Exablox OneBlox Appliance
Scale-out NAS Built on Revolutionary Object-based Storage

Features & Benefits:

OneSystem Features & Benefits:

Specifications:

OneBlox 4312 Dimensions (Click Image to Enlarge)

OneBlox 3308 Dimensions (Click Image to Enlarge)

OneBlox Appliance Specifications / Comparison
	OneBlox 4312	OneBlox 3308
Power	100-240 VAC, 10.7 – 4.2A max	100-120 / 200-240 VAC
Thermal Rating	900 BTU/hr, 270W (typical)	500 Btu/hr, 100W (typical)
Weight (empty, no disks)	52 lb. (23.6 kg)	23 lb. (10 kg)
Space Requirements	17.2" w x 3.5" h x 25.5" d inches (37 x 89 x 648 mm) 2 Rack Units (RU)	18.75" w x 3.7" h x 15" d inches (unit can fit in 19" rack or on table top) 2 Rack Units
Hard Drive Bays	12 x 3.5” drive slots, hot swappable. 2 x 2.5” drive slots	8 drive slots, hot swappable
Hard Drive Types	3.5" SATA II & III (3 Gb/s and 6 Gb/s) 3.5" SAS (6Gb/s and 12 Gb/s)	3.5" SATA (up to 6Gb/sec) 3.5" SAS (up to 12Gb/sec)
Max. Raw Capacity	96 TB (12 disks rated at 8 TB each)	48 TB (8 disks rated at 6 TB each)
Operating Temperature and Elevation	10° C to 35° C (50° F to 95° F)	10° C to 40° C (50° F to 104° F); at </= 3,000 m(at </= 10,000') elevation
Relative Humidity	8% to 90% relative humidity, noncondensing	20% to 80% relative humidity, noncondensing (28° C wet bulb temperature)
Non-operating Temperature and Relative Humidity	-40° C to 60° C (-40° F to 140° F); 5% to 95% relative humidity, noncondensing	-40° C to 65° C (-40° F to 149° F); 10% to 95% relative humidity, noncondensing, in original container
Operating Acoustic Noise	56.5 dBA sound pressure (LpA) @ normal operating conditions (at 22°C and at sea level)	56.5 dBA sound pressure (LpA) @ normal operating conditions (at 22°C and at sea level)
Cooling	Three adjusted fan cooled	Adjusted fan cooled
File Service Protocols	SMB (1.0, 2.0, 2.1, 3.0); NFS v3	SMB (1.0, 2.0, 2.1, 3.0), NFS v3
Onboard GbE Ports	2 x 10GbE BASE-T, 2 x 1 GbE BASE-T, 2 x 10GbE SFP+ (optional)	4
Onboard USB Ports	2 x USB 2.0, 2 x USB 3.0	2
LCD Screen	(Virtual) Accessible through web browser	3" TFT
LED Lights	Blue and red activity and status LEDs on each drive bay door	3 lights on front panel for system status 8 drive status lights
Electromagnetic Emissions and Compatibility	FCC Class A, EN 55022 Class A, EN 61000-3-2/-3- 3, CISPR 22 Class A	FCC Part15B Class A (US), ICES-003 Class A (Canada)
Safety and Quality	CE Marking (Europe)	UL/CUL 60950 I.T.E. (US & Canada), Manufactured under an ISO 9001 registered quality system

Solutions:

When it comes to the increasingly complex task of managing data storage, many small and midsize organizations face even greater challenges than large, global enterprises due to relentless growth in business information that needs to be managed and secured. In a recent survey by Storage Magazine, about one-fourth of the respondents pegged their unstructured file growth at 50% or higher year-over-year.

The consumerization of IT with fading boundaries between personal and workplace computing along with the unstoppable march to a virtualized IT infrastructure is pushing IT personnel to find new ways to manage their storage infrastructure. Some of their biggest hurdles are:

• Scaling storage as the business grows rapidly
• Containing the rising expense of data storage capacity
• Dealing with the complexity of storage management and architecture
• Devoting precious staff time efficiently to manage storage and data backup

With data volumes growing faster than anticipated, legacy scale-up storage architecture with two controllers sharing the workload and providing failover just doesn't stack up today. In a scale-up storage architecture, disks and shelves are added to expand capacity, only memory may be added to scale performance. Eventually, and o"en rather quickly, a scalability limit is reached, and the only available options are to either add another storage system or do a forkli" upgrade and replace the existing system. The consequences are sprawling storage silos that are complicated to manage with no investment protection that ultimately leads to spiraling costs.

In addition, small and midsize organizations that are looking to implement storage solutions with enterprise-class features to meet their business needs face complicated installation and management challenges. And in most cases, they are not equipped to handle these difficulties due to IT resource constraints and a lack of appropriate in-house expertise.

