Overview

There are several major advantages of using a FlashArray for Swift object storage nodes. These include:

  • A dramatic reduction in the storage capacity and physical hardware required to facilitate data protection through Swift’s consistent hashing ring. The FlashArray’s unique parity protection scheme enable it as an alternative to the default approach involving creating 3 or more copies of data. Within a single site, the capacity required for object storage along with the parity overhead is an approximate 1.3 multiple of the object(s) stored. The default Swift behavior involves storing a multiple of 3.

  • The reduction of replicas made possible by the use of a FlashArray has the effect of significantly reducing a typically major inhibitor to the scale a given Swift cluster can achieve. It has been observed that the weight of replication traffic can become a limitation to scale in certain use cases.

  • The associated storage capacity associated with employing based on the global data reduction rate of the FlashArray

  • Reduced Swift node hardware requirements: Internal drive requirements for storage nodes are reduced, only operating system storage is required. Disk space for Swift object data, and optionally the operating system itself, is supplied by the FlashArray.

  • Reduced rack space, power, cooling and footprint requirements: Since a single storage subsystem provides storage space for multiple Swift nodes, smaller and possibly lower power 1U nodes can be used in the cluster.

Traditional and FlashArray Swift Stack Comparison

Figure 8.1. Traditional and FlashArray Swift Stack Comparison

On the left of Figure 8.1. Traditional and FlashArray Swift Stack Comparison is a traditional Swift cluster, which has a total storage capacity of 240TB. This requires 10 Swift object storage nodes with 12 2TB drives per system, which results in approximately 80 TB of effective storage capacity assuming that Swift uses the default replica count of 3.

Compare this traditional system to the FlasArray based cluster, shown on the right in Figure 8.1. Traditional and FlashArray Swift Stack Comparison. The FlashArray is a single 3U system that, depending on the configuration selected can provide up to 878TB of raw disk capacity. This number can be effectively multiplied by the global data reduction rate achieved by the FlashArray, which is dependent on the data stored within the Swift environment.