Hardware Reference
In-Depth Information
systems. OneFS replaces all of these, providing a unifying clustered file system
with built-in scalable data protection, and obviating the need for volume man-
agement. OneFS is a fundamental building block for scale-out infrastructures,
allowing for massive scale and tremendous eciency.
Crucially, OneFS is designed to scale not just in terms of machines, but
also in manpower|allowing large-scale systems to be managed with a fraction
of the personnel required for traditional storage systems. OneFS eliminates
complexity and incorporates self-healing and self-managing functionality that
dramatically reduces the burden of storage management. OneFS also incorpo-
rates parallelism at a very deep level of the operating system, such that virtu-
ally every key system service is distributed across multiple units of hardware.
This allows OneFS to scale in virtually every dimension as the infrastructure
is expanded, ensuring that what works today, will continue to work as the
dataset grows.
OneFS is a fully symmetric le system with no single point of failure|
taking advantage of clustering not just to scale performance and capacity, but
also to allow for any-to-any failover and multiple levels of redundancy that
go far beyond the capabilities of RAID. The trend for disk subsystems has
been slowly increasing performance while rapidly increasing storage densities.
OneFS responds to this reality by scaling the amount of redundancy as well as
the speed of failure repair. This allows OneFS to grow to multi-petabyte scale
while providing greater reliability than small, traditional storage systems.
Isilon scale-out network-attached storage (NAS) hardware provides the
appliance on which OneFS executes. Hardware components are best-of-breed,
but commodity-based|ensuring that Isilon hardware benets from commod-
ity hardware's ever-improving cost and eciency curves. OneFS allows hard-
ware to be incorporated or removed from the cluster at will and at any time,
abstracting the data and applications away from the hardware. Data is given
infinite longevity, protected from the vicissitudes of evolving hardware gen-
erations. The cost and pain of data migrations and hardware refreshes are
eliminated.
OneFS is the ideal solution for \big data" and cloud applications, and
is widely used in many industry solutions today, including energy, financial
services, Internet and hosting services, HPC, business intelligence, engineer-
ing, manufacturing, media and entertainment, bioinformatics, and scientific
research.
11.2 Design/Architecture
OneFS combines the three layers of traditional storage architectures|le
system, volume manager, and RAID|into one unied software layer, creating
a single intelligent distributed file system that runs on an Isilon storage cluster.
