Your Challenge: The low density and limited scalability of legacy storage solutions
IT professionals: what is the industry’s best practice in deploying High-Density Scale-Out Storage at lower cost?
With today’s relentless growth of unstructured data, both small businesses and large ones have to figure out how to store data cost-effectively even when they’re using a traditional storage architecture rooted in layers of complexity and cost. It’s a particularly pressing issue for Web-scale cloud providers and data-rich large enterprises who accumulate huge amounts of unstructured data.
IT pros must be able to rapidly deploy enormous quantities of storage capacity to keep up with dynamic business needs, without exceeding tightly-constrained IT budgets. This means finding storage solutions that don’t incur costs for additional physical space to house that storage, or for the associated server hardware needed to scale that storage—costs that are common in conventional storage solutions.
Clearly, the answer isn’t “more of the same.” It demands a new high-density solution that can provide more storage capacity in less space, while somehow also reducing the cost and complexity of object storage solutions by completely eliminating a tier of physical storage servers and protocol conversions.
One Solution: Rausch Netzwerktechnik BigFoot Storage Object Solution
Recognizing the inherent limitations of traditional storage architecture, Rausch Netzwerktechnik knew it needed a fundamentally more efficient approach to scale-out object oriented storage architectures. Rausch chose the Seagate Kinetic Open Storage Platform to supply its customers with higher-density, more cost-effective storage solutions.
The Seagate Kinetic Open Storage Platform is a device-based object storage platform that comprises storage devices, a key/value API and Ethernet connectivity. This innovative platform enables better performance, scalability and simplicity, as well as significantly lower total cost of ownership (TCO). It also includes developer tools that help simplify storage architectures by enabling applications to communicate directly with the storage device.
This new platform has allowed Rausch to create a ground-breaking solution that dramatically increases storage density and reduces performance bottlenecks. It has also enabled the company to better address the needs of its scale-out cloud storage customers and offer them improved capacity and scalability, while significantly reducing overall costs.
The Rausch BigFoot Storage Object solution features two 1 Gb/s Ethernet interfaces integrated in each HDD; each HDD has its own IP address to enable direct communication with the device. Housing 72 HDDs (totaling 288 TB) in a single 4U chassis, BigFoot Storage Object delivers an impressive packing density of 2.8 PB per rack.
Rausch BigFoot Storage Object holds 72 HDDs in a single 4U chassis
The Kinetic Open Storage platform employed in BigFoot Storage Object solutions differs from conventional architectures by providing direct access to individual storage devices over the network; this enables massive scalability and location independence. The central management this architecture affords lets technicians easily administer data and hard drives. Scalability is remarkably simple; there’s no need for extra server hardware (CPUs, mainboards, controllers), customers can just select the appropriate interface and add more HDDs to the space-efficient BigFoot chassis.
Key Features and Benefits
- Up to 288TB capacity in only 4U
- TCO reduced by up to 50 percent compared with conventional systems
- Each HDD equipped with 2x 1Gb/s LAN Interface
- No SAS/SATA controller required
- Only 750mm (29.5″) depth for 1000mm (40″) racks
- First European chassis designed around the Seagate Kinetic Open Storage Platform
How to deliver higher storage density, but lower TCO (Total Cost of Ownership)
Because the Seagate Kinetic Open Storage platform enables drives to interface directly with the applications, an entire tier of hardware can be eliminated. This technological advantage, combined with the exceptional packing density of the BigFoot Storage Object 4U chassis, facilitates denser storage racks that can decrease TCO in a number of different areas:
- Lower Capital Expenditure — Storage servers can be removed from the data center, resulting in lower capital expenditures when building out data centers. Alternatively, for a given level of capital expenditure, customers can allocate much greater storage capacity in the same physical space.
- Labor — Removing the need for storage servers reduces the number of technicians required to maintain them. In addition, the higher-density storage enabled by BigFoot Storage Object can potentially reduce the number of technicians a data center needs to employ in general, leading to significant labor savings.
- Power consumption — Eliminating the storage server tier, combined with much greater rack density, enables fewer racks to support the same quantity of storage and thus reduces energy consumption.
- No SAS/SATA controller required
- Only 750mm (29.5″) depth for 1000mm (40″) racks
- First European chassis designed around the Seagate Kinetic Open Storage Platform
The greater rack density made possible by BigFoot Storage Object solutions provides another compelling cost benefit — a significantly smaller physical footprint for the data center, which directly translates into lower costs. This is particularly critical in cases where availability of physical real estate is constrained, for example, data centers located in co-location facilities.
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Who is John Paulsen? A former small-business leader myself, I feel your pain (and joy) and hope you’ll enjoy the blog. I launched and ran a well-regarded production company in San Francisco with a team of 9 brilliant, hard working people. I learned to manage a wide array of tasks a small business must handle — business strategy, facilities design, HR, payroll, taxes, marketing, all the way down to choosing telecom equipment and spec’ing a server system to help my team collaborate in real-time on dense media projects from multiple production rooms. I’ve partnered with and learned from dozens of small business owners.