Fortunately, there are new approaches to storage on the market for growing organizations that can help address their storage needs without requiring dedicated management resources while at the same time driving down their costs.

OneBlox and OneSystem Technical:

The Business Challenge

Some estimates indicate that, in 2012, 2.5 quintillion bytes of data was generated globally – that's two billion terabytes. Every day, that rate of generation increases as more and more people store more and more data in new and different ways. Enterprises have been forced to continue to "throw hardware" at this storage problem in order to maintain the rates of capacity growth. As a result, many enterprises are supported by storage platforms that might better be called "Frankenstorage." Moreover, the foundational storage arrays used by these enterprises is likely not as scalable and feature-rich as necessary for them to be fully reliant on these systems.

In short, traditional storage systems do not provide the breadth and depth of functionality that modern enterprises demand. But, that's only a part of the equation.

Storage Technology has Fallen Behind

It's easy to see that traditional storage technology has fallen woefully behind what is required in the modern enterprise. In so many ways, storage actively works against an organization, requiring constant attention, expensive consultants, and specialized third party monitoring tools. Some storage systems look much like a car with no tires, no dashboard, and a square steering wheel. Sure, it would be possible to drive on the rims, but it would be a poor driving experience and, without the dashboard, it would be impossible to figure out how fast the car is driving.

Data Management has Become Increasingly Difficult

Besides the very real problem of ongoing capacity upgrade needs, enterprises also face a multitude of challenges around ongoing management of the data and of the very systems that house the data. While traditional storage vendors have attempted to bring ease of use and ease of administration to their products, they are saddled with the burdens of legacy architectures that practically force complexity into the administrative process. As such, storage management has become a specialized niche for many IT staffers that are tasked with maintaining an organization's storage assets. The problem here is that every minute that a storage administrator has to spend on unnecessary tasks is a minute delay in getting a product to market or a minute lost in focusing on business-facing organizational goals.

What Would Perfect Storage and Storage Management Look Like?

In a modern enterprise, storage is the lynchpin upon which all services depend. Employees and customers alike are affected by the storage choices that are made. Because of this and after studying the major storage challenges that affect enterprises, Exablox decided to ask a very simple question: "What would the perfect storage system and storage management look like?" It's a short question, but with a number of different answers. At the same time, we scanned the storage market and realized that there can be many correct answers but no one has brought together what we feel is the perfect solution... until now. Exablox has cherry-picked the best features from best of breed solutions across the storage landscape and brought them into a single product.

Exablox will:

• Scale-out seamlessly to accommodate capacity, performance, and/or availability requirements
• Deduplicate information to maximize storage utilization
• Snapshot information to provide granular file level recovery
• Fail over and replicate resources enabling continuous information availability

On the management front, Exablox also identified the cream of the crop with regard to how certain products are managed and envisioned and built a storage management system that has the following characteristics:

• Be intuitive and easy to use
• Configure and integrate with cloud-based services
• Proactively diagnose and report problems
• Strive for zero configuration for storage management tasks

The end result of this effort is a powerful, yet simple, storage management appliance, OneBlox, coupled with a cloud-based management service, OneSystem. In fact, the OneBlox and OneSystem combination is so intuitive that a typical IT staff person can have the initial node up and running in just 5 minutes.

But that simplicity doesn't come by way of a scaled-back product. The Exablox solution is incredibly powerful and feature-filled, as you will discover in the rest of this paper.

The Exablox Ecosystem and Components

In order to achieve the lofty goals set forth for this new vision of storage, Exablox has built, from the ground up, a brand new and unique storage ecosystem. Exablox provides organizations with massively scalable storage with enterprise-class features and single-instance cloud management that brings the entire environment under a single administrative umbrella, regardless of how large it ultimately grows.

Exablox takes a building block approach to architecture, starting with a node, expanding to a ring, and eventually becoming a mesh. Each object type is described in the following sections.

Distributed Object-based File System

To achieve the stated goals of the OneBlox system, Exablox has created a groundbreaking new file system. OneBlox's object-based file system handles all aspects of data storage and protection, including protecting all storage in a number of ways. OneBlox protects against:

• Data deletion or corruption
• Drive removal
• Drive failure
• Appliance failure
• Ring failure

Simple doesn't mean ordinary! Exablox's vision required the design and implementation of many enterprise- class storage features architected to be as powerful as those features found in traditional storage systems, but with exposure to the administrator that retains the desire to provide an easy-to-use solution. As such, significant engineering has gone into building world-class features for organizations more interested in solving business problems than in fighting with storage. OneBlox's file system is built on top of a distributed content addressable content store. As new data goes into the file system, they are chunked up into 32KB blocks and distributed around the ring. Once distributed, additional replicas are created for data protection. Clients accessing content stored in a ring are load balanced across multiple nodes, which increases performance and reliability of the storage environment.

