Friday, July 26, 2013

Technical overview OneFS continued

Software upgrade of the Isilon cluster is done in one of two methods:
Simultaneous upgrade - This method installs the software updates and reboots the nodes all at the same time. This does cause a temporary interruption of service in serving data to clients but it is typically kept under two minutes. The benefits are that system wide changes can be made without any data operations. This enables us to make changes without impacting the customer and can be considered safer even though the service is interrupted albeit temporarily.
Rolling upgrade - This method upgrades and restarts into each node in the cluster sequentially. The cluster remains online and there is no disruption of service to the customer. This is ideal for minor revisions but for major revisions of say OneFS code, it may be better to perform a simultaneous upgrade so that version incompatibilities are avoided.
The same holds true for an upgrade. Additionally, a pre-verification script is run to ensure that only supported configuration is permitted to upgrade. If the checks fail, instructions on troubleshooting the issues are typically provided. Upgrades can be invoked by the administrative interfaces mentioned earlier such as the CLI or the web admin UI. After the upgrade completes, the cluster is verified with a heatlh status check.
Among the various services for data protection and management in the OneFS, some are listed below:
InsightIQ : This is a performance management service. It maximizes the performance of your Isilon scale out storage system with innovative performance monitoring and reporting tools. A backend job called the FSAnalyze is used to gather the file system analytics data and used in conjunction with InsightIQ.
SmartPools is a resource management service which implements a highly efficient automated tiered storage strategy. It keeps the single file system tree in tact while performing the tiering of aged data. Recall that the SmartPool subdivides the large set of homogeneous nodes into smaller Mean Time to Data Loss (MTTDL)- friendly disk pools. By subdividing a node's disks into multiple, separately protected pools, nodes are also significantly more resilient to multiple disk failures.
SmartQuotas: is a data management service. This assigns and manages quota that seamlessly partition the storage into easily managed segments at the cluster, directory and sub-directory levels.
SmartConnect: is a data access service that enables client connection, load balancing and dynamic NFS failover and fallback of client connections. Connections target different nodes to optimize the use of cluster resources.
SnapShot IQ is a data protection service that takes near instantaneous snapshots while incurring little or no performance overhead. Recovery is equally fast with near-immediate on demand snap shot. Snapshot revert and delete are separate services.
Cloud management such as Isilon for VCenter is a software service that manages Isilon functions from VCenter. VCenter also comes with its own automatable framework.
SyncIQ  is a data replication service that replicates and distributes large, mission critical data sets, asynchronously to one or more alternate clusters. Replication can be targeted to a wide variety of sites and devices and this helps disaster recovery. The replication has a simple push-button operation.
SmartLock  is a data retention service that protects critical data against accidental premature or malicious alteration or deletion. It is also security standards compliant.
Aspera for Isilon is a content delivery service that provides high performance wide area file and content delivery.

No comments:

Post a Comment