case study: georgia tech

Case Study: Georgia TechUniversity Private Cloud for Researchers

Didier ContisDirector Technology ServicesCollege of EngineeringGeorgia Institute of TechnologyJoe ArnoldCEO SwiftStack Inc.

2

Session Speakers

Didier Contis

Didier Contis is the Director Technology Services / College of Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology Greater Atlanta Area. The largest of Georgia Tech’s six colleges, CoE offers more than 50 graduate and undergraduate degree programs through its main Atlanta campus and satellites around the world. Its 13,000 students use an estimated 150 unique apps—the same ones businesses rely on to design airplane wings, model circuit-board layouts, and much more.

Joe ArnoldJoe Arnold is co-founder and CEO of SwiftStack, a leading provider of object storage software. SwiftStack's customers include some of the largest web and enterprise IT organizations. Joe managed the first public OpenStack launch of Swift after its release as an open source project. He has been active in the OpenStack community since 2010. Joe is the author of Object Storage with Swift published by O'Reilly Media.

Georgia Tech Case Study - OpenStack Summit 2014

3

Object Storage and OpenStack Swift


Joe ArnoldCEO SwiftStack Inc.

4 Georgia Tech Case Study - OpenStack Summit 2014

Swift Object Storage – Key Attributes• Open-source object storage system

• Powers the largest storage clouds

• Geographically distributed

• Multi-tenant

• Massively concurrent

• Extremely durable

• Runs on standard Linux

• Inexpensive commodity x86 hardware

“Swift is a proven solution, suitable for production needs, and should be included in competitive evaluations of object-based storage solutions.”

February 2014

“OpenStack Swift in particular has gained a lot of traction both in the enterprise and in the service provider space”

October 2013

5

Swift Data Redundancy

Swift places 3+ replicas of all data as unique as possible


Single Node ClusterDisks are “as-unique-as-possible”

Large ClusterStorage Racks are “as-unique-as-possible”

Muti-RegionDistributed data centers are “as-unique-as-possible”

Small ClusterStorage Nodes are “as-unique-as-possible”

6

Swift Object Storage – Filesystem Conceptual View


Swift Node

SwiftNode

SwiftNode

CIFS NFSSwiftStack Filesystem Gateway

Files

7

Georgia Tech Case StudyDidier ContisDirector Technology ServicesCollege of Engineering


Who we are and what we do• Georgia Tech: 21,471 undergraduate and

graduate students (Fall 2013)

• Six colleges: Architecture, Business, Computing, Engineering, Liberal Arts and Sciences

• 6th Top Engineering Graduate Programs

• 5th Top Engineering Undergraduate Programs

• 13,000 students in the College of Engineering, largest in the U.S.

9

We have been deploying pre-cloud systems since 2007…

Meet our federated condominium systems


10

Our VDI / App publishing farm…Virtual Lab Project and its supporting shared infrastructure (Matrix)


11

Our HPC farm…PACE: Partnership for an Advanced Computing Environment HPC federation / condominium system. 28,000 cpu cores and 2PB storage


12

What we learned:1) Our HPC and VDI users love compute power2) They love their research data even more

They are not alone….


13

All our researchers / students love their research dataThey love to

• Acquire

• Create

• Exchange

• Receive

Data….


14

Here is a research project generating a lot of data

Remote Sensing and GIS-enabled Asset Management System (RS-GAMS)

Assessment of pavement, bridge, and roadway assets using various sensors

Estimated Storage needs: 2,400 lane miles interstate highways currently on files with plan to analyze 2,000 miles in next few months…

Raw data: 2.2GB per lane mile

Processed data: 1.2GB per lane mile

16 Million jpeg files so far !!!!


15

Here is a research project receiving a lot of data

Effective Capacity Analysis and Traffic Data Collection for the I-85 HOV to HOT Conversion

The effectiveness of the implementation of the HOT lane is being evaluated in a before and after study.

Direct fiber network feed from Georgia Department of Transportation to Georgia Tech

Over 400TB of videos currently stored on random fileservers, USB drives…

Lots more video to collect….


16

Oh, by the way have you heard about:Research Data CurationThe White House Office of Science Technology Policy:

“has directed Federal agencies with more than $100M in R&D expenditures to develop plans to make the published results of federally funded research freely available to the public within one year of publication and requiring researchers to better account for and manage the digital data resulting from federally funded scientific research.”

http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2013/02/22/expanding-public-access-results-federally-funded-research

http://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/microsites/ostp/ostp_public_access_memo_2013.pdf


http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2013/02/22/expanding-public-access-results-federally-funded-research

http://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/microsites/ostp/ostp_public_access_memo_2013.pdf

17

So where do we store all this data?