To maintain performance levels that are necessary for large amounts of data, each node maintains its object metadata in an index stored on a solid state disk (SSD) which is built into each OneBlox.

The Global Namespace

The Global Namespace is the single presentation of the OneBlox environment to the user base and is the file system that powers OneBlox. With the OneBlox file system, administrators do not create traditional storage objects such as LUNs, volumes and aggregates. Nor does the OneBlox system use RAID for data protection. As storage capacities have grown, RAID has proven to be the Achilles' Heel for many, as rebuild times in the event of a disk failure grow longer, increasing the potential for data loss.

Instead, OneBlox uses a comprehensive replication engine and other features, including Continuous Data Protection (CDP), to protect data and to present to users a single, unified view of the storage environment.

Local Replication
The cornerstone for many enterprise data protection efforts, replication is a key asset in the Exablox arsenal and is used throughout the ecosystem, from single appliances all the way up interconnected meshes. In fact, data protection is so critical in the Exablox vision that, by design, multiple copies of data are always kept, but the exact process depends on how many OneBlox nodes and Rings exist in the environment:

• Single node. OneBlox creates three replicated copies of the information on the single node across 3 drives, which enables the loss of up to two physical hard drives in the appliance, without loss of data.
• Two nodes in a ring. OneBlox load balances and distributes three copies of information across both nodes and across ensures each copy is on 3 separate drives. In this scenario, an entire node can fail and users will still have access to their information.
• Three or more nodes in a ring. OneBlox leverages all nodes in the ring as replication targets, enabling a scenario in which two nodes can fail and users will still have access to their information.

Deduplication and Compression
Data protection always comes with some kind of cost. When data is replicated, as is the case with OneBlox, additional capacity is required to store that replicated data. However, to maximize the overall usable capacity of a OneBlox appliance or ring, Exablox has imbued the system with powerful inline data deduplication. Each time a file or portion of a file is targeted to the OneBlox system, it checks to see if that data already exists in the environment. If it does, that second copy is simply discarded and a very small pointer to the original copy of the file is put into that space instead, which uses just a fraction of the storage that would otherwise be used.

To put it simply, each time data is written to the environment, OneBlox asks a simple question: Do I need to store the data or just create a pointer?

In a traditional storage environment, deduplication is often disabled and not used for primary storage due to the processing overhead that is introduced inside these legacy environments. With OneBlox, not only is deduplication enabled by default, it can't be disabled. The OneBlox system has plenty of processing power.

Continuous Data Protection Through Snapshots
Although fast disk-based technologies have been available for many years, many companies will rely on backup windows to keep long-term archives of their critical business data. Most often, these backup windows take place over night. This presents a significant opportunity for data loss in the organization if, for example, a data loss event takes place at the end of a workday. In this case, all of the work performed since the most recent backup – which took place in the wee hours of the morning – is lost.

OneBlox provides a powerful data recovery feature known as Continuous Data Protection (CDP). Throughout the day, OneBlox continuously takes snapshots of new data written in the system and keeps those snapshots as recovery points in the event of data loss, which could be something as simple as an accidentally deleted file. This snapshot-based approach to Continuous Data Protection eliminates the data loss window, enabling much faster recovery in the event of a serious data loss issue.

It might seem that the snapshots feature could use massive amounts of disk space. Thanks to OneBlox's deduplication engine, snapshots use only a fraction of the space that they otherwise would, enabling very granular data recovery at a minuscule cost.

In a "keeping IT focused on the business" feature, these snapshots are actually available to users who can access them through Windows Explorer or the Mac Finder and recover older versions of their own files without IT having to be involved. OneBlox provides the ability to go back to the last file written (which could be the last second), as well as further back in time: the last minute, hour, day, week, month, or year(s).

As is the case for deduplication, continuous data protection is enabled by default and cannot be disabled.

Encryption
No matter how big the business, data security is of prime importance but is something that business owners don't want to have to worry about. However, inattention to security can bring negative PR in the event of a data breach due to unsecured data. By default, with OneBlox, data is always encrypted while it is stored in the system and this encryption cannot be disabled. This atrest encryption system uses AES 256 to protect even the most sensitive information.

Thanks to this encryption technology, organizations deploying OneBlox can rest assured that a lost or stolen hard drive can't be used to steal sensitive information. In fact, the encryption allows an organization to simply throw away bad hard drives without having to worry about the contents ultimately being retrieved by data thieves.

