OSNEXUS Announces QuantaStor 5.6 Release with New Innovations in NAS Storage Tiering and Ceph Technology

by Lauren Grob

Hardware enclosure visualization capabilities for Ceph with QuantaStor 5.6.

Hardware enclosure visualization capabilities for Ceph with QuantaStor 5.6.

BELLEVUE, Wash., May 15, 2020 – OSNEXUS, the leading developer of grid-scale software-defined storage solutions, today announced the availability of QuantaStor 5.6. This release introduces several new features including NAS storage tiering to cloud platforms, S3 Reverse Proxy capabilities for IBM Cloud Direct Link, scale-out Ceph technology upgrades, and enhanced hardware enclosure visualization capabilities for Ceph.

Advancing Ceph Adoption

“QuantaStor 5.6 is a major step forward in ease-of-use for deployment, management, and monitoring of scale-out QuantaStor configurations which are built on Ceph technology. Our goal with this release was to make it even easier to deploy and maintain Ceph clusters within QuantaStor,” said Steven Umbehocker, CEO of OSNEXUS. “One of the highlights in this update is the new hardware visualization system that correlates OSD and Journals to the exact drive slots for every major system manufacturer, most notably the Western Digital Serv60+8 and the HPE Apollo line of systems.”

Starting with this release QuantaStor now includes Ceph v14 (Nautilus), enabling customers to leverage new Ceph RGW features such as S3 object locking.

Along with the new visualization features, this release adds major improvements to the OSD and Journal management system with additional intelligence built into the automated provisioning system. Among other features, the improved system automates journal mirroring and enables customers to use all media types (NVMe, SAS, SATA, and PMEM) for data, caching, and metadata.

NAS Storage Tiering to Cloud Object Storage

QuantaStor now supports NAS to cloud storage tiering to IBM Cloud Object Storage (COS), Azure Blob, AWS S3, and S3 Compatible storage enabling automatic data migration to the cloud as a low-cost archive option. When data is migrated the system creates links so that files appear to be local even after migration. Local caching provides greater read & write performance and lowers costs by reducing the number of S3 PUT/GET operations.

S3 Reverse Proxy for IBM Cloud Direct Link

QuantaStor now includes an S3 Reverse Proxy management feature designed specifically for IBM Cloud Object Storage (COS) by enabling IBM Cloud Direct Link customers to set up a highly-available S3 reverse proxy in just a few clicks.

“This continues our commitment to IBM Cloud and brings another tool to IBM Cloud customers and architects that boosts security while simplifying hybrid cloud deployment and maintenance,” said Steven Umbehocker, CEO of OSNEXUS. “Now IBM Cloud Direct Link customers can maintain a highly-available S3 Reverse Proxy to their IBM COS storage and at the same time take advantage of other QuantaStor benefits like the NAS gateway to IBM COS and the new NAS to IBM COS (S3) storage tiering features.”