550 likes | 1.14k Views
University Private Cloud for Researchers. Case Study: Georgia Tech. Didier Contis Director Technology Services College of Engineering Georgia Institute of Technology Joe Arnold CEO SwiftStack Inc. Session Speakers. Didier Contis. Joe Arnold.
E N D
University Private Cloud for Researchers Case Study: Georgia Tech Didier ContisDirector Technology ServicesCollege of EngineeringGeorgia Institute of Technology Joe ArnoldCEO SwiftStack Inc.
Session Speakers Didier Contis Joe Arnold Joe 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. • 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. Georgia Tech Case Study - OpenStack Summit 2014
Object Storage and OpenStack Swift Joe ArnoldCEO SwiftStack Inc. 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 “OpenStack Swift in particular has gained a lot of traction both in the enterprise and in the service provider space” October 2013 “Swift is a proven solution, suitable for production needs, and should be included in competitive evaluations of object-based storage solutions.” February 2014 October 2013 Georgia Tech Case Study - OpenStack Summit 2014
Swift Data Redundancy • Swift places 3+ replicas of all data as unique as possible Single Node Cluster Disks are “as-unique-as-possible” Large Cluster Storage Racks are “as-unique-as-possible” Small Cluster Storage Nodes are “as-unique-as-possible” Muti-Region Distributed data centers are “as-unique-as-possible” Georgia Tech Case Study - OpenStack Summit 2014
Swift Object Storage – Filesystem Conceptual View Files CIFS NFS SwiftStack Filesystem Gateway Swift Node SwiftNode SwiftNode Georgia Tech Case Study - OpenStack Summit 2014
Georgia Tech Case Study Didier 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. Georgia Tech Case Study - OpenStack Summit 2014
We have been deploying pre-cloud systems since 2007…Meet our federated condominium systems Georgia Tech Case Study - OpenStack Summit 2014
Our VDI / App publishing farm… • Virtual Lab Project and its supporting shared infrastructure (Matrix) Georgia Tech Case Study - OpenStack Summit 2014
Our HPC farm… • PACE: Partnership for an Advanced Computing Environment • HPC federation / condominium system. 28,000 cpu cores and 2PB storage Georgia Tech Case Study - OpenStack Summit 2014
What we learned:1) Our HPC and VDI users love compute power2) They love their research data even moreThey are not alone…. Georgia Tech Case Study - OpenStack Summit 2014
All our researchers / students love their research data • They love to • Acquire • Create • Exchange • Receive • Data…. Georgia Tech Case Study - OpenStack Summit 2014
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 !!!! Georgia Tech Case Study - OpenStack Summit 2014
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…. Georgia Tech Case Study - OpenStack Summit 2014
Oh, by the way have you heard about:Research Data Curation • The 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 Georgia Tech Case Study - OpenStack Summit 2014
So where do we store all this data? Georgia Tech Case Study - OpenStack Summit 2014
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 Georgia Tech Case Study - OpenStack Summit 2014
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 Servercirca 2006 • Refurbished Desktop tower • Two 5 ports USB cards • 13+ USB drives each shared individually via NFS !!! WARNING UNCONFIRMED REPORT !!! Georgia Tech Case Study - OpenStack Summit 2014
VAPOR the hybrid cloud Our magic answer to all our problems ??? Georgia Tech Case Study - OpenStack Summit 2014
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 !!!! Georgia Tech Case Study - OpenStack Summit 2014
Proposed Use Cases for VAPOR Cloud • Ephemeral computing: A machine runs for short term use. Possibly for development/testing purposes. • "Pet" computer: student needs a system which is "permanent", stateful and accessible both off and on campus. Basic usage is like VDI. • 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. • 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. Georgia Tech Case Study - OpenStack Summit 2014
<DRAFT> Vapor Architecture Vision </DRAFT> Self-Service (to be defined / under investigation) Management Management (Microsoft Azure Pack / RedhatCloudForm…..) On-premise Component Off-premise Component RackSpace HYPERVISOR or CONTAINERPODs (Hyper-V / KVM / XenServer + NVIDIA vgpu…) Amazon AWS Microsoft Azure COMPUTE STORAGE (Gluster / Ceph / Scale-IO / ...) DATA STORAGE (Swiftstack / DDN WOS / Gluster…) NETWORK (VXVLAN / NVGRE / VPN…) NETWORK (VXVLAN / NVGRE / VPN…) Georgia Tech Case Study - OpenStack Summit 2014
Today we are focusing on…. Data Storage Georgia Tech Case Study - OpenStack Summit 2014
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) Georgia Tech Case Study - OpenStack Summit 2014
Services supported by the Data Storage Layer / Swift Research Data Storage Research Data Curation Research Data Repositories DATA STORAGE (SwiftStack– Storage as a service) FilesystemGateway (CIFS / NFS / GPFS/ ….) “Dropbox” type service Georgia Tech Case Study - OpenStack Summit 2014
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 Georgia Tech Case Study - OpenStack Summit 2014
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) Georgia Tech Case Study - OpenStack Summit 2014
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 Files Apps Scripts Swift HTTP APIs SwiftStackCIFS/NFS Gateway Swift Node Swift Node Swift Node Georgia Tech Case Study - OpenStack Summit 2014
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 Georgia Tech Case Study - OpenStack Summit 2014
Filesystem Gateway – No Data Lock In Files • 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 Objects Swift HTTP APIs SwiftStackFilesystem Gateway Swift Node Swift Node Swift Node Georgia Tech Case Study - OpenStack Summit 2014
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 JBossModeShape and Infinispan storage subsystem • Infinispan connection to Swift initially to use the Swift3 (S3) emulation layer Georgia Tech Case Study - OpenStack Summit 2014
Swift zones distribution across campus 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 ??? We expect more zones to come on-line in the next 12 months Geographically distant region is on the roadmap (using hosting agreement with other Universities and Internet 2) Zone ISYE 1 Zone PACE 1 Zone ECS 1 Georgia Tech Case Study - OpenStack Summit 2014
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… Georgia Tech Case Study - OpenStack Summit 2014
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….. Georgia Tech Case Study - OpenStack Summit 2014
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) Georgia Tech Case Study - OpenStack Summit 2014
Our Financial Model Approach • Limit 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
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 SwiftStackFileSystem Gateway (convergence) Georgia Tech Case Study - OpenStack Summit 2014
Managing Swift with SwiftStack Joe ArnoldCEO SwiftStack Inc. Georgia Tech Case Study - OpenStack Summit 2014
SwiftStack Object Storage Software Simple, Web-based MANAGEMENT INTEGRATE Seamlessly SCALE Without Disruption DEPLOY Deploy in Minutes not Days OpenStack Swift (support included) Standard Hardware & Linux Distribution Georgia Tech Case Study - OpenStack Summit 2014