Object storage supplier Cloudian has launched a load-balancing product called HyperBalance.
Update; Cloudian HW/SW to SW-only OEM Loadbalancer.org deal change date added. 19 Aug 2022.
Cloudian’s HyperStore is scale-out object storage software that runs on x86 servers, inside virtual machines, in container environments, on the public cloud and in Cloudian’s own 1000, 1600 and 4200 appliances with 100TB to 1PB+ capacities. Load balancing improves responsiveness and increases the availability of applications by distributing network or application traffic across a cluster of servers. It also facilitates the storage of data in multiple locations for zero downtime in case one location fails and a switchover is needed.
Cloudian says that, in its shared-nothing architecture, any storage node can respond to any incoming request, providing a parallel processing capability that allows performance to grow as new nodes are added. But individual nodes can get overwhelmed and become a bottleneck. HyperBalance helps avoid this and achieve maximum performance by evenly distributing workload across all nodes, thereby eliminating bottlenecks.
It establishes a clean separation between the HyperStore object storage domain and the accessing networking infrastructure. The HyperStore distributed system gets a single IP address and is accessed and used as a private storage cloud.
Cloudian’s HyperBalance appliance is based on Loadbalancer.org’s enterprise product line and operates at layer 7 in the OSI stack. Loadbalancer.org has Enterprise 1G, 10G, 25G, 40G, 50G and 100G appliances with the number representing the level of Ethernet connectivity. The Enterprise 40G appliance has an eight-core XEON CPU and provides 48Gb/sec throughput and 19,584 SSL TPS.
Loadbalancer works with a number of object storage vendors, including Hitachi Vantara and MinIO. Cloudian said told us: “Although Loadbalancer has six appliances, we’re only OEM’ing their software
(no hardware) and offering our own 50GbitE and 100GbitE appliances as well as a 10GbitE software VM version.” This is a change from the University of Leicester situation where actual Loadbalancer.org hardware was used. A Cloudian spokesperson said: “The change to OEM’ing only their software became effective as of this Tuesday when we made our announcement.”
HyperBalance provides high availability and is a scale-out technology. It can handle up to handle 3.3GB of storage per second with no impact on performance. The University of Leicester in the UK is a customer, and has two HyperBalance appliances [Enterprise 40G products] installed as a high-availability pair across two datacenters. Starting with 12 HPE Apollo servers, they now balance traffic across 15 Apollos and handle an average of 120TB per week.
The two HyperBalance boxes are configured as a secure gateway to interconnect the Cloudian HyperStore network to external services on the university’s public network.
Support for the University of Leicester is provided by Loadbalancer.org. Check out a downloadable Loadbalancer.org white paper here.
