SOLUTION

BRIEF

HIGH-END STORAGE FOR EVERYONE

Exablox OneBlox
APRIL 2013
Reliable storage is critical to the lifeblood of every data-driven business, and
operational storage capabilities like non-disruptive scalability, continuous data
protection, capacity optimization, and disaster recovery are not just desired, but
required. But enterprise-class storage features have long been out of reach of
organizations that don't have enterprise-sized budgets, storage experts and large
data centers. Instead, they make do with low-end disk arrays or even just a box of
disks patched together with a minimal amount of data protection in the form of manual backups. The
problem is that disks fail, organizations change, and data continues to grow organizations that pile
up disks under the desktop are taking big risks for significant business failure while those that pay up
for traditional arrays and even cloud storage incur significant cost and management overhead.
Having to step up to deliver these advanced storage requirements challenges growing organizations
with big adoption hurdles, not the least of which is both OPEX and CAPEX cost. Far too many
organizations struggle along with high-risk storage or feel forced to allocate significant energy, cost,
and staff time into acquiring, deploying, and operating high-touch storage arrays with layers of
complex add-on software. Even larger enterprises with expert storage gurus and big data centers can
feel the weight of managing complex SANs for departmental, ROBO, and other practical rubber-
meets-road storage scenarios. Whats really needed is a new approach to storage - an affordable,
expandable array solution with advanced storage capabilities baked in. Ideally it should be simpler to
operate than even setting up a file system on raw drives and it should be available at a justifiable cost
for even small data driven businesses.
In this solution brief we are going to look at what SMB and departmental storage buyers should both
require and expect from storage solutions to meet their business goals, and how traditional mid-
market storage based on old technologies can fall short. We will then introduce Exabloxs new
OneBlox storage array to highlight how purposefully designing storage from the ground up can lead
to a simple but powerful hardware design and software architecture that features built-in high
availability, easy scalability, and great data protection. Along the way well see how two real-world
users of OneBlox experience its actual benefits, cost effectiveness and true ease of management in
their live customer deployments.

CROSSING THE GAP FROM JUST DISK TO ARRAY

Its one thing for a very small business to rely on a box of disks, or a simple RAID array with manual
backup processes. But when a business comes to critically rely on its data storage to support core
operations, scalable and reliable applications, and business continuity, there are a number of storage
capabilities that IT (or whomever is wearing the IT hat) should provide. Historically, most of these
capabilities have been associated with high-end enterprise class storage, and not readily available
to low and mid-market solutions. Today, data is driving at the heart of more and more business of all
sizes, and key data storage capabilities are becoming important for everyone. Among the most
important of these are:

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Continuous Data Protection Disks fail. Files get deleted. Data gets corrupted, lost and
stolen. Its a reality that many young and growing organizations hope and pray nothing
happens to anything important at a critical time. Unfortunately, bad things do happen and
even seemingly small data problems can have serious business consequences. Advanced data
protection features are automatic and continuous, and include RAID or replication, snapshots,
and encryption.

Non-disruptive Scalability - When its time to grow, and if anything is true both
organizations and data will continue to grow, IT needs to be able to add storage capacity at
will without rebuilding the storage architecture, migrating data, or deploying yet another
separate storage unit with yet another namespace to manage.

Complete Management - Operating a business blind is a bad idea. If an organization cant

see what is going on with their data storage - if they cant actively manage storage services -
then they will run into unexpected walls at the worst times. Cohesive integrated management
helps assure the availability, capacity, and performance management of the storage services,
without requiring high-end domain expertise on staff.