18

Research Data Storage Challenges Our Challenges:

Obviously we have a lot of research data. How much ??? (2 PB just for HPC) Cheap enterprise level storage is still expensive Backup is a problem (cost, time)

Meet our BIGGEST challenges: Bring-your-own-drive – USB, thumb Consumer cloud – Dropbox, etc.


Storage on demand

19

Research Data Storage Challenges

“Sometimes” important research data might be stored might on not so reliable solution:• Due to cost of existing “enterprise

storage” and research programs funding • Backup? Could you repeat the question

please?

Ultimate cheap NFS File Server circa 2006• Refurbished Desktop tower• Two 5 ports USB cards• 13+ USB drives each shared individually via NFS


!!! WARNING UNCONFIRMED REPORT !!!

20

Our magic answer to all our problems ???


VAPOR the hybrid cloud

21

Meet VAPOR

Goal: Build a Georgia Tech Distributed and Federated Academic Cloud

Proposed design principles:• Led by Academic Units in partnership with Central IT

(Currently College of Engineering, College of Science, College of Computing, Library, HPC PACE Group, Office of Information Technology)

• Support Instruction and Research at Georgia Tech• Distributed across campus and beyond (Hybrid)• Federate multiple departmental projects • Design / Architecture by Committee • Academic Governance Oversight• Need to be able to experiment and iterate quickly !!!!


22

Proposed Use Cases for VAPOR Cloud1. Ephemeral computing: A machine runs for short term use. Possibly for

development/testing purposes.

2. "Pet" computer: student needs a system which is "permanent", stateful and accessible both off and on campus. Basic usage is like VDI.

3. IaaS: Running campus services (both production and beta) on VMs. E.g. I don't want to manage a hardware layer but I need to set up a purpose built website to host data and services for an international research group and webhosting doesn't meet my needs.

4. PaaS: Running a platform. E.g. I don't want to manage hardware or the OS layer, but please give me a database I can use for this application.


23

<DRAFT> Vapor Architecture Vision </DRAFT>

NETWORK(VXVLAN / NVGRE / VPN…)

DATA STORAGE(Swiftstack / DDN WOS / Gluster…)

HYPERVISOR or CONTAINER PODs(Hyper-V / KVM / XenServer + NVIDIA vgpu…)

COMPUTE STORAGE(Gluster / Ceph / Scale-IO / ...)

Self-Service(to be defined / under investigation)

Management(Microsoft Azure Pack / Redhat CloudForm…..)

Amazon AWS

MicrosoftAzure RackSpace

NETWORK(VXVLAN / NVGRE / VPN…)

Management

On-premise Component Off-premise Component


24

Today we are focusing on…. Data Storage


25

Vision of the Data Storage layer• Will hold a large portion of GT “Research Data”• Probably multiple data storage layers (multiple vendors / technology)• Some of our current requirements:

Distributed and Resilient (support multiple catastrophic failures) Limit vendor dependency / lock-in (priority to open source) Leverage de-facto standards (S3 / Swift) Support multiple entry points (API, Cloud NAS, pluggable services) Flexible design to limit the need to migrate data to new systems down the road Integration with Georgia Tech identity management system (LDAP & AD)


26

Services supported by the Data Storage Layer / Swift

DATA STORAGE(SwiftStack – Storage as a service)

Research Data Curation

Filesystem Gateway(CIFS / NFS / GPFS/ ….)

Research Data Repositories

“Dropbox” type service

Research Data Storage


27

Why Swift / SwiftStack for the Data Storage Layer? Like:

• Swift is open-source (limit vendor lock-in in our mind)• Turn key approach / manageability provided by SwiftStack• Growing ecosystem around Swift• Low hardware requirement / homogeneous hardware not required• System seem robust -> replication rather than RAID technology• Price is right !!! (so far….)

Don’t Like:• It is object storage / not native filesystem• Still young project / product


28

Research Project Candidates to use Swift Projects in Aerospace, Transportations and BioEngineering currently

targeted

Examples of research projects looking / experimenting with Swift:

• Effective Capacity Analysis and Traffic Data Collection for the I-85 HOV to HOT Conversion

• Remote Sensing and GIS-enabled Asset Management System (RS-GAMS)


29

Our current strategy to engage research groups Goal: Incentivize researchers to store data directly

into Swift as objects when it makes sense

• This means demonstrating advantages from:• Indexing• Metadata• Scalability• Performance• Future benefits (analytics)

• It also means making an up-front investment:• In training and technical assistance• Providing free storage


SwiftStackCIFS/NFSGateway

Swift HTTP APIs

SwiftNode

Files

SwiftNode

SwiftNode

Scripts

Apps

30

Filesystem Gateway• Using Object Storage natively is difficult

• Lots of workflow based on using files. Our students are using Windows / Linux applications packages which are not object friendly.

