Scale-out Unified Storage for IBM Cloud

OSNEXUS QuantaStor is available on IBM Cloud bare-metal storage servers at all IBM Cloud datacenters worldwide. Use your IBM Cloud bare-metal “class” provisioning portal to provision QuantaStor appliances, you’ll see “OSNexus QuantaStor” as an operating system choice in provisioning portal if you’ve selected a system that is eligible (servers with 12-36 or more drive bays). QuantaStor’s storage grid technology enables one to combine QuantaStor systems into a distributed storage grid which provides unified management of your systems across IBM datacenters. After combining 3 or more systems into your storage grid a scale-out cluster may be created to deliver highly available file, block, and object storage. Each grid can manage multiple clusters that can span multiple datacenters. See below for example designs from 650TB to 6PB.

Solution Design Assistance

The following design tools help customers, partners, and system architects build optimal hardware configurations for the two primary QuantaStor configuration types. We recommend getting assistance with the design and setup process as there are many factors to consider when estimating performance and selecting the right configuration for a given workload. Please contact us at sdr@osnexus.com (Solution Design Review) to get assistance from our Solution Engineering team.

IBM Cloud - QuantaStor Scale-up NAS Storage Servers

QuantaStor’s scale-up storage server configurations provide file (NFS/SMB) and block (iSCSI) storage that’s ideal for a variety of use cases. Hybrid configurations use a combination of HDDs and SSDs to provide fast, reliable, cost efficient storage for a variety of use cases including server virtualization, data analytics, backup storage, databases/OLTP, and more. Configurations scale from 4TB to 360TB of raw storage. QuantaStor has AD integration, 2FA, MFA, KMIP, FIPS 140-2 L1 cert, LDAP Single-Sign-On and many other security features. Other commonly used features are remote-replication for replicating across IBM datacenters and on-prem as well as QuantaStor’s NAS Gateway and NAS Auto-tiering to IBM COS.

IBM Cloud - QuantaStor Scale-out NAS Storage Cluster

QuantaStor scale-out storage clusters provide unified and highly-available NAS (NFS/SMB), SAN(iSCSI) and S3 compatible object storage all within a single storage cluster. These solutions are ideal for IBM Cloud as they enable easy storage expansion by adding media or additional server, easy replacement of systems by shrinking the cluster to remove legacy hardware, and supports the use of multiple generations of IBM servers within the same storage cluster. We recommend erasure-coding (4k+2m or 8k+3m) for NAS and S3 object configurations and triple replica for iSCSI block storage configurations.

Example configurations:

• 650TB usable 4x node scale-out hybrid NAS

• 1.3PB usable 6x node scale-out hybrid NAS

• 2.8PB usable 12x node scale-out hybrid NAS

• 5.2PB usable 22x node scale-out hybrid NAS

• 100TB usable 4x node scale-out all-flash SAN

• 200TB usable 4x node scale-out all-flash SAN

Click the button below to launch the web based solution design tool to custom design your own storage cluster.

IBM Cloud Licensing

QuantaStor Cloud Edition on IBM Cloud ‘Classic’ Bare-metal

QuantaStor on bare-metal servers at IBM Cloud includes the QuantaStor Cloud Edition license with the deployment. Simply select OSNexus QuantaStor as the operating system and then choose the licensed capacity that matches the amount of raw storage capacity you’re adding to the server. For example, if you’re creating a new QuantaStor system with 30x 12TB drives the license capacity needed is 360TB so one would select the 384TB license option.

QuantaStor VSA for IBM Cloud VMware vCenter

IBM Cloud also enables QuantaStor to be deployed as a virtual machine on your IBM Cloud VMware vCenter infrastructure. This option is available in the IBM Cloud catalog in the Storage section. Once you’ve deployed your QuantaStor system you’ll need to order a 1YR or 3YR license which you can get directly from OSNexus by clicking the link below. The current IBM licensing model is a BYOL (bring-your-own-license) model for QuantaStor VSA but in the future we hope to have this integrated similar to how licenses are automatically applied in the bare-metal offering.