Recently, SmartX officially launched HCI 6.0, enhancing our Enterprise Cloud Platform (ECP). One of the standout features is the introduction of SMTX File Storage (SFS), which enables SmartX ECP to offer enterprise customers stable, high-performance, and scalable distributed file storage services. With SFS, enterprises can meet diverse data storage needs using a single platform, reducing the costs associated with legacy NAS procurement while boosting storage reliability and performance.
Product Architecture
SFS is deployed within the SMTX OS (SmartX hyperconvergence software) cluster, operating as containers in the file controller. It utilizes ZBS in the SMTX OS cluster to provide underlying persistent block storage services and can be managed uniformly through CloudTower.
Currently, SFS supports NFS protocol, offering file storage services by mounting the file system to application systems and external clients. This facilitates users in storing and managing unstructured data such as text, images, and videos simply and efficiently.
Key Features
High Availability and Reliability Ensuring Business Continuity
With production-grade high availability features such as hard disk data checksum, multi-replica redundancy, client access HA, and rack awareness, SFS can address a wide range of issues, including file controller failures, hard drive failures, node failures and rack failures, ensuring business continuity and data reliability.
Data Redundancy Between Physical Nodes
SFS allows users to choose from two-replica and three-replica strategies, with data copies placed on different physical nodes to avoid data loss caused by hardware failure. In case of node failure, the system will automatically trigger data recovery for unwritten data blocks and rebuild the data copies on healthy nodes, without the need for manual intervention and additional space for hot backup.
Client Access High Availability
When a file controller fails, it will first trigger the HA protection of the file controller on the current node. If it cannot be pulled up on its physical server node, the corresponding access IP will drift to another healthy file controller to protect the access of the application to the file system from interruption. When the client has new data to write, it will trigger copy-on-write (COW), and after the file controller is restored, the access IP will be migrated back to the original controller node to balance the overall access loads.
Multi-Level Performance Optimization
SFS also enhances storage performance through a variety of optimization strategies during the process of writing data from the client to the actual disk.
Data Access: Prioritizing Distributing Files to Local File Controllers to Reduce Lateral Traffic
When creating a file system, virtual disks are created on each file controller, with priority given to writing files to the access point’s local virtual disk, thus reducing lateral traffic and enhancing file I/O performance.
Data Drop: Optimizing I/O Path with I/O Locality and Boost Mode
With SmartX ECP’s I/O locality feature, the file controller prioritizes the placement of data replicas on the host where they are located, reducing I/O request latency. With Boost Mode, the ZBS Chunk can access the file controller’s Guest OS memory directly, bypassing the performance bottleneck caused by QEMU processing of I/O requests, thus significantly improving performance.
Currently, in the performance test (1M sequential read/write of 12GB files, based on two-replica strategy), SFS can provide storage performance of 8 GiB/s sequential read and 5 GiB/s sequential write, fully satisfying the access requirements of high-bandwidth file services.
Simple and Flexible O&M
CloudTower provides a unified GUI that allows users to perform one-click deployment, deletion, scaling-out, upgrading, and other lifecycle management operations for file storage clusters. Users can also manage clients’ and users’ access to file systems and files through NFS authentication.
Use Cases
Data Center Integration
SmartX ECP provides high-performance block storage and file storage with a single set of resource pools, satisfying the diverse storage needs of different business services and helping customers build a more streamlined IT infrastructure with lower TCO.
For applications requiring high performance and low latency such as financial transaction databases and online payment systems, users can pin the volumes in the cache and keep the key application data continuously supported with high-performance hardware. Applications handling unstructured data can mount a file system with a maximum capacity of 1PiB, eliminating the need to use several volumes. Moreover, SFS can provide file storage services for container applications using Kubernetes NFS CSI Driver, helping enterprises accelerate application containerization.
PACS Image & Large Capacity Resource Pool
With SFS, SmartX ECP can provide large-capacity, high-performance, and stable distributed storage and computing resources for imaging, ticketing, audio, and video applications. For example, healthcare institutions can use SmartX ECP to support Picture Archiving and Communication System (PACS), providing high-performance storage for images needed for recent diagnosis and treatment, as well as storage with balanced performance and capacity for images stored for a long period of time.
Moreover, applications can flexibly allocate resources, utilizing GPU passthrough and sharing for intelligent analysis. Container management capabilities provided by SKS further facilitate users’ application containerization process. Overall, SmartX ECP can help customers maximize the cost-effectiveness of IT systems with a simpler architecture, lower procurement costs, and higher application performance.
Large and Medium Backup Resource Pool
No need for separate backup server hardware. Backup management services and media servers can run directly on file-based, high-capacity hyper-converged nodes, also supporting other applications like desensitization, verification, and emergency response. Basically, a single ECP node can provide over 1GiB of write performance and more than 2TiB per hour recovery speed.
Integrated Distributed Disaster Recovery
For small and medium-sized customers, SmartX offers an integrated distributed disaster recovery solution in collaboration with CDP vendors. This solution provides data protection and second-level RPO for SmartX virtual machines, VMware virtual machines, and physical nodes. It also provides the necessary computing power and storage space for backup and emergency recovery.
Overall Advantages
- Reliable and scalable: SFS is completely independently developed by SmartX, ensuring autonomy and control. Feature high availability with both block storage HA features and file controllers HA protection. Support node-level and file-controller-level scaling-out.
- Flexible and open: Adapt to mainstream operating systems and support to provide storage services for container applications using Kubernetes NFS CSI Driver. Provide enterprise-grade high-performance and highly reliable file storage services for both internal and external clients of the SMTX OS cluster through a single storage resource pool.
- Convenient O&M: Support one-click deployment, upgrade and scaling-out. File storage cluster can be deployed within 10 minutes. Visualization and alarm capabilities can further enhance O&M efficiency.
In addition to SFS, HCI 6.0 also introduces a variety of innovative features such as resident cache, erasure coding (EC), AI computing support, and Upgrade Center. To learn more, please refer to our previous blog: SmartX Releases HCI 6.0 to Enhance Enterprise Cloud Platform.
