Core Software of SmartX HCI

SMTX OS is SmartX HCI’s core software with built-in distributed block storage and native hypervisor. Hypervisors from VMware and Citrix are also supported.

ELF Virtualization
VMware/Citrix Virtualization

Check out customers' reviews of SMTX OS on Gartner®️ Peer Insights™️ website.

4.9
更新于 2024 年 2 月
Distributed Block Storage ZBS
Native Hypervisor ELF
Deploy with VMware
Resources

Storage

Distributed Block Storage ZBS

The distributed block storage component ZBS is independently developed by SmartX. Its high reliability and high performance capabilities ready for production have been tested with the long-term deployment and operations in the production environments such as finance industry. ZBS can be delivered in a hyper-converged form together with SmartX’s native hypervisor ELF, VMware vSphere, etc.

Distributed Block Storage Architecture

Overview

Distributed Architecture

Eliminate the bottleneck of traditional controller architecture, fully make use of the performance of new storage media, and improve system concurrency and elastic expansion capabilities.

Storage Resource Pooling

Integrate system storage resources, realize unified planning / expansion and use-on-demand, improve resource utilization, and reduce operation & maintenance costs.

Software Defined

Fully decoupled from server hardware, not only provides users with more flexible hardware choices, quick integration of the latest hardware technologies to improve the overall system capabilities, but also quickly adapts to new CPU architectures such as ARM to meet users' needs.

Rich Enterprise-Level High Availability Features

Hard-Disk-Level Data Block Checksum

Deal with silent data corruption through data checksum.

Deal with silent data corruption through data checksum.

Node-Level Data Protection and Automatic Data Recovery

Data protection is performed between nodes through a multi-replica mechanism; when a component or a node fails, the available space is automatically used, and concurrent data recovery starts among multiple nodes, ensuring that the data redundancy satisfies the expectations at all times.

Rack-Level Protection

Through rack topology configuration, the replicas are automatically placed on different racks to prevent the cluster from being inaccessible caused by power outage or failure of a single rack further improving the storage reliability.

Snapshot Protection

By generating a snapshot for the storage, the data can be quickly restored to the state at the time when the snapshot was taken, ensuring data security.

Outstanding Performance

Fully Distributed Architecture

The distributed architecture eliminates controller bottlenecks, and the concurrent performance increases linearly with the number of nodes.

Automatic Tiering of Hot and Cold Data

Cold data automatically sinks to HDD, and hot data remains in the cache layer, fully making use of the advantages of SSD hardware and further improving performance.

All-Flash Support

Supports all-flash storage environments to fully meet enterprises' needs for high-performance scenarios.

Proprietary File System Based on Bare Metal Devices

A file system is directly built on bare devices, more suitable for accessing high-performance block storage, avoiding the overhead of the existing Linux file system.

Expand on Demand

Powerful Expansion Capability

Starting with 3 nodes, the capacity can be easily expanded online in a single storage pool, improving the performance significantly.

Flexible Expansion Method

The capacity can be expanded based on components or nodes, as well as by integrating hardware of different brands.

Intelligent Data Migration

The data distribution can be dynamically balanced within the cluster, and the distribution balance can be quickly restored after capacity expansion.

Compute

Native Hypervisor ELF

ELF provides free native virtualization services for SMTX OS, integrating with ZBS distributed block storage to deliver superior compute and storage performance in most virtualization scenarios.

Virtualization Features

Virtual Machine Management

A simple and convenient virtual machine life cycle management. One-click creation, batch operation, and safe confirmation of resource deletion make the management efficient and safe.

Virtual Machine High Availability

Enable the "high availability" function for the key-business virtual machines. When the host fails or the network is isolated, the business will be automatically restored immediately.

Virtual Machine Template

Create virtual machines in batch through templates to reduce repetitive work, deploy applications rapidly, and reduce space usage.

Intelligent Placement and Placement Group

Place virtual machines automatically according to host resources and availability zones. Also set custom placement policies based on placement groups to meet requirements such as license restrictions or application high availability.

Combination with Storage

I/O Localization

Intelligently optimize I/O based on the read and write features of the virtual machines to achieve software-defined performance improvement.

Storage Policies at Virtual Volume Level

Set the provisioning policies and the number of replicas with the granularity of virtual volumes to have a fine management.

Flexible and Open

Converged Deployment

Based on VMware Virtualization

SmartX's distributed block storage ZBS can be deployed on the same node as VMware hypervisor to implement a hyper-converged solution.

When using this architecture, SMTX OS runs in a virtual machine (which is called SCVM) on ESXi.
The compute virtualization services are provided by VMware ESXi.
By passing through the RAID card (HBA/JBOD mode) to SCVM, all the hard disks on the servers will be taken over by SCVM, providing distributed block storage services.

Deployment Architecture

Overview

Mature Ecosystem, Combined Advantages

While using the familiar VMware virtualization and all its ecosystem (such as disaster recovery, anti-virus, etc.), you can obtain all the advantages of SmartX's hyper-convergence and distributed storage.

High Reliability

In addition to the high reliability of distributed storage ZBS, SMTX OS additionally provides SCVM high availability to ensure that, when SCVM fails, the virtual machines on the node can still access storage services.

Virtualization and Storage Decoupling

While being compatible with the rich versions of ESXi, SmartX's distributed storage modules can be upgraded individually at any time to obtain the latest version.

View SMTX OS Compatible ESXi Versions

MetroX Disaster Recovery

The MetroX disaster recovery solution can be implemented by combining the high availability of vSphere virtual machines and the MetroX features of distributed storage ZBS.

View the Architectural Diagram
Resources
Document
SMTX OS Release Notes
Check out what we have upgraded in this version.
Download
Document
SMTX OS Installation and Deployment Guide (Commercial Edition)
Everything you need to successfully install and deploy SMTX OS.
Download
Document
SMTX OS Administration Guide
Features and technical details about SMTX OS.
Download