CIFS/SMB
The Microsoft Windows-standard CIFS/SMB file server protocol has been around for a long time and enjoys wide operating system support. As such, OneBlox exposes file shares via the Global Namespace using SMB. This enables immediate access to OneBlox shares from Windows-, Linux-, and Mac-based systems in the organization.

Additionally, OneBlox provides OneSystem with the ability for administrators to authenticate with Active Directory environments so that existing user accounts can be used for OneBlox access. This negates the need to maintain a separate user directory in OneSystem if users are elect to use Active Directory.

Remote Replication
Sometimes, disaster strikes. Mother Nature has a knack for attacking without warning and entire parts of cities can be wiped off the map. To protect against site failures such as this, many companies deploy disaster recovery sites that are physical separated from the main data center.

For those concerned about potential site failure, a ring, which can consist of up to six interconnected OneBlox, may be replicated to another ring in what is known as a mesh. This replication feature replicates the information across the two rings and only replicates the changed deduplicated information on an ongoing basis. In the event of one site going offline, the other site has additional copies of the information and users can access the information from the alternate ring. OneBlox enables customers to build reliability and disaster recovery for a low price and without the complexity that often dooms these implementations. Moreover, all information replicated to each ring is already deduplicated and encrypted, so the network utilization is maximized.

Increasing Capacity
No company is a static entity. Organizations grow and change every day and this growth becomes a part of the organization culture. Why is it then that adding additional storage capacity with a traditional storage system is always an "event" that requires planned downtime and can carry with it the risk of an outage?

There's a much better way to handle capacity increases. With zero configuration additional disk drives or OneBlox can be added in support of an organization's growth. With OneBlox, there are three primary ways to add capacity:

• Add new hard drives to an existing OneBlox
• Upgrade existing hard drives in an existing appliance with drives of a higher capacity
• Add new OneBlox to an existing ring

Adding or Upgrading Hard Drives
With traditional storage arrays, adding capacity often means buying a huge, expensive shelf fully populated with hard drives even if just a few TB of extra capacity is needed. With OneBlox, if an appliance has available hard drive slots, an administrator can simply insert a new hard disk until it clicks in place. That's it. It's a complete tool-less process and it doesn't matter what the capacity is of the new hard drive. OneSystem simply detects that a new drive has been added and works behind the scenes to integrate its capacity into the environment. Organizations can always use any hard drive purchased from a computer store. OneBlox inherently supports the latest drive technology.

If a customer wishes to upgrade the capacity of an existing appliance, the existing hard drives can simply be replaced one-by-one with drives of a larger capacity. OneSystem and OneBlox will handle the integration of the new capacity and the redistribution of existing data on the appliance and in the ring. In either case when adding additional drives, it requires zero configuration. The additional capacity is dynamically pooled with the existing global file system and applications and users immediately have more capacity. With a traditional storage array, this drive-by-drive replacement process would be extremely tedious, and most likely not supported by the storage array vendor.

Adding OneBlox
As more capacity is needed in an environment, customers can simply add more OneBlox to an existing ring and scale capacity, performance, and availability. As new devices are deployed, they are automatically discovered by OneSystem and are seamlessly added to the storage environment. Similar to drive expansion, adding OneBlox to a ring requires zero configuration. From a user perspective, the effective storage capacity of the environment simply grows as new OneBlox are added. No changes to users or applications is required to take advantage of the additional capacity.

Increasing Network Throughput
Although gigabit Ethernet is fast, sometimes it's not fast enough, particularly when dealing with dozens or hundreds of terabytes of data. In addition to scaling capacity, each OneBlox appliance has been gifted with the ability to scale to up to 4 Gbps of raw throughout thanks to the quartet of bonded gigabit Ethernet adapters that are built into the device. In the figure below, you can see these ports at the lower left hand side of the picture.

Summary

Exablox uses three words – Powerful, Simple, and Protected – to describe what is a top to bottom reinvention of how storage works at the most fundamental levels. By abandoning legacy RAID concepts and traditional scale-up storage architectures, Exablox has incorporated best of breed ideas into a single integrated solution and management experience. Exablox is enabling organizations to solve complex business challenges with powerful, yet simple and elegant, storage.

Video Demo:

In this demo, you'll see the benefits of continuous data protection and the power and simplicity of OneSystem, the cloud-based management for OneBlox. You'll also see how many of the storage management features, like growing a scale-out cluster require zero configuration.

Documentation:

Download the Exablox OneBlox 4312 Appliance Datasheet (PDF).

Download the Exablox Product Brief Datasheet (PDF).

Download the Exablox OneBlox and OneSystem Overview Datasheet (PDF).