Advanced Intelligent Storage

Dec 19, 2018

Advanced Intelligent Storage a.k.a AIS is a (dual controller or Standalone TBD) flash array which provides a perfect blend of Storage and Compute operations in one Single box, to business applications.
Traditionally Storage arrays are considered to be dumb in terms of taking decisions. Administrators and other users normally consider Arrays for keeping the Application data. This data is generally used by Applications which are running on remote places which are in the form of Physical Servers or through Hypervisors.

In the real time Application scenarios, Data flows from Application to Storage Arrays and the approach taken by Administrators flows from Top to Bottom. VAAI is one such example.
AIS goes one step forward, where it focus on providing intelligence to the Storage arrays and the approach it takes is the “Bottom Up” approach. It essentially means, everything is data unless it is given to application where it has a meaningful purpose. A data can be used by an application or it can itself be an application.
AIS array contains an OS which is specially designed for providing intelligence to Array. Figure 1 denotes the major components of AIS array.

Advanced Intelligence Storage Architecture

AISA Deliverables
- Dual blade All Flash Array
  All flash array integrated with Hypervisor and Private cloud.
- Dual blade Hybrid Flash Array
  A combination of Flash (performance) and HDDs (capacity) integrated with Hypervisor and Private cloud.
  AIS OS will be in Electronic Storage or laid out in the form of VM Image. Three different roles:
  1) AIS-OS: For Storage Array. It includes:
  a. Kernel, Kvm, Storage engine, Targetcli, LIO, NVDiMM,
  b. Opensource LVM, MDRaid, DRBD
  c. Connectivity to JBODs and External Storage Arrays
  d. Qemu, libvirt (with continuous LVMM) for src and dst side LVMM
  e. Controller VM which contains Openstack packages and mysql database for private cloud. Also connectivityAPIs to Public cloud.
  f. PCIe passthrough mode enabled for Controller VM

For Compute nodes, it will be called as AIS-OSCN. Compute nodes can be any bare metal server and x86 hardware. Once this OS is installed, all nodes will be part of private cloud.
a. Kernel, kvm
b. Qemu, libvirt (with continuous LVMM) for src side LVMM.
c. Openstack services for compute nodes.
d. AISA Agent
AIS-OSON: OS for Object storage Nodes. Normally x86 nodes.
a. No need of OS installation (Optional)
b. Openstack services for Object storage such as Ceph, RADOS, Sheepdog, GlusterFS, LustreFS.
c. AISA Agent

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