How can I super-charge my object storage solutions with load balancing?
Storage Published on •4 mins Last updated
Loadbalancer worked with this commercial bank to deliver a highly available, resilient, and scalable HPE Ezmeral Data Fabric file and object storage solution.
Downtime is becoming an increasing concern for object storage users for three main reasons:
- Data growth - Exponential data growth has led to increasingly complex storage environments that need to be able to store, retain, and maintain data securely.
- Scalability concerns - As data explodes, organizations are forced to relook at their storage systems and invest in solutions that are sustainable and long-term. As a result, they are making a move away from traditional storage options to cloud-based object storage; which is a reliable, efficient, and affordable way of storing, archiving, backing up, and managing huge volumes of static or unstructured data.
- Increasing complex ecosystems - It’s not just the storage applications themselves that need load balancing; it’s also the surrounding ecosystem. Storage points into a number of different ecosystems and key client-side applications so it is important these end-to-end workflows are also load balanced in order to retain smooth data access, storage, and analysis.
The use case: the need for a dedicated pair of (clever, not complex) load balancers via HPE Greenlake
Without a dedicated load balancer, most object storage applications rely on a simple round-robin DNS solution to manage the traffic flowing to and from their application. However, the limitations of round-robin DNS are well known. Fundamentally round-robin DNS can create all sorts of problems for the end user when a storage node fails. As this commercial bank acknowledged.
The IT Department at this organization wanted to consolidate its multiple storage applications and provide high availability for its mission-critical HPE Ezmeral Data Fabric file and object store. As such, they needed to deploy an effective, dedicated object storage load balancer to their architecture to intelligently reroute and distribute network and application traffic across their available server cluster, preventing disruption to the end user and facilitating a more resilient, highly available, and scalable object storage solution.
The bank's preferred procurement route was via the HPE Greenlake platform as this simplified the process for all the parties involved — Loadbalancer, HPE and the customer themselves.
The final outcome: highly available, resilient, and scalable object storage
Loadbalancer's dedicated load balancing solution provided the availability, scalability, and resilience required of this commercial bank's HPE Ezmeral Data Fabric file and object storage application by:
- High availability - Supporting uptime and an uninterrupted end user experience by providing immediate failover and redundancy.
- Scalability - Reducing the burden of scale-out with simple autoscaling of a cluster, or the easy addition of a new node to their storage cluster.
- Resilience - Ensuring even traffic distribution, reduced response times, and health monitoring, meaning more efficient resource utilization and superior performance.
For more details check out the full case study.
How Loadbalancer achieved these results: using smart, flexible, and unbreakable ADCs
Approach...
Load balancing is a core network and IT solution that sits in a network, between client devices and backend servers, in order to intelligently divert network traffic amongst the available servers. So if a server fails, or is compromised, it will immediately spot the issue and reroute traffic away from that failed server to another, keeping everything ticking along as it should.
Load balancing, therefore, improves an application's resource availability and performance by providing a failsafe against a number of different scenarios that could result in downtime e.g.
- Server failure
- Security threats
- Server maintenance
It can be deployed in a number of different ways. For advice on how to choose the right deployment for your object storage application, check out this white paper: Load balancing deployment options for object storage
How...
- Two pairs of load balancers (Enterprise VA MAX) were provided to this commercial bank
- They also employed Loadbalancer's professional services and subscription billing model
Training...
- Technical training was provided for in-house staff so they could easily deploy, manage, and maintain these load balancer appliances themselves.
Why they chose us: market leaders in load balancing object storage applications
Our object storage expertise...
We work with object storage end users and resellers, as well as object storage providers themselves. This end-to-end understanding of the variety of use cases and architectures within which object storage operates has given us a unique, comprehensive understanding of storage-specific workflows and challenges. And our work with HPE, Dell, Cloudian, and Scality over the last 20 years means we have been lucky enough to be directly involved in tailoring our solutions to meet the unique requirements of each object storage ecosystem.
For detailed step-by-step instructions on how to load balancing object storage solutions, please refer to the relevant deployment guide below:
- How to load balance Ceph Object Gateway
- How to load balance Cloudian HyperFile
- How to load balance Cloudian HyperStore
- How to load balance Dell EMC
- How to load balance Hitachi Vantara
- How to load balance IBM Cloud object storage
- How to load balance iRODS
- How to load balance MinIO
- How to load balance NetApp Storage Grid
- How to load balance Qumulo
- How to load balance Scality Ring
- How to load balance Panzura Cloud
- How to load balance Storage Made Easy,
- How to load balance Swiftstack
- How to load balance Zadara
Our partnership with HPE Greenlake...
With the combined strength of HPE and Loadbalancer, organizations are able to run highly reliable applications, increase customer success and scale as they grow. The HPE Greenlake platform allows end users to select exactly what is needed for their unique business demands, and pay only for the service they are using. This model allows customers to accelerate their core business functions without having to carry overheads for support solutions.
For a full list of our credentials or to discuss this use case in more detail, contact us for more info.