Kris Meier
I’m excited to announce the immediate availability of Google Cloud Storage as a tiering option in InfiniteIO’s Hybrid Cloud Tiering solution. I’m equally excited to announce our partner membership in the Google Cloud Partner program. With Google, we will continue to bring innovative solutions that optimize the customer experience across the Hybrid Cloud.
InfiniteIO’s Hybrid Cloud Tiering solution installs transparently and automatically assesses and visualizes customers’ active and inactive (cold) data sets. Policies are easily created reflecting priorities defining what cold data means to the business. InfiniteIO applies these policies to automatically move the inactive data to the most cost-efficient class of Google Cloud Storage with zero disruption.
InfiniteIO supports all four classes of Google Cloud Storage: standard, nearline, coldline, and archive, allowing customers flexibility to optimize costs.
In our upcoming 2.5 software release we are supporting Native File Format for files tiered to object storage. Native File tiers whole files instead of storing the data in a proprietary format. Native File allows customers to access tiered files directly via Google Cloud Storage, eliminating vendor lock-in. Moreover, customers can leverage the power of Google Cloud resources to develop cloud-native workflows and gain insight into data tiered in native format.
Reducing Cloud Latency
Finally, a couple thoughts on performance. Google+InfiniteIO customers can realize the high performance benefits of InfiniteIO’s Hybrid Cloud Tiering Solution. Our Hybrid Cloud Tiering solution is built on InfiniteIO’s File Metadata Engine (IFME) which delivers file metadata responses to applications at sub-100 µs speeds, some 5-20x times faster than typical NAS solutions. This reduction in latency can result in dramatic application performance increase. I’ve seen 2x application performance increase as measured by decrease in run times just by offloading all of the metadata requests. Cool thing about this is InfiniteIO responds to metadata requests regardless of whether the file is on the NAS or in Google Cloud Storage. When was the last time you saw cloud storage serve up file metadata at under 100 µs?
To that end, I just ran a subset of mdtest to measure our metadata performance. mdtest is one component of the io500 benchmark. A single-node InfiniteIO configuration can deliver about 1.2M metadata operations per second (Figure 1). In a traditional environment, the latency the clients should see would be about 1 millisecond. In the test, InfiniteIO reduced latency dramatically to about 40 µs latency (Figure 2). At the same time, we’re offloading 100% of the metadata requests. Not too bad.
If you’re building hybrid cloud IT environments with Google as the foundation, here are more resources: