Netapp 6060

[Marianna]

TheStorageGRIDSG6060 appliance includes a compute controller and a storage controller shelf that contains two storage controllers and 60 drives. Optionally, 60-drive expansion shelves can be added to the appliance.

This figure shows the back of the optional expansion shelf for the SG6060, including the input/output modules (IOMs), fans, and power supplies. Each SG6060 can be installed with one or two expansion shelves, which can be included in the initial installation or added later.

The StorageGRID SG6060 and SG6060X appliances each include a compute controller and a storage controller shelf that contains two storage controllers and 60 drives. Optionally, 60-drive expansion shelves can be added to both appliances. There are no specification or functional differences between the SG6060 and SG6060X except for the location of the interconnect ports on the storage controller.

The fronts of the SG6060 and SG6060X are identical. The following figure shows the front of the SG6060, which includes a 1U compute controller and a 4U shelf containing two storage controllers and 60 drives in five drive drawers.

This figure shows the back of the optional expansion shelf for the SG6060 and SG6060X, including the input/output modules (IOMs), fans, and power supplies. Each SG6060 and SG6060X can be installed with one or two expansion shelves, which can be included in the initial installation or added later.

Optionally, 60-drive expansion shelves can be added to both appliances. There are no specification or functional differences between the SG6060 and SG6060X except for the location of the interconnect ports on the storage controller.

This figure shows the back of the optional expansion shelf for the SG6060 and SG6060X, including the input/output modules (IOMs), fans, and power supplies. Each SG6060 can be installed with one or two expansion shelves, which can be included in the initial installation or added later.

Recently NetApp announced an upgrade to its StorageGRID SG6060 appliances through a software upgrade. Through the newer NetApp StorageGRID 11.4 software, the company has been able to increase the flexibility of the SG6060. Aside from increased flexibility, the updated SG6060 now supports scaling out, making them larger.

The NetApp StorageGRID SG6060 is an expansion node announced a few years ago when events happened in real life instead of over Zoom. The SG6060 is a high-capacity, high-density node for on-prem use. In its original form, it helped bring quite a bit of storage to StorageGRID with a nice balance of cost to performance, with a few drawbacks. For one, if one needed more storage, they would need to add more storage nodes. NetApp has addressed this, among other issues in the 11.4 update.

The biggest benefit to the update to the SG6060 is that users can add more SG6000 expansion disk shelves. This makes the appliance easier to scale out. The appliance is a 5U unit, 1U compute, 4U storage. Now users can add one or two additional 4U 60-slot expansion shelves. As the base capacity is filled up. The main appliance supports 58 NL-SAS drives and each expansion shelf supports 60 for a total of 178 drives.

Before the release of the NetApp StorageGRID 11.4 software, storage capacity expansions that used StorageGRID appliances required adding more appliance nodes, scaling out to increase the overall storage capacity of a StorageGRID system.

The base SG6060 storage appliance combines a 1U compute node with a 4U 60-disk storage shelf. Although the SG6060 previously supported the use of expansion shelves for additional capacity, with StorageGRID 11.4, you now have the flexibility to add 1 or 2 additional 4U 60-slot expansion shelves as the capacity of the base appliance fills up. You can start with a base SG6060 and, as the capacity fills up, add an expansion shelf, and then continue to a second expansion shelf.

The base SG6060 storage appliance contains 58 NL-SAS drives. Each expansion shelf adds an additional 60 NL-SAS drives, and it supports the addition of 2 expansion shelves, for a total of 178 drives.

The product supports a range of disk sizes, including 4, 8, 10 (FIPS), 12TB, and the newly introduced 16TB. All drives in a single shelf must be homogenous. However, with the new StorageGRID 11.4 software, the SG6060 storage appliance now supports the SG6000 expansion shelves with different drive sizes.

For example, you could start with 4TB drives in your base SG6060 disk shelf and at some point add a first expansion shelf with 8TB drives, followed by expanding a second time with a shelf of 16TB drives. This flexibility allows storage and grid administrators to select the expansion capacity that they need for their environment as well as the workload performance needs of the applications.

To protect your data and improve durability against failures, the appliance configures each disk shelf as a separate NetApp Dynamic Disk Pool. In case of a component hardware failure, not all of the data stored is affected.

To help manage the underlying storage shelves, the StorageGRID 11.4 software now manages and upgrades the NetApp SANtricity controller firmware in the StorageGRID appliances. This simplifies the management of the underlying disk array firmware for storage and grid administrators.

Object storage isn't anything new. In fact, many people are surprised when they learn that initial development of commercial object storage solutions started in the late 1990s. The technology has already lived through many lifecycle iterations but we need to credit Amazon Web Services (AWS) for the modern popularization of the storage platform via their implementation: S3.

Over the last decade, the rate of object storage adoption has soared, initially in the public cloud service provider space for the most part. In just in the last 18 months though, we have seen a stupendous increase in on-premise object storage proofs of concept in the ATC, as well as customer purchase of on-premise object storage platforms.

More recently, we've seen application vendors adopt object storage as a first tenant of their products to realize the benefits mentioned above. Such products as Splunk, Hadoop and AI Frameworks (to name a few) have, in their latest iteration, integrated native object storage support.

In turn, this has motivated object storage vendors to start designing even higher performing solutions that leverage flash in combination with high throughput SATA media or even all-flash object storage appliances.

So what makes NetApp's StorageGRID different from other object storage solution out there? Anyone familiar with NetApp's object storage platform would point to 5 specific areas where StorageGRID establishes leadership: information lifecycle management, layered erasure coding, cloud integration and federation, software-defined object storage and performance. Let's dive into each of these topics.

If you ask anybody familiar with StorageGRID what sets them apart from other platform, the first thing that will come up will be the policy-based information lifecycle management engine. Simply put, this engine allows you to control how the data will live throughout its life on the grid.

A grid manager could define a policy wherein data written to the grid would automatically get copied to every one of five different sites upon first write for the first six months of its life (to ensure local access performance), then after the initial six months, two copies be kept in a single site for the following 18 months (the site where data mining is performed). After the data hits two years of age, a single copy of the data gets erasure encoded across the five sites (for data durability and cost efficient storage). By defining such a policy, the user would never need to touch the data for that data to trickle through the grid and self optimize based on the defined policies.

This is just an example based on life of the data, but much more complex rules can be created combining multiple criteria. These criteria can even include custom metadata fields attached to the data being stored on the grid. This isn't exclusive to StorageGRID, but the granularity of the policy definition, the ability to simulate the effect of a policy change and being able to apply that policy on an existing bucket containing data without having to migrate the data to another bucket with NetApp's solution is unmatched.

The StorageGRID platform offers the highest possible level of data durability and availability by using multiple mechanisms to ensure data integrity and providing the ability to do geographically dispersed erasure coding. First off, when designing the platform, NetApp chose to use local erasure coding or DDP to protect the data before the StorageGRID software is even involved in the data protection scheme.

The StorageGRID software provides the ability to configure multiple erasure coding schemes in a single grid to optimize cost, reliability and performance all at once. Once the data is stored, StorageGRID has both in-flight and at-rest data verification processes to ensure the integrity of the data.

Another differentiator between StorageGRID and many other object storage solutions available today is its ability to federate with public cloud service provider object services. What we mean by that is that data can actively flow between an on-premise StorageGRID deployment and AWS S3, Glacier or Azure Blob.

Those public cloud services can be defined as a storage tier within the grid and employed as a target for information lifecycle management policies. As part of the integration with public cloud service providers, StorageGRID also supports AWS SNS or Simple Notification System and the streaming of metadata directly into ElasticSearch for indexing.

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