Home

Welcome to the documentation wiki!

Important

This documentation covers the simplyblock release 1.0 beta for self-hosters consisting of management plane, storage plane (clusters) and kubernetes CSI driver components. It has been extensively tested on aws ec2 and eks, but is available for use on other platforms as well. It provides storage for stateful kubernetes services, Linux, Microsoft Windows(c) and vmware vsphere(c). The release is ready for piloting and will soon be followed by a production-ready release 1.0 GA. Managed service customers on aws using storage for eks, please just look here. For AWS SaaS customers, documentation is not released yet.

Simplyblock is a high-performance, highly scaleable, storage-efficient distributed block storage system based on nvme-over-tcp.

Storage performance is measured by performance density - random IOPS per TiB - and access latency - the average time it takes to access the storage for IO operations, which is now measured in microseconds.

By these indicators, Simplyblock is up to thousand times faster than many object stores and file storage (file shares and distributed file systems); And it is even multiple times faster than most best-in-class SAN systems and high-performance, cloud-based block storage services such as AWS EBS.

It is important to note that Simplyblock can deliver this performance advantage with very little hunger for compute resources - it is possible to deliver up to 500.000 IOPS per CPU core.

Simplyblock is also based on distributed, highly scalable architecture - this means that it can scale from relatively small amounts of storage - multiple TiB on a single node - to hundreds of nodes and thousands of devices.

And even more importantly - performance scales linearly with the capacity, keeping the performance density (IOPS per TiB) constant even for large clusters! The scale-out mechanism is fully transparent and adding storage capacity and nodes is accompanied by a fast, fully automated re-balancing of the cluster.

Note

So far, users had the choice between storage systems with high performance density - usually high-end SAN systems - and storage systems with high scalability - such as ceph (block, file, object) or lustre (distributed file system). Simplyblock is first to combine these characteristics into a single system.

Simplyblock protects data by erasure coding and currently supports k+1 and k+2 protection schemas, which can be chosen individually by logical volume. Typical effective to raw storage ratios are therefore around 1:1.5, compared to 1:3 in replicated systems. In case of temporary outage of nodes or removal of devices, the cluster re-balances itself without impact on IO. In case of permanent device failure, the cluster automatically excludes the failed unit and rebuilds data redundancy in the background.

Simplyblock is a fully containerized solution and has been built for deployment into different clouds, virtualized and bare metal environments. It is tightly integrated into Kubernetes and provides all k8s storage lifecycle operations with its own CSI driver.

Simplyblock is fully nvme-over-tcp based: As nvme-over-tcp clients (called initiators) are now built into the kernels of linux, vmware and windows server and support HA (multi-pathing), no proprietary drivers or administration software are required on the hosts to which Simplyblock storage gets connected. Simplyblock uses the nvmf (nvme-over-fabric) protocol also for all internal data transfers within a cluster.

Simplyblock supports a multi-tenant control plane to which one to many storage clusters can be connected. The control plane can be deployed as single or HA (multi-node) service and provides a TLS-secured API endpoint, CLI, Statistics Collection, Aggregation, Dashboarding, Monitoring and Alerting services (grafana, prometheus), logfile management (graylog), ongoing health-checks and automated incidence repair after failure. All services can be deployed in HA mode with multiple active nodes.

Simplyblock supports