• Latency / speed is also an issue

• Strategies being deployed or investigated:• SwiftStack gateway with lots of cache• Would like a GPFS Gateway (High Performance Computing)• Storage abstraction technology (Software defined storage

utopia…. EMC ViPR Data Services ?)


Directory Directory

Directory

Directory Directory

Directory

Directory


Filesystem Gateway – No Data Lock In• No lock in due to encoding with SwiftStack gateway

• Data in/out same via Swift API or via CIFS/NFS filesystem

• Traditional gateways (like S3/Glacier, Avere, Panzura) are a 'medieval marriage....forever‘

• These gateways severely lock data in – all data going in via gateway MUST come out through same gateway

• It's a "Hotel California“ for data – you can check-out any time you like, but you can never leave

• Other gateways with lock have other benefits/features• E.g. deduplication, compression, etc.• Or offer POSIX required for some applications

SwiftStackFilesystemGateway

Swift HTTP APIs

SwiftNode

SwiftNode

SwiftNode

Objects Files

36

What about our Research Data Curation problem?• Initiative lead by Georgia Tech Library

• Migrate from Dspace to a Research Data Curation repository built around Fedora (repository infrastructure) and Hydra (front end repositories)

• Fedora 4.0 will connect to Swift via JBoss ModeShape and Infinispan storage subsystem Infinispan connection to Swift initially to use the Swift3 (S3) emulation layer


37

Swift zones distribution across campus

Zone ECS 1

Zone PACE 1Zone ISYE 1

We expect more zones to come on-line in the next 12 monthsGeographically distant region is on the roadmap (using hosting agreement with other Universities and Internet 2)

Federated and Distributed Academic cloud:Each zone is located in a server room which is owned and operated by a different GT department….. No one own the cloud VAPOR ???


38

What hardware are we using?• Supermicro chassis, primarily 24 bays chassis

• Hardware configuration is heterogeneous (different drives capacity, no same number of storage nodes per zone)

• Drives are mix of Enterprise / Consumer grade. Mainly 1TB or 2TB

• Most storage nodes have 10GB network connectivity (SolarFlare or Mellanox Connect-X). Currently SFP+ 10GB… 10GB Base-T is next

• LSI SAS Adapter 9211-8i (do not forget to re-flash if needed to change card from Integrated Raid to Integrated Target)

• SSDs for Account/Container Ring (60GB to 120GB)

• Memory to TB ratio?? 1GB of memory per TB can be expensive…


39

Distributed management of our Swift Infrastructure Sysadmin from multiple departments share administrative responsibilities. Would like more delegation granularities down the road: delegation on a

per zone / region basis to enable for node management of cluster operator role.

Students are a great resource to replace dead drives…. If they know which one to replace…..


40

SwiftStack Auth and LDAP• Initially was considering using AD Integration

• LDAP was a definite requirement. Availability delayed some of our testing / usage.

• Georgia Tech LDAP size is fairly large:- ou=accounts -> 300K entries- ou=people -> 2M entries

• So far so good. Initial integration was easy (5 minutes) but we waited until code was stable…..

• Anyone with a GT valid account can access the Swift cluster !!!!- (but we have not advertised its existence…. Please don’t tell our students)


41

Our Financial Model ApproachLimit recurring cost at all costs !!!!

Fund recurring cost at the central level (licensing for example)

Focus on Bring Your Own:• Zone (BYOZ)• Server (BYOS)• Drive (BYOD)

We envision to use HDDs as a form of currency with research groups.

4TB of data to store = 3 x 4TB HDD payment for 5 years.

Hopefully storing 4TB will be negligible in 5 years when drives start to die.

√Georgia Tech Case Study - OpenStack Summit 2014

42

IT’S ALIVE…. Okay… So What’s Next…

• Implement Quotas… probably container based Quotas

• Re-architect the proxy layer this summer. Dedicated proxy nodes and possibly Load Balancer (Netscaler / F5)

• Might deed to identify High performance NAS Gateway for specific workload ('medieval marriage....forever’)

• Investigate support for a GPFS based Gateway

• Keep educating people on long term benefits of using Swift API to access data

• Unified access to data via SwiftStack FileSystem Gateway (convergence)


43

Managing Swift with SwiftStack


Joe ArnoldCEO SwiftStack Inc.

44

SwiftStack Object Storage Software


Standard Hardware & Linux Distribution

DEPLOYDeploy in Minutes

not Days

INTEGRATESeamlessly

SCALE

Without Disruption

OpenStack Swift (support included)

Simple, Web-based MANAGEMENT

45

Questions & Answers

case study: georgia tech

Documents

openstack community

dogeorgia tech

author of object storage

largest of georgia techs

unique appsthe

based storage solutions

graduate students

largest web