Integrated Disaster Recovery - Floods, fires, hurricanesand fallible humans - even a small
Robots + Water + Data = Liquid Robotics

A growing startup venture, Liquid Robotics has made quite a splash in the marine data space with
their Wave Glider marine robots that can cost-effectively hold station or slowly patrol vast
stretches of ocean collecting insight from many kinds of sensors. Wave Gliders are exceptionally
green, with electronics powered by solar energy and propulsion uniquely provided by converting
wave action to forward motion. But while the robots are fascinating, the business is really about
data collecting, storing, processing, and delivering it to customers.
I talked with James Gosling (the father of Java), currently working on the Wave Gliders
autonomous systems, about the data-centric nature of their business and why Exablox is so
exciting to them. James told me that Liquid Robotics needs bulk storage for lots of data (like
hydrophone readings, weather and even DNA analysis) and that some projects involve months if
not years of data collection. Data has to be gathered from the remote platforms (by satellite, wifi,
and even swapping drives sea-side), processed, distributed to global customers, and archived.
Because they are a high growth small company, its hard to forecast how much storage will be
needed next, it isnt cost-effective to build out an enterprise class solution, and cloud storage is
expensive for their usage patterns. Its no surprise that James is attracted to the OneBlox design for
its premise of cost-effective deployment and ease of scalability. James particularly likes that
OneBlox just extends the single global namespace when adding disks or nodes no need to update
any applications, management scripts, or partition data.
Data protection is also obviously important since their reputation is built on delivering data. Wave
Gliders have collected data while surviving hurricanes - they certainly dont want to risk losing
data on the IT side the through failed disks or accidently deleted files. James likes OneBloxs
continuous data protection, and as a developer, he thinks the snapshot capabilities are vital for
their testing cycles. They could rollback quickly and easily if something isnt going right. And the
built-in encryption for some of their customers is a critical asset.
Currently Liquid Robotics has only one IT person for science data, and James indicated everyone
is so busy they couldnt manage complex storage solutions even if they wanted to. He was pleased
with the easy setup, and the nice management console that works remotely. Overall, Exablox
OneBlox appears to have been designed to meet the data storage challenges Liquid Robotics faces
as a growing data-centric business.
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Solution Brief
business needs its data to survive. DR is not just for remote locations in risky areas, even the
most safe and secure installations can lose power, experience accidents, and have disgruntled
employees. Advanced storage solutions replicate data across nodes and sites automatically.

Capacity Optimization Getting the most out of a storage investment means minimizing
how much capacity is used through data de-duplication and compression. Once only available
for archives through off-line processing by specialized hardware, advanced storage solutions
implement capacity optimizations for all data.

Top Ten Issues with Traditional Mid-Range Storage

Unfortunately most of todays mid-range storage solutions tend to either be overloaded low-end
storage with layers of complex software added on, or stripped-down yet still expensive enterprise
storage platforms initially designed around large data center architectures from the last decade. In
other words, its a tough choice and a big hurdle either way. Here are our top ten specific concerns
with these traditional storage solutions:
1. Reliance on RAID - RAID techniques are 25 years old this year and are showing their age.
With ever bigger disks now available (e.g. recent 4TB drives), RAID sets experiencing a failure
might not be able to rebuild in a reasonable timeframe, leaving them extremely vulnerable to
successive failures (which would not be protected), not to mention being possibly
inaccessible for days.
2. Complex Data Protection Data protection features in traditional array architectures are
often provided through additional expensive licensing and layered-on software (and
sometimes even hardware) solutions, incurring additional cost, complexity, and management.
3. Disruptive Scalability Traditional array chassis may support some scale-up by adding
more disks, but only until they are full. Then it becomes a huge disruption and additional
burden to roll in another array instance to handle more growth, leading to multiple name
spaces to manage going forward. The environment grows more complex with each array
growth step.
4. Management Burden Traditional arrays and multiple storage software add-ons tend to
proliferate management tools and create expert staffing requirements for each system and
solution. Often, dedicated storage staff need to be assigned and trained up front, creating a
large OPEX burden even at low initial deployment sizes.
5. Offline Backups Historically, backups have been the standard way to protect data and
provide DR. But in practice backups are unwieldy - they occur only at specific points in time
leaving big windows of exposure, they can take a long time to recover, and in fact many
backup implementations have never been tested to see if recovery is actually achievable.
6. Security Holes Like with most laptops, drives pulled from traditional arrays have to be
physically destroyed to ensure nothing is left on them and they cant really be re-used
without risking some data exposure. Third party encryption is expensive even if available, and
isnt integrated with the file system possibly leaving drive-level vulnerabilities.
7. Storage Expertise Requirements Setting up and maintaining traditional arrays requires
managing storage pools, RAID groups, LUNs, volumes, and file systems. Often this requires
large consulting projects with SIs or vendors just to get systems setup and installed the first
time.
8. Suboptimal Capacity Utilization Features like de-duplication and compression tend to be
after-thoughts in mid-market storage. Traditional storage vendors have a perverse incentive
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Solution Brief
to encourage the use of more capacity, not just for disk drives, but also for licenses linked to
TB deployed.
9. Vendor Certified Drives Most array vendors insist on drives sourced through them,
which drives up both support and operations costs. Drives cant be easily repurposed and
specific equipment (including hot and cold spares) may need to be maintained in all locations
at additional cost.
10. Conversation Speed Support Storage needs to be online in most organizations around the
clock, despite small IT staffing. When problems arise, resolution involves hours on the phone,
transferring log files, and very persistent IT folks.

