True NAS, clustering, high availability, cost, performance, rich features and support: Advantages of Zadara™ NAS-as-a-service in Amazon AWS
The Zadara Storage Virtual Private Storage Array (VPSA™) service was built from the ground up for the cloud, to offer customers the same control and robust capabilities of enterprise-grade NAS and SAN arrays, but with the flexibility, elasticity, scalability and cost efficiency of the cloud.
The Zadara VPSA service offers true NAS-as-a-service at AWS. With NFS connect over IP and a rich set of enterprise-class features, VPSA provides customers with superior performance, data encryption and an on-demand, pay-as-you-go cloud structure,- all utilizing the powerful cloud platform of AWS.
Some of the advantages of using Zadara NAS vs. Gluster at AWS:
1 - Zadara Storage is truly “as-a-service”
To provide NAS, GlusterFS needs to run on one or more VMs of the customer, which means that the maintenance of the software stack needs to be performed by the customer. This software stack can be both cumbersome, due to management and compatibility, and is more prone to errors.
Zadara Storage provides an IP address that connects directly into the NAS device, and the customer can simply consume the storage. There are no software stacks that need to be built and then maintained, upgraded, or debugged. And Zadara’s CloudFabric™ architecture, on which the VPSA service is based, has no single point of failure.
2 - Zadara Storage offers customers a dedicated choice of hardware and full control
GlusterFS runs on top of Amazon EBS. This means that whatever EBS can’t do, Gluster cannot do either, such as choosing your hardware to best support your workload, capacity, performance and cost needs.
Zadara Storage has its own independent hardware proximate to Amazon Web Services, which allows us to provision dedicated drives per customer (offering better performance and advanced security features).
Better yet, we give our customers their choice of drives to best fit their workload needs; from high performance SSDs, designed for demanding applications requiring 1000’s and 10000’s of IOPS, to 3TB repository drives that support applications that necessitate large capacities at an inexpensive cost, and multiple choices of other SAS and SATA drives at various capacities and speeds.
Zadara’s as-a-service model allows customers to tune drives, performance, and costs up or down, on an hourly basis.
3 - Zadara Storage offers superior performance, consistent throughput and IOPS
Gluster’s performance is dependent on EBS performance, which has limited performance and consistency, even under provisioned IOPS.
Zadara Storage NAS runs on Zadara’s hardware, which is independent of AWS. Customers each receive dedicated drives and virtual controllers (called “Zadara Engines”) which run on dedicated CPU cores and memory. Better yet, every volume has 4 QoS controls: Read IOPS, Write IOPS, Read Throughput, and Write Throughput, and the on-demand structure allows customers to tune up or down according to need.
4 - True High Availability
Due to the dependency and software stack on top of EBS, GlusterFS has several challenges for high availability:
- A single EBS to EC2 mount point
- EBS < single point of failure
- EC2-based Gluster file server < single point of failure
- Single Availability Zone (AZ) < single point of failure.
Zadara Storage VPSA service is true high availability at every level, with a self-healing structure that provides 100% availability (backed by an SLA) and full business continuity:
- Our virtual controllers have redundant cores, memory and networks with automatic failover from active to standby cores with automatic migration of IP addresses
- VPSA disks have redundancy using user-selectable RAID 1, RAID 5 or RAID 6, as well as redundant disk paths and an automatic rebuild in the event of disk failure
- All 10Gb pipe networking paths are redundant Direct Connect paths
- Available in multiple Availability Zones (AZ’s) and regions, VPSA can be mounted to multiple EC2 instances across multiple AZ’s, including coast to coast replication for disaster recovery.
5 - Zadara Storage is a lower cost solution
GlusterFS’s need for expensive instances for deployment, along with GlusterFS licensing and support costs, adds several additional expense layers to the overall cost of the solution.
