As I continue along with some SFD13 previews I stumble upon Exablox. Exablox is one of the few presenting companies at SFD13 that I know very little about so I’m excited to hear what they have to offer and say come June 14th in Denver when the event kicks off. Also, Exablox is coming into SFD after being acquired by StorageCraft earlier this year and given the partnerships between the two companies in the past I’m sure we will hear some more in regards to how this integration is going. Headquartered in Mountain View Exablox was the brainchild of Matthew Catino, Tad Hunt and Frank Barrus. Founded in 2010 the three set out to create a more scalable filer array – and in the end we are left with a product they call OneBlox.
[symple_box color=”yellow” fade_in=”false” float=”center” text_align=”left” width=””]Just a disclaimer of sorts – every article, comment, rant or mention of SFD13 that you find here has been completed on my own merits. My travel, flights, accommodations, meals, drinks, gum, etc are all paid for by Gestalt IT, however I’m not required or obliged to return the favor in anyway other than my presence 🙂 – Which still feels weird to say 🙂 Well, my presence and possible a little bit of Maple Syrup.[/symple_box]
OneBlox – A reimagined scale-out storage solution.
Honestly when I first started diving into OneBlox I pretty much assumed it was just a simple filer box that you purchased chalked full of drives – but after some more digging there is honestly a lot of differences between OneBlox and a lot of the other scale out NAS boxes I’m familiar with.
- You can bring your own drives – yeah, you can put pretty much whatever drives you want in these things! Different speeds and capacities? No problem
- It runs off of object storage – underneath all that SMB/NFS presentation is a heaping helping of object based storage, which is a big enabler for our next point
- There is no RAID – rather than utilizing parity to protect against failure OneBlox utilizes their custom based object file system to intelligently write 3 copies of every object, ensuring your data is written on not only different drives, but different nodes within a ring as well. Wait! What’s a ring?
- Their ring architecture – A ring is essentially a cluster of 1 or more OneBlox nodes. All nodes within a single ring are essentially pooled to form one single global file system which shrinks and grows as drives and nodes are added. Item such as deduplication and compression are all formed globally across this file system – meaning we have inline deduplication across multiple OneBlox nodes.
OneSystem – Cloud Based Management
As of late it seems like everyone is jumping on this “cloud based” management solution – and rightly so. We get the ability to manage our infrastructure from anywhere with a browser and an internet connection. OneSystem is Exablox’s play in this field. OneSystem essentially allows administrators to access all of their deployed OneBlox’s from a secure, available, cloud-based management server through a browser. OneSystem provides real-time monitoring and health reporting as well as supports a multi-tenant environment for those service providers and large enterprises that may need it. Don’t trust the cloud just yet? No problem, the whole OneSystem can be deployed on premises as well if need be.
As I mentioned earlier I don’t know a lot about Exablox so I’m excited to see what they have to say at SFD13. I read a little in regards to some unique CDP and replication strategies they have as well for protecting data between different rings. From the surface it looks like some cool tech and I can’t wait to learn more about some of their biggest use cases and see more about how that underlying custom object based file-system works! Hopefully we see more at SFD13! For those that want to follow along I’ll have the live stream along with any of my SFD13 related content on my page here, or be sure to stay up to date by keeping an eye on the official SFD13 event page. And hey, follow along and ask questions using the hash tag #SFD13 – See you in June!
