Scality slips its Ring around Kinetic drives

An object of Seagate’s exercise

Have a look at those hot JBODs

Scality provided an architectural diagram of its use of Kinetic JBODs

Kinetic JBOD and Scality RING. Click picture for largest version.

Accessing systems "talk" to a ring of Scality metadata servers, a RING farm, which stores file system directories and has a small object cache. These appear to provide the access details to retrieve or write objects from Kinetic pools in separate data centres, with objects stored using erasure coding and replication.

The access is shown to be object, file or block-based.

A Scality source said both Dot Hill and Newisys had Kinetic drive chassis. The Newisys EDA-4604 holds 60 Kinetic drives in 4u and a PDF document presents some information about it.

EDA stands for Ethernet Drive Array and the document says its capacity is 240PB, 2.4PB per standard rack – so less dense than the Rausch BigFoot chassis. It has 4 x 1GBitE connection ports and redundant 1GbitE connections to each drive. There are "2 x 10GbitE datacenter network ports" and "Dual, redundant, hot-pluggable Ethernet Switch and Management (ESM) module" inside the box.

Newisys claims this is an ideal building block for object storage deployments.

Scality says all Kinetic configurations will be able to use its RING. You can read a Seagate Kinetic drive FAQ here. ®