ActiveScale Object Storage

ActiveScale’s unique scale-out architecture employs high levels of parallelism throughout to achieve high performance without high cost. Within the Access Layer, system performance is optimized by load balancing across all cluster nodes. Object metadata is stored in NVMe storage for high performance. The Data Layer provides unlimited scalability of active and cold data at consistent levels of availability and performance at scale.

As the industry’s only object storage platform with Active and Cold Storage Classes, ActiveScale configurations and data layouts are easily optimized for both performance and affordability, even at massive scale. Dedicate Active Storage to those data sets that you are currently working on. Dedicate Cold Storage to data that is not accessed frequently. Simply restore cold data sets to Active Storage when it makes sense. Interested in a deeper dive on ActiveScale Cold Storage? Click here.

ActiveScale software enables high-data resiliency with configurable erasure coding policies for both Active and Cold Storage Classes, so you can confidently optimize deployments according to capacity, performance, availability, and durability needs. Objects written to the Cold Storage Class benefit from patent-pending two-dimensional erasure coding providing 50% better storage efficiency than replication or two-copy approaches, and better data durability than any other cold data solution.

ActiveScale DDP intelligently erasure encodes your data, equally balanced across all available storage resources according to policies that you set. DDP prevents disk hot spots over time and simply overcomes hardware failures. Best of all, DDP easily allows for resource expansion without the painful rebalancing typical of static, deterministic policies that prevent scaling in other systems.

DDR provides out-of-band continuous system monitoring, data integrity verification, predictive failure detection, and self-healing of object data to ensure the highest durability of all data objects. The DDR self-healing process is not dependent on replacing failed drives, and is performed in parallel to shorten rebuild times.

ActiveScale leads the industry in strong, immediate data consistency across all nodes to ensure that accurate data is presented with no performance impact, whether in a single site or 3-Geo dispersed sites at the time of local ingest and dispersion.

ActiveScale software supports the AWS S3 API, including support for Authentication, Standard and Glacier Storage Classes, Object Lifecycle Management, Object Lock, Versioning, Replication and Strong Consistency, for simple integration of S3-enabled applications and workflows.

ActiveScale supports file system volumes, accessible via NFS for simple, easy management and access of file-based data.

Account quotas allow you to easily set and limit capacity usage with hard or soft limits on a per user basis, applicable to both S3 buckets and NFS volumes.

Define Object Lifeycle policies on a bucket per bucket basis to easily expire or archive data automatically. Simply set rules with pre-defined actions to be performed as your objects age. Unlike public cloud solutions, transitioning objects between Active and Cold Data Classes incurs no storage overhead, access, or restoration charges that inhibit your access to your archived data.

For rapid recovery of data due to ransomware, inadvertent deletion, or just to maintain data history, Object Versioning systematically saves versions of data objects. Users can easily set bucket policies to retrieve and restore prior object versions.

Object Notifications enable you to trigger workflow processing via Kafka clusters. Deploy fault-tolerant, real-time, end-to-end data pipelines and streaming applications for a variety of use cases, such as real-time analytics, IoT, mobile apps, and media workflows.

ActiveScale is optimized for both large and small objects. Large object performance policies are built for durability and economics. Small object policies are designed to minimize latency when storing and retrieving large numbers of small objects.

For maximum data security, encrypt your data in flight with SSL/TLS and at rest with ActiveScale. ActiveScale encrypts both object data and metadata, including custom metadata, in both Active and Cold Storage Classes.

Object Lock prevents objects from being deleted to help you protect against ransomware, meet regulatory requirements for write-once-read-many (WORM) storage, and support long-term retention policies.

A single-site ActiveScale deployment simply protects against all component failures with metadata, data, and parity intelligently spread across all computing and storage resources within the cluster. Compute and network resources are actively load balanced for maximum performance.

An ActiveScale 3-Geo configuration delivers the highest availability and protection against disaster. ActiveScale Geo-spreading automatically erasure encodes objects across all three locations. Even with a full data center outage, objects are accessible. The two remaining locations host all the data and parity required to continue servicing all data requests.

ActiveScale also provides uni- and bi-directional asynchronous per-bucket replication between ActiveScale clusters or to AWS cloud services for data protection, backups, and disaster recovery.

The ActiveScale System Management (SM) web-based interface lets you:

• Manage accounts, users, and access keys.
• Monitor system, health, hardware, capacity and performance.
• Configure notifications and retrieve reports and logs.
• Perform system upgrades and expansions.

To automate tasks, RESTful APIs and a command line interface are also available.

ActiveScale Cloud Management (CM) is a cloud-based tool that receives telemetry data from ActiveScale systems to create standard and custom reports. Basic management features and advanced insights, including historical trends, capacity modeling, utilization, and forecasting, help you identify conditions for preemptive action.

Using Prometheus, ActiveScale maintains local and global metrics that can then be downloaded to your local Prometheus database for long-term retention and viewed using Grafana visualization tools.