Sometimes the world isn’t in the best place, environmentally speaking. We’ll steer clear of politics. And with many businesses worrying about not only energy costs but also their carbon footprint, it’s good to know that we have strategies to minimise power consumption. Welcome to video seven in our short series explaining SymplyPERIFERY. Let’s talk about how our scalable in-facility storage matches up with environmental responsibility.
SymplyPERIFERY incorporates patented Darkive technology, which takes a smart approach to maintaining the access superiority of disks while approaching the overall power costs of much greener LTO tape. As a function, Darkive will spin down drives and step-down node power on your cluster resources, keeping awake the strict minimum to guarantee service. And it will cycle power on a regular basis for background maintenance. Using this method, up to 80 percent of power can be saved without sacrificing any meaningful functionality or performance.
In this way SymplyPERIFERY can be used to displace or compliment tape libraries. Although tape based systems are undoubtedly cost-effective, content isn’t instantly accessible and tapes need to be migrated over time. Which incurs costs. It also makes scaling your archive more complex.
As your business grows and applications evolve, so will your capacity and performance requirements. SymplyPERIFERY benefits from massively parallel architecture that enables almost infinite scaling. Remember the straws in the glass? There’s no need for complex configuration or management, and no need to migrate data. Just add more storage nodes and they’ll be automatically booted and adopted by the cluster. Rebalancing of system resources happens organically and continually as part of the regular operation of the cluster, requiring no intervention from administrators. In other words: plug in more drives and SymplyPERIFERY will move data around to make the best use of the additional space. Nice.
As part of this process the system health processor continually performs background checks to ensure object integrity, cardinality (proper level of replication), and handle lifecycle events driven by administrator-defined metadata. Easy-to-configure content retention policies mean that you’re only keeping data as long as intended so the system doesn’t clog up with data sprawl.
This also makes retiring disks or even a whole node from the cluster a simple operation. It’s just the click of a button in the management UI and you uninstall the physical hardware whenever it’s convenient for you. As a consequence, the cluster will create replacement replicas or erasure coded segments of all contained objects elsewhere, in the same manner as if there was a hardware failure. Once the cluster has completed the creation of replacement segments and replicas, the system indicates that it’s safe to remove the retired piece of hardware.
Because adding and removing nodes can happen in flight, migration can take place in an organic fashion without the massive disruption and extra costs associated with forklift upgrades. Which is fantastic for business continuity.
What’s more, because SymplyPERIFERY doesn’t use databases there’s a much lower CPU overhead. Which means you’re generating less heat, so you need less cooling and therefore using less energy.
So SymplyPERIFERY is a massively scalable, adaptable, and environmentally friendly solution for storing large amounts of data. And it stores that data as objects. We’ve got one more video to go – and that’s all about access control.