Zadara’s cost calculation is based upon:
1. Size of Zadara Engine (larger sizes have more CPU and RAM)
2. Quantity and type of drives
3. Encryption features (data-at-rest and data-in-flight)
4. Enterprise Suite (a set of Enterprise-grade data management features)
Zadara provides customers clear and full oversight of their spending, with full control.
6 - Zadara Storage includes a rich enterprise-grade feature set
GlusterFS NAS deployment only provides the NFS protocol access.
Zadara Storage VPSA, which provides NFS and iSCSi, includes a rich set of enterprise-class storage features, far beyond clustering and true high availability. These features offer advanced throughput and IOPS tuning, thin provisioning, metering, encryption choices, mirroring and remote replication for business continuity, detailed snapshot control and much more. (Watch out for a big announcement coming up with more details on our latest added features.)
7 - Support
The public cloud has been notorious for inconsistent support. Zadara Storage VPSA was built for enterprises that require true 24x7 support and business continuity. Our support provides direct contact to a team of Zadara engineers who work 1:1 with each customer to resolve any question as quickly and efficiently as possible.
To learn more about our Enterprise storage-as-a-service and NAS offering at AWS, contact our sales team and take advantage of our free trial.
Zadara VPSA are available at the following Amazon AWS locations:
US-West, US-East, Japan (launching September 2013), and the UK (launching September 2013).
Zadara Storage is an AWS Technology Partner.
To be more accurate, you seem to be comparing to *the AWS trial version of GlusterFS*, not to the technology (or the Red Hat Storage) product itself. At a technical level, GlusterFS supports multiple protocols (far more than Zadara), doesn't have a single-server SPOF, can run on any storage or compute hardware you want, etc. Is it really fair to compare the full for-pay version of one thing vs. a specific kick-the-wheels trial of another?
ReplyDeleteBoom... thread over
ReplyDeletePlatypus, thank you for reading our blog and for your comment. This blog entry is about NAS as a service at AWS. The fact that Gluster supports any hardware or other protocols that cannot be used at AWS is not relevant in this context.
ReplyDeleteOK then, Nelson, let's just talk about AWS. Those other protocols *can* be used in AWS. GlusterFS *can* be deployed in a fully distributed manner (no SPOF) across availability zones, etc. I've done these things in AWS myself. Now, are you going to correct your post and comment, or are you going to continue being disingenous?
ReplyDeleteGlusterFS is fully-distributed and scalable file system, end-of. Let's not compare ripe apples (GlusterFS) with raw ones (NASaaS), shall we.
ReplyDeletePlatypus, most applications can be deployed in a fully distributed manner with a combination of DRBD and/or other techniques like Gluster. However, you touched on the main point; you said "I've done these things in AWS myself." You need to do this by yourself, maintain it by yourself and also debug it by yourself when something doesn't work. With Zadara, you get an IP address from which you can mount the volumes and that's it. Everything else is taken care of because it is "as a service." In any case, we reworded the High Availability section to emphasize the fact that those limitations are because Gluster is not a service and not related to Gluster as a product. This is the whole point of the article.
ReplyDeleteSo shouldn't your comparison be the red hat storage offering? GlusterFS is the software - your service could just as easily use Gluster as any other software. Comparing a service offering to software that is used to build services is disingenuous.
ReplyDelete@John Mark, we @Zadara wrote our own software. The reason for that, is because we want to provide quality of service by allocating dedicated physical drives, cpus,memory, and bandwidth per customer. The comparison of service vs product is relevant, because as a customer that wants to implement NAS at AWS, needs to decide if to license a product and implement himself or do it as a service, like most of the other AWS services.
ReplyDeleteNelson - For that matter, I learnt that you could use Zadara software on your own servers and storage, just as you use GlusterFS. Is that not correct ?
ReplyDeleteHi Ankur, yes Zadara Software could be loaded in your own datacenter. It requires physical servers with drives, not VMs but yes this is definitely one of the use cases, where customers want to have Zadara on premise and may be even replicating data to the public cloud.
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