THE BENEFITS OF INTENTIONAL DESIGN

What would happen if you started with a blank sheet of paper and designed, from the ground up, a
new storage solution that provided those key storage capabilities in a single, self contained array,
everything baked-in and automated for the non-storage expert to setup and operate? Youd certainly
avoid inheriting the legacy issues mentioned above, and could create storage that would be a cost-
effective joy to own and operate, rather than a costly burden.
Exablox has taken just that approach with their new OneBlox storage appliance. OneBlox has been
designed to provide advanced storage capabilities that data driven businesses need, aiming for a low
management burden and affordable price point that both smaller IT organizations and departmental
storage buyers would appreciate.

Simple
OneBlox is plug and play scale-out
storage. Physically, each OneBlox
storage node has eight 3.5 drive bays
and 4-1GbE connections. One of the
first remarkable things about OneBlox
is that you bring your own disks to
the array. You can plug in any disks of
any size that you have or source
(SATA, SAS, SSD) your own drives.
Over time, drives can be removed,
recycled, reused, and replaced as
needed. This process is done
dynamically, and the file system will
automatically regenerate the desired
levels of data protection (through
object-based replication). This means
you can reuse drives from other
arrays, buy disks from your vendor of
choice, and swap out disks as your
capacity and budget allows.

Figure 1- Exablox OneBlox Appliance

Powering OneBlox is a new distributed object-based file system. A unique aspect to Exabloxs file
system is the ubiquitous access it provides an organization by presenting a CIFS/SMB file share to
users and applications. This isnt common as most object-based systems require custom application
API or RESTful interfaces. Under the covers OneBlox breaks every file it sees into objects. By
managing at the object level, OneBlox can provide data replication across associated disks and nodes
and make a global namespace out of all the storage presented.
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Solution Brief
Object level replication enables Exablox to avoid legacy RAID protection schemes while protecting
data from disk or node failures. Data replication is in real time and, by default, in triplicate. If there is
more than one node in the local ring, it will ensure that at least one of the replicates is on a different
node. This replication scheme enables information is still available after two drive or node failures.
Moreover, failed disks (or whole nodes) can simply be removed and replaced OneBlox will
dynamically re-replicate all the objects on the node as needed to maintain the appropriate protection
level. There are no vulnerable or offline rebuild windows as with legacy RAID approaches and no
worrying about LUNs or volume sizes.

Scalable
Multiple storage nodes can be aggregated into a single ring (of up to 6 nodes) by simply powering
them up on the same LAN. They will automatically discover other nodes and join the ring with zero
configuration. Once nodes are clustered, not only does OneBlox automatically redistribute any data
objects across the ring (if necessary to protect against two drive or node failures), it presents all the
aggregated storage in the same global namespace. When you physically add either a disk or a new
node, the current network share simply expands to include the new capacity. There is no need to
manually manage storage pools, mess with RAID sets, manage volumes and file systems (although
you can carve out additional shares if you want to), or migrate data.

