The latest release of QuantaStor SDS v.4.1 is now out with many new features and major upgrades including the move to Ubuntu 14.04 Trusty Tahr as the base platform for QuantaStor SDS, an upgrade to Ceph Jewel (10.2) for scale-out block and object deployments, High Availability fail-over enhancements and a real-time dashboard for storage system memory, CPU, networking and other analytics.

Global Namespaces

One of the most notable upgrades is the addition of Global Namespaces which is especially important for Media and Entertainment organizations.  Global namespaces enable end-to-end media production workflows to create and share digital media folders across a QuantaStor storage grid that can span sites and data-centers.

Global Namespaces group shares together into a globally accessible folder across selected appliance groups.  The appliance groups can include all appliances in a grid or only a subset of QuantaStor SDS appliances and storage systems.  Utilizing Microsoft DFS technology to redirect SMB/CIFS clients and NFSv4 referrals to route clients to the appropriate appliance, the new global namespace capability is fully integrated with QuantaStor’s Highly-Available (HA) storage pool technology to ensure up-time in the event of a hardware outage.

Ceph Integration

QuantaStor 4.1 makes major forward strides with the storage grid integration with Ceph’s current production release (Jewel).  The new version makes it easier than ever to setup Ceph with just three dialogs to setup a complete configuration from scratch from cluster formation to object storage pool group provisioning.

Avid Integration

QuantaStor SDS v.4.1 also now provides SMB/CIFS storage to Avid Media Composer environments with Avid awareness.  QuantaStor SDS lets editors and artists collaborate using the same content simultaneously by providing dedicated copies of Avid Media Composer’s metadata files on shared storage.

For a complete list of QuantaStor SDS v.4.1 upgrades visit the OSNEXUS wiki.

Categories: Ceph, Storage Appliance Hardware