the rapidly growing ecosystem of S3-enabled applications. It’s also compatible with public cloud platforms including AWS, Google, and Microsoft. Integrated data management tools make it easy to integrate your on prem and cloud storage environments.

Data durability
Get up to 14 nines data durability and configurable data protection. Only Object Storage offers granular management that lets you customize data protection for various data types within a cluster. Select from multiple levels of data replication and erasure coding.

Object lock for immutable
Data Object Lock prevents object version deletion during a user-defined retention period. Immutable S3 objects are protected using object- or bucket-level configuration of WORM and retention attributes. The retention policy is defined using the S3 API or bucket-level defaults. Objects are locked for the duration of the retention period, and legal hold scenarios are also supported. This functionality provides data protection from accidental or malicious deletion as well as ransomware. Regulatory compliance with SEC Rule 17a-4(f), FINRA Rule 4511, CFTC Regulation 1.31 is validated in an independent assessment.

Integrated multi-site capability
Extend your storage with the flexible geo-distribution architecture. Replicate data across regions to provide local access and resilience in the event of a data center failure. Configurable consistency levels let you select either synchronous or asynchronous replication. Or employ distributed erasure coding to stripe data across sites as an efficient DR option.

Scalable performance
Process multiple requests in parallel, across all nodes in Object Storage’s shared-nothing cluster. This eliminates bottlenecks and allows performance to grow as you add nodes. For large file transfers, multi-part upload lets you transfer files between sites or to the public cloud.

Security
Object Storage supports KMIP standardized key management as a Server-Side Encryption (SSE) option. SSE supports AES-256 and FIPS-validated crypto-graphic modules, allowing enterprises and service providers to easily and securely encrypt data stored at rest. SSL encryption ensures data confidentiality for data in transit (HTTPS). And with S3-compatible ACLs, SAML, MFA, IAM, and secure trust policies, system administrators can better manage access to buckets and objects.

Hybrid storage policies
Objects are automatically assigned the most appropriate storage policy associated with the bucket; where smaller-size objects utilize a replica factor (RF) policy for optimal performance and larger objects utilize an erasure coding (EC) policy for best capacity efficiency.

Multi-tenancy
Establish multiple user spaces with Object Storage’s multi-tenancy capabilities. Provide individual management domains and namespaces within a shared cluster. Cloudian offers QoS controls and billing features that let you manage bandwidth and chargebacks.

Intuitive management
Manage Cloudian via the iGUI or automate tasks using the RESTful API. Cluster management tasks are simple as well. Add or remove nodes and update system software without disruption.

Variable-size metadata tags
Record metadata along with user data to facilitate data management and data search. Elastic Search integration provides near real-time search capability. Variable metadata tag sizes give you flexibility not found in other object storage systems.

Use cases:

Data protection/ransomware protection

Figure 2. data protection

Object Storage powered by Cloudian, makes a storage target for popular data protection applications like Veeam, Commvault, Rubrik, Vertias and any others that support the S3 API. It lets you retain a familiar workflow while ensuring a predictable backup window, and low RTO/RPO. The solution has the industry best implementation of S3-object lock for tamperproof data immutability, protecting customers data vs. the threat of Ransomware. Customers get a robust Data Protection solution with scalable storage, high data durability and fast recovery times at 70% of the cost of traditional storage solutions.

Data lakehouse and analytics

Figure 3. Data lake analytics

Object Storage powered by Cloudian is validated and certified with data analytics platforms, including Greenplum, Teradata, Vertica, Apache Druid, Microsoft SQL Server 2022, Dremio, Splunk, Elastic, and Cribl. It allows customers to ‘Cloudify’ their analytics architecture, giving them the flexibility, elasticity and scalability of the cloud infrastructure while allowing for separation of compute and storage scalability to modernize data analytics architectures on-premises. With a robust Data LakeHouse solution within the security of your own firewall, customers can create data analytics solutions that comply with data privacy, residency and/or sovereignty regulations, all at a fraction of the total cost compared to traditional storage solutions.

Healthcare

Figure 4. Healthcare

Designed to meet the need for large, secure, highly resilient and flexible storage infrastructure at a low cost, Object Storage Powered by Cloudian comes HIPAA ready. It integrates with a host of healthcare application vendors as well as vendor neutral archive solutions and acts as a central storage repository for all health care data. The solution allows healthcare IT to consolidate storage, viewing and management of all content and medical images, assuring that clinical staff enjoys real-time access to a more complete view of the patient from anywhere and at any time.

Service providers

Figure 5. Service provider

Object Storage powered by Cloudian, comes ready with multi-tenancy, QoS, Billing, Quotas and Role-Based Access Controls (RBAC), making it for service providers of all sizes. Revenue-ready use cases for service providers range from STaaS, Backup-as-a- Service, Ransomware Protection-as-a-Service, DRaaS, MS O365 Backup-as-a-Service amongst others. Scalability goes from one to thousands of nodes to support hundreds of petabytes, with flexibility on storage access via the Amazon S3 Restful API.

Minimum configuration for Object Storage powered by Cloudian
When sizing and configuring hardware systems for a VM or appliance-based Object Storage powered by Cloudian, it is part of best practices (and a requirement) to engage in a sizing exercise to assess the workflow and workload and determine what resources between the minimum and recommended values (or even above them) may be required. As a guideline, below are some of the recommended and minimum supported configurations for a VM or Appliance based Object Storage powered by Cloudian.

Figure 6. Minimum supported configurations for VM or Appliance* Minimum VM specs are for Lab/Dev/Test environment and not for production deployment
** Up to 16 TB/disk for larger 4U appliances is supported

ThinkSystem Ready Nodes for Cloudian
To make it easier, Lenovo and Cloudian have certified the following systems as Ready Nodes for the Object Storage powered by Cloudian. Click here to find the pre-configured, optimized server platforms for Object Storage powered by Cloudian. These provides flexible building blocks for unlimited growth ideal for large scale object workloads like backup, archive, and data lakes. It features Lenovo reliability, XClarity management and end-to-end ThinkShield security.

Summary
Object Storage powered by Cloudian makes it easy to build fully featured, Amazon S3-compliant cloud storage, on-premises. It is available as either SDS on the DCSC, or as Ready Node appliances. Either way, it ensures unlimited scale, multi-datacenter storage, fully automated data tiering, and support for all S3 applications – all behind your firewall. It combines robust availability with system management control, monitoring capabilities and reporting. A host of features, including hybrid cloud streaming, virtual nodes, configurable erasure coding, and data compression and encryption sets it apart with highly efficient storage and seamless data management that lets users store and access their data where they want it, when they want it. Built on a robust object storage platform for effortless data sharing, cloud service providers around the world use Object Storage to deploy and manage storage for both public and private clouds, while enterprises rely on it to store their backups, M&E data, medical images and for 24-hour video surveillance data both in their private and hybrid clouds.

Resources:
Lenovo Object Storage Powered by Cloudian solutions
Cloudian Object Storage
Software-Defined Storage
ThinkSystem SD630 V2 Server
ThinkSystem SR630 V3 Server
ThinkSystem SR635 Server
ThinkSystem SR635 V3 Server
ThinkSystem SR650 V2 Server
ThinkSystem SR650 V3 Server
ThinkSystem SR655 Server
ThinkSystem SR655 V3 Server