A primary focus of our work at OSNEXUS is to make storage management easier. Often times, this equates to reducing the number of steps so that the software “does the right thing.” But as OSNEXUS has grown, we have found that simplifying the number of steps for a task is just not enough.

While analyzing support tickets, we realized a special kind of system analyzer was needed to help IT teams answer questions about their configurations before they go live, with a one-click analysis of health, security, and performance metrics that captures the expertise of our best support and solution engineers.

The net result of this work is the new Configuration Analyzer in QuantaStor version 5, download available here. The Configuration Analyzer provides a one-click analysis of the network, security, and performance settings across all QuantaStor servers in a given storage grid, making it easy to validate a storage configuration before going live. This also can be used as an important audit and reporting mechanism to show proof of GDPR compliance.

An additional benefit of the tool is to analyze common configurations that might be incomplete or could cause problems, and provide a detailed report of your grid configuration, highlight known problems found, and make recommendations to fix such problems.

QuantaStor 5 New Features

In addition to Configuration Analytics, QuantaStor 5 also has a number of new features, integrations, and a major platform upgrade (including a kernel upgrade to 4.15).

QuantaStor 5 highlights include:

Ansible Automation – The Ansible module enables users to quickly and easily set up playbooks to automate the provisioning of file, block and object storage within QuantaStor storage grids, which is ideal for highly dynamic environments like software development, testing, continuous integration, and analytics.

Advanced Server Integration – QuantaStor now monitors the server internals (temperature, fans, power supplies, CPU, firmware, etc.) for all major server models from Dell, HPE, Cisco, Intel, Supermicro, and Lenovo. Monitoring is tied into the QuantaStor call-home system so that administrators can more easily manage and monitor the hardware in distributed hybrid-cloud configurations.

Scale-out Object Storage Upgrade – Major performance boost (250% faster write performance) with integrated support for Ceph Luminos, plus automated pool, monitor, cluster, OSD, and journal configurations for simple object storage configuration.

NAS Gateway Upgrade – Performance boost due to revamped NAS gateway using a high-speed backend, integration added for Microsoft Azure blob storage, Amazon S3, Google Cloud Object Storage, Ceph, Dropbox, and Backblaze.

HPE NV-DIMM Support – Added support for HPE’s NV-DIMM technology for use in scale-out object and block storage configurations.

For more information on QuantaStor, visit osnexus.com.

Categories: Storage Appliance Hardware