XCBS - XSKY

User Requirements

Open-source and Interoperability

The open source-based cloud platform has obtained attention since it was born. With healthy ecosystem of standard IaaS constructed by OpenStack and other open-source community, vendors who are in pursuit of project agility, technical force aggregation and long-term self-controlled product leverage such open-source framework as main architecture for “Cloud OS”of scaled IaaS to build enterprise dedicated cloud or cloud platform for application industry.

Full-distributed Architecture

To realize VM block mirror management, mirror warehouse and data backup, major part of users select Ceph as underlying storage module for Cloud scenarios with KVM. Ceph is a mainstream open-source distributed storage platform which is widely used by large-scale internet and HP computing carriers and is now in vigorous development. The community led by Ceph foundation provides good technical ecosystem with deep involvement of various HW and OS leading vendors, ensuring the advantage of Ceph modules technology and outstanding interoperability among vendors.

Production and SLA

However, the adoption of native Ceph by enterprises is limited by the following problems:

Operations and maintenance are conducted by command lines to a large extend, presenting obvious low-efficiency
Deficient integration with enterprise-level HW and application ecosystem, highly depending on development
Lower level of single-point performance and SLA compared to traditional storage

Product Value

XCBS（XSKY Cloud Block Storage）is an enterprise distributed storage product offered by XSKY with deep optimization on open-source cloud environment. Compared to the community software, XCBS is deeply optimized on stability, performance, reliability and easy of use, achieves visualization and automatic DevOps and provides reliable storage infrastructure to large-scale cloud environment.

Why XCBS

Deep mutual authentication with open-source cloud platform vendors, deployed as hyperconvergence or storage pool

Dramatically reduce IO latency and linkage jitter compared to community Ceph with the same HW configuration

Visualized DevOps and troubleshooting and fine cluster management at HW-level

Interactions with Open Source Community

Ceph Jewel in 2016: XSKY ranked Top 3 in global source code contribution to Ceph
Ceph Luminous in 2017 : The only Asian team in Top10 contribution to performance optimization
Ceph Kraken in 2017: Haomai Wang,CTO of XSKY, was nominated as the only featured developer
XSKY contributed InfiniBand RDMA as an interconnective support to Ceph
AS one of Intel's SPDK partners in China, XSKY plays a leading role in integrating SPDK and BlueFS to improve storage efficiency with NVMe
In2018, XSKY participated in the establishment of Ceph foundation and became a top member

Advantages

Cloud-native, seamless connection to open-source solutions

Long-term 100% compatible with community Ceph at interface level
Optimized and reconstructed RBD interface supports separate upgrade of cloud platform and storage
Rich RESTful APIs, enabling connections to multiple platforms

Agile delivery with simplified DevOps

One-click to scale-out and upgrade
100% GUI for DevOps
Full-index monitoring with log/alert and AI-driven predictive DevOps

Optimized system performance to unleash HW potential

Deep optimization on network/hard disk processing efficiency and IO path
SSD smart cache greatly improves performance with tiered input
Patented LibRBD aggregation agent improves performance of single client by 20% and reduces CPU usage rate of single node by 40%

Storage features of enterprise level

LUN expansion and shrinkage on-the-fly， automatic thin provisioning and real-time QoS modification for complicated storage management scenario
High-reliability and high-availability of data with ROW and stretched cluster
Optional object storage components provide service to mirror data and other unstructured data