ProphetStor: Flash-Optimized Federator Software-Defined Storage Platform

ProphetStor Data Services, Inc. announced the availability of version 3.1 (Del Mar Release) of its Federator platform, updated with flash optimized functions, and can turn commodity hardware into performance all flash array or hybrid flash array, delivering a powerful, flexible and unparalleled user experience.

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The integrated SDS platform also enables multi-use storage and data services based on a single platform that simplify and automate storage discovery, abstraction, delivery of services leveraging existing storage systems (scale-any), which includes built-in enterprise scale-up and scale-out storage capabilities.

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The suite of services also include analytics called Traffic Modeling Module (TMM), an innovation of Federator which provides predictive for application traffic loading, and leverages storage resource dynamically and intelligently. Additionally, Elastic Resource Control (ERC) dynamically adjusts the R/W cache size based on the traffic prediction data generated by TMM (capacity and/or IO/s provisioning), data services (data protection or recovery) and optimization (deduplication and caching). The transparency of the resource availability and the demands from the application enables the ‘just-in-time’ allocation of the elastic resource allocation, and brings along the best utilization. As a result, Federator powered storage systems can be more cost effective and maintenance support can be simplified.

“Our customers wants to start building the next generation of the scalable infrastructure that enables better control, increased competitive advantage, enhanced scalability and reduces the TCO,” says Eric Chen, CEO, ProphetStor. “The ‘Future of the IT’ and SDS themes continue to resonate with customers as this transformation is just beginning and it’s going to be huge. The good news is, this is where ProphetStor has been focused from the start. The release of Federator 3.1 will change the dynamic of the status quo of all flash array and hybrid flash array as the performance, features, and cost-effectiveness of storage can be achieved at the same time. Unlike the other solutions on that market that are ‘device-base,’ Federator based storage systems are naturally ‘cloud-enabled and RESTful API programmable’.”

Federator Scale-Up transforms standardized commodity hardware into a storage powerhouse. This version takes into account the critical requirements of low-latency and high performance from flash. In addition, it provides enterprise-grade features, such as pooled storage (eliminating the need to predetermine storage size), copy-on-write (ensuring data consistency), checksums (enabling data integrity verification and self-healing), rapid snapshot, writable snapshot, snapshot rollback, remote replication, volume creation from snapshot, volume consistency group, and DR.

Federator Scale-Out function provides the highly scalable, manageable, and reliable hyper scale storage included in Federator SDS solutions. At the back end, Federator Scale-Out adopts Ceph Storage Cluster concepts of no single point of failure, self-healing, self-managing, great performance and scalability, and easy to deploy through the Preboot eXecution Environment (PXE). At the front end, Federator Scale-Out provides the web-based GUI to manage and configure storage nodes in scale-out cluster. Furthermore, it includes the enterprise features, such as thin provisioning, snapshot, replication, storage offering, backup and recovery. And they are accessible through the Federator SDS dashboard.

Federator 3.1 enablesSDS with following features:

• Automatic discovery of storage systems, and abstraction of physical resources into virtual pools

• Supports enterprise storage arrays and commodity storage hardware

• Classification of storage pools by their capabilities and performance

• Dynamic monitoring and scheduling of resources to deliver storage requests

• Automatic storage provisioning based on pool groups and IO/s service offerings

• Supports block storage through iSCSI, FC, RBD protocols

• Open RESTful management API

• Integration with OpenStack, VMware VAAI enabling storage services with unified management for storage systems

Federator recognizes the built-in functionalities of individual storage resources, and uses them to define storage on demand, matching the requirements from the application. It is a fill to a gap in the OpenStack landscape, bolstering the storage layer to make OpenStack a credible choice for business application being run by corporate IT.