Storage performance matters most when the content you are storing is at the very heart of your business model.
There are times when you want to store data and performance is a non-issue. You need to keep the data (e.g., to meet regulatory requirements or “just in case”), but you don’t need to retrieve it on a regular basis or rapidly. And then, there are times when you need to store data and then locate it and retrieve it quickly. And, of course, you want to make absolutely certain that your data is securely preserved.
Where Does Storage Performance Matter?
Storage performance matters most when the content you are storing is at the very heart of your business model (i.e., it directly impacts your business model and the product or service you are providing). And, with everyone working remotely and everything going online, it has certainly become a concern for businesses of all sizes. Some people think first of expensive SAN and NAS for keeping data available. However, recently, many are moving data to public clouds, which are actually built on object storage technology.
Is the Cloud the Best Storage for All Your Archives?
While the public cloud may be a good choice for some, it is not necessarily the end all and be all of cost-effective storage. Depending on the use case, your business or organization might be better served by either a hybrid cloud (which combines on-premise cloud storage with a cloud service such as Amazon S3, Microsoft Azure or Wasabi Hot Storage) or an on-prem cloud. Examples of use cases where a hybrid cloud model is beneficial include:
- Your data center footprint space is limited
- You need both onsite and offsite copies of your data (e.g., disaster recovery (DR))
Recently, Caringo launched Swarm Cloud DR, a managed, offsite disaster recovery solution powered by Wasabi. As our CEO Tony Barbagallo said in his blog The Future is Hybrid (Cloud), “adopting a hybrid-cloud approach to data storage allows you to enjoy the speed in your local data center and the flexibility of the cloud for additional compute services and offsite data preservation.” Now, who wouldn’t want that?
How Does Object Storage Deliver Performance?
Case in point, when STFC decided to integrate object storage into its JASMIN super-data-cluster, they required high aggregate throughput as well as durability and accessibility of data over a common protocol (e.g., S3 wrapped in a multi-tenancy framework). A number of leading object storage solutions were tested in STFC’s environment. Caringo Swarm met the requirements by delivering:
- Read performance equivalent to parallel file systems for S3 throughput
- NFS and S3 access to the same objects
- Easy management of thousands of tenants and billions of objects
- Simple internal and external file access and file sharing
How did Swarm meet or beat every requirement specified for the JASMIN project’s implementation of object storage? Since 2005, we’ve devoted ourselves to evolving object storage technologies so we have a complete ecosystem of S3-compatible products. With some of the longest running and largest object storage installations in the world, we’ve proven that our storage clusters actually get faster as they get bigger! This phenomena is discussed in depth in our whitepaper Artificial Intelligence & Machine Learning: The Smarts of Swarm.
How is Performance Testing Performed for Object Storage?
Performance Testing Object Storage systems presents challenges that are different from those in testing more traditional storage such as NAS and SAN, and our architects and engineers are experts in performance optimization. In our September Tech Tuesday webinar, Principal Solutions Architect Ryan Meek and Sales Engineer Jose Marcos will discuss their experiences, and also discuss:
- How object storage system architecture affects performance
- Relevant performance dimensions for object storage software testing
- Best practices for measuring and evaluating performance
- Actual test results gathered on Swarm in real-world scenarios
- The role of concurrent users, transactions, latency and throughput in testing
- Client configuration for better S3 performance
There will be live Q&A throughout the event, so don’t miss the opportunity to get your questions answered by Ryan and Jose!
Register now to watch live or on demand.
