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Scale-out NAS
The explosive growth of unstructured data across virtually all industries and the speed with which enterprises need to access that data have created a “big data” challenge that cannot be solved with traditional network and storage technologies. The emergence of faster wide-area networks (WANs), faster CPUs, and larger storage arrays has further highlighted the problem - reliable movement and storage of massive bulk data over global distances cannot be achieved with solutions that are based on traditional software architectures and technologies with inherent bottlenecks in performance and scalability.

Challenge

Transfer tools that use traditional network protocols fail to utilize the available bandwidth, while traditional server and storage operating systems experience performance bottlenecks from CPUs, disk IO, and file system overhead. To meet the extreme business requirements of big data access, transfer, and storage, solutions must overcome the limiting factors associated with conventional network protocols, servers, and storage systems.

Solution: Aspera Enterprise and Connect Server for Isilon OneFS

Aspera’s high-speed transfer software shipping with Isilon OneFS operating system and Isilon scale-out NAS delivers an integrated solution uniquely enabled to transfer and store file assets of any size, with maximum speed, over any IP network, with complete bandwidth control and security. This cost-effective and breakthrough solution delivers extreme performance and reliability of scale-out NAS across high- latency and low bandwidth networks.
 

Transfers occur at maximum speed, fully utilizing the allocated bandwidth while being fair to other critical network traffic. Transfers are fast, stable, robust and predictable, even for the largest files, most challenging networks, longest distances, and highly concurrent and loaded transfer scenarios.

Support for the Most Common Use Cases

The joint Aspera / Isilon solution can be deployed to support a wide set of common use cases including replacing CIFS mounts for user uploads and downloads from a central cluster, automating data movement for processing, multi- location synchronization and replication, and data migration to and from other storage systems.

Single Integrated System

Aspera Enterprise and Connect server are bundled and ship with Isilon storage. The Isilon server and storage tier are collapsed into a single, common storage and transfer management pool, simplifying the management of multiple fasp™ processes running on multiple cluster nodes. As file transfer needs expand, simply add performance or capacity to the Isilon cluster, without having to manage servers and storage separately and with no downtime.

Scale-Out Performance

The joint solution enables linear scale-out transfer performance for both single and concurrent transfers. Aspera fasp™ transfers can be easily scaled out across nodes in the Isilon cluster to achieve maximum aggregate throughput end-to-end.

Complete Control Over Performance

Aspera’s unique adaptive rate control virtualizes performance management cluster-to-cluster. A single virtual link spanning multiple nodes allocates bandwidth and priorities to transfers. Combined with Isilon scale-out performance, this capability provides unmatched transfer management and bandwidth prioritization—enabling precision fairness to other network traffic. Bandwidth priorities can be assigned to individual transfers, down to the user, nodes, cluster, DNS name or IP address.

All-Active High Availability and Load Balancing

Isilon SmartConnect provides intelligent client connection load balancing and failover support for Aspera fasp™ clients. Through a single host name, SmartConnect enables client connection load balancing and dynamic Aspera fasp™ failover of client connections across storage nodes to provide optimal utilization of the cluster resources. SmartConnect is compatible with any Aspera fasp™ client or server.



Figure 1.
Results of tests performed on an Isilon S-Series 200 3 node cluster, comparing fasp™ to traditional transmission protocols by calculating the throughput from transferring files of various sizes, under varied WAN conditions. The comparison of fasp™, SCP, RSYNC, FTP and TCP demonstrates that fasp™ eliminates the TCP bottleneck for the bulk data transmissions and improves the throughput by a factor up to thousands. Even more important, fasp™ transfer speeds are relatively constant over network WAN conditions ranging from 0 ms to 300 ms round-trip latency, and 0% packet loss to 5% packet loss! TCP based protocols drop by a factor of 1000X over the same conditions.