Challenges associated with SMB in software-defined storage
Today’s data-driven enterprises are seeking software-defined storage (SDS) solutions to support traditional business operations in addition to supporting cloud services, big data and analytics, AI, ML, and other data-intensive workloads. SDS solutions must be flexible to meet a wide variety of customer needs, suitable for any hardware, and run on virtual, cloud, or container platforms. The make-or-break features for most SDS systems are focused on high performance: low latency, high input/output per second (IOPS), and low CPU overhead. Not to mention SDS solutions must be able to handle millions of files, scale to multiple petabytes of storage, and provide access to both structured and unstructured data.
SDS systems often use the SMB protocol for unstructured data and object access (directories and files). A variety of free and proprietary Linux-based SMB solutions are available for SDS providers to integrate as part of their solutions, but many are not able to meet the rigorous performance, availability, and massive scalability demands of your customers.
Fusion File Share by Tuxera for software-defined storage
Fusion File Share by Tuxera, our SMB solution, reduces the bottlenecks and limits imposed by an under-performing SMB solution. It ensures consistently high performance, boosting I/O throughput while reducing CPU usage in scale-out distributed file system architectures. Our SMB server features a modular and threaded design, SMB over RDMA, and advanced SMB compression support to ensure the highest performance and rapid file transfers. In our tests working with parallel file systems, Fusion File Share was found to boost throughput, contributing over 85% of the speed performance of the file system.
Our advanced SMB solution also enables fast, easy handling of multiple simultaneous connections to shared resources. It can be deployed in active-passive mode over the distributed file-system clients to provide high availability and transparent fail-over of connections. Fusion File Share also handles active-active clusters for scale out scenarios, and is deployable as a container.
Fusion File Share is easy to integrate into any SDS system and is dynamically configured. Tuxera’s team of storage development experts support you all the way from evaluation to implementation, going above and beyond to ensure your project performs flawlessly and on schedule.
Scale-out sequential read performance comparison
Technical features relevant to SDS
- RDMA over SMB-Direct
- Multichannel support
- Scale-out awareness
- Threaded data processing
- Encryption
- Low CPU use and network overhead
- 24/7 support – contact us for pricing
- Integration to vendor VFS