Optimized
Automatic replication is great, but OneBlox does much more right out of the box. It also applies in-
line data de-duplication to optimize capacity. No questions to answer, radio buttons to click, no
management. It just does it and not just on a single node, but de-dupes across the entire ring (global
namespace). Although triplicate replication requires extra disk space compared to RAID, de-
duplication tremendously reduces the total storage space required (your mileage will vary depending
on data content).

Protected and Secure

In addition to the ring level replication, OneBlox provides advanced continuous data protection in the
form of automatic (space-optimized) snapshots that occur for every file write. This means that at any
point you can do an immediate online recovery of previous versions of a file without having to try
restoring from backups. Users can even find and recover files easily themselves by navigating
through a dedicated Snapshots folder through Mac Finder or Windows Explorer.
OneBlox not only protects against file deletion/corruption, but also drive removal. Every object that
is written to OneBlox is encrypted (in-line) with AES 256 before its written to the physical disk.
Failed or obsolete drives can be simply removed and thrown out. If disks are lost or stolen they are
unreadable. Following the OneBlox core management design principle, encryption happens
automatically - there isnt any special configuration. Its built-in and always protecting your
information.
In addition, Exablox is delivering cross-site replication to protect against an entire ring failure or site
failure. With this capability, it will be possible to designate rings to replicate to each other providing
an easy way to support disaster recovery plans. Furthermore, each of the rings continues to share the
same global namespace giving users and applications in both locations access to information in its
entirety. And since the data is already de-duplicated and encrypted with only incremental snapshot-
to-snapshot changes needing remote replication, WAN usage will automatically be optimized and
your information secure. Remote replication across rings could also be used to propagate data across
sites and support ROBO locations.

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Solution Brief

New Storage for an Old Museum: Museum of Science, Boston

The Museum of Science, Boston is a well-loved institution in New England, founded in 1830 and
visited by about 1.5 million people a year. With more than 300 full time employees (and many
more part-time and volunteer folks), running the Museum is not a casual undertaking. While many
museums have very small IT shops, the Museum of Science is blessed with a staff that includes IT
management, a half dozen admins and DBAs, and a busy support/help desk to handle museum
operations, research and development, collections, and increasingly live and online exhibits.
I interviewed Marc Check, the Director of Information and Interactive Technology about the ever
dynamic museum environment, how they are handling the fast growing digital data, and where
Exablox fits into the picture. Marc explained that as a museum, they tend to accumulate large
archives of materials and, of course, data protection is very important.
Storage consolidation has been a big project. The have consolidated a lot of unstructured data on
existing mid-range arrays, b ut the increasing appetite for storage has seen those scaled up to the
point where they now need to consider architectural upgrades and data migrations. Marcs team is
also looking at better DR and business continuity plans, supporting projects to digitize Museum
archives, storing newly acquired digital assets, providing for a potential project that will produce
thousands of hours of video, and enabling creative new live data exhibits (where visitors can
interact in the Museum, and then continue to connect over the internet).
Marc likes the OneBlox approach because they really want easily scalable and easily managed file
storage. He also thinks that a cost-effective NAS solution that keeps Museum materials highly
accessible presents far greater opportunities for the Museum than tiering data into archives (for a
museum, archival stuff is primary data). Because of the OneBlox continuous data protection and
cross-site replication, Marc thinks that it offers a very attractive alternative to their current offsite-
backup approach for unstructured data.
As a non-profit institution, Marc was careful to point out that affordability is k ey. Because OneBlox
enables the Museum to independently upgrade drives, it offers great investment protection
(avoiding storage refresh/migration every couple of years). With an ease for both implementing
and growing storage in a cost-effective solution, the new Exablox OneBlox seems just right for old
museums.

