Block storage scaling specialist Lucidity has expanded its portfolio to offer a tiering service, and sketched out plans to shine its light on more of the storage stack.
The company launched its Autoscaler service for block storage just under a year ago, and claims to be able to deliver 75 percent to 80 percent disk utilization from day one with a 2x IOPs performance boost. In practical terms, it says, this meant a cost saving of $88,000 a month at a leading US airline, while reclaiming “100s of human hours.”
The company claims its newly launched Lumen engine will deliver “seamless disk tiering” for customers cloud storage estates, albeit with humans taking the final decision on whether to action the service’s recommendations. It reckons half of disks are in the wrong tier, with a quarter of disk spend wasted. But with downtime costing $9,000 a minute on average, hitting the stop button to do something about it is unthinkable.
Cofounder Vatsal Rastogi told Blocks & Files that while autoscaler deals with a very focused problem, overprovisioning, Lumen was “a more horizontal product that helps the organization get a view of all these multiple pillars and give them a health scan of the underlying, targeting one niche problem to begin with.”
He said that based on its research, around 5 percent of disks are throttled or bottlenecked, because they are in the wrong tier. This leads to downtime, business loss, and more importantly loss of brand value over time he said.
Tiers before bedtime
At the same time, he said, half of disks are on higher tiers, leading to massive wastage and costs. “On the one side of the coin you’re getting throttled because you didn’t provision enough. On the other side, you’re wasting money because you provisioned more.”
Dealing with the problem is complex and time consuming, and is further complicated by a lack of visibility, and the fact that each disk, each VM, and each cloud has its own nuances.
Lumen analyzes the customer’s setup, serving up insights and recommendations. However, unlike its autoscaling cousin, it leaves it to the human operator to make the final call on which, if any, recommendations to implement.
But, Rastogi added, implementing recommendations – whether up or down tiering – is a oneclick process, with no downtime. And by providing more visibility, customers are in a better place to implement more governance and chase better operation efficiency.
Under the covers, the co-founder explained, “We’ve created a disk virtualization technology which essentially decoupled the application interface and the physical disks.” This means that the application still sees that there’s a D drive, while behind the scenes Lucidity is able to manipulate disks and make the changes without disruption.
The service is available on Azure initially, with AWS and GCP support to follow. Rastogi said the company had identified 15 key cloud storage challenges, each of which was huge in itself. With autoscaling and tiering now in the bag, that leaves plenty more problems for the company to take a tilt at.