Managed
Along with the OneBlox storage, Exablox has also been innovating with its cloud-based storage
management service, OneSystem. Exabloxs OneSystem cloud solution means you never have to
install local storage tools, open firewall ports, or configure VPNs for remote management access.
OneBlox owners simply log into OneSystem (running in the cloud) and pair their unique OneBlox
with it much like you would a Bluetooth connection setup. From there, the rest is management
simplified: visual, drag-and-drop, directly actionable. Configuring new shares, users, groups,
integrating with Active Directory, and disaster recoveryall done through an intuitive browser
interface. OneSystem proactively tracks and monitors the usage, capacity and health, and issues alerts
if necessary. We expect that Exablox support will be offering proactive management of discovered
issues on a 7x24 basis another bonus for small IT organizations.
To summarize the innovative design briefly, all data in OneBlox is automatically replicated, de-
duplicated, encrypted, and continuously protected by snapshots. Management is cloud-based and
hosted by the experts. Scale-out growth is basically plug and play. Thats a lot of capability for an
appliance that enables you to use whatever drives you want.

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Solution Brief

THE BOTTOM LINE - COST

Perhaps the biggest challenge for most storage buyers is cost. OneBlox looks to save organizations
money in several areas, both CAPEX and OPEX, that are worth briefly reviewing:

OneBlox delivers the equivalent of an all inclusive licensing of multiple enterprise class
storage capabilities. In addition, these capabilities are baked-in to the point where they dont
require expert storage administration. Ease of use translates into a low total cost of
ownership.

OneBlox systematically scales out and grows smoothly, with no large thresholds in storage
architecture, services or licenses to overcome. The storage owner is free to add almost any
available capacity increments desired, as needed.

The bring-your-own-disk approach enables sourcing whatever drives desired from any
trusted vendor, at any price on the free market.

Cloud management means no on-premise support is required for hosting or maintaining

storage management solutions. It will always be current, and enables remote management
and monitoring by experts.

TANEJA GROUP OPINION

Procuring capable and reliable storage has always been a challenge for the smaller IT shop while even
larger enterprises can have great need for cost-effective departmental storage solutions. The size of
an organization doesnt determine how critical its data is to that organization, despite traditional
vendors aligning storage capabilities with corporate market size. Exablox is primed to exploit this
need by bringing advanced capabilities to the broader market in a low cost-of-ownership solution.
OneBlox can easily serve as central storage for a small business and departmental storage for larger
ones. Initial use cases for OneBlox would include storage consolidation, data collection, customer
projects, image and media sharing, and home directory hosting. Given the ongoing costs of active
cloud storage, a resource many smaller organizations often revert to in order to avoid a large on-
premise storage hassle, simple and easy storage like OneBlox now provides a great alternative. It
would be especially affordable if you could re-use existing or refurbished drives.
While Exablox OneBlox is capacity-oriented file storage, you can plug in whatever drives you want to
trade-off capacity for performance. And with cross-site replication built-in, OneBlox will be used to
address data distribution and global shared access requirements. We even think OneBlox could have
a strong role to play as an easily expandable storage tier behind server-side flash solutions.
Exablox has definitely changed the storage game with OneBlox and its OneSystem cloud management.
When all the storage intelligence is baked in and you can rely on the vendors live management, why
suffer with more complex and costly alternatives? We expect this kind of all-in, cost-effective storage
to not just be attractive to those suffering storage growth pains, but ultimately enable new data
driven business new services, applications, and even new companies.
NOTICE: The information and product recommendations made by the TANEJA GROUP are based upon public infor-
mation and sources and may also include personal opinions both of the TANEJA GROUP and others, all of which we
believe to be accurate and reliable. However, as market conditions change and not within our control, the infor-
mation and recommendations are made without warranty of any kind. All product names used and mentioned here-
in are the trademarks of their respective owners. The TANEJA GROUP, Inc. assumes no responsibility or liability for
any damages whatsoever (including incidental, consequential or otherwise), caused by your use of, or reliance upon,
the information and recommendations presented herein, nor for any inadvertent errors that may appear in this doc-
ument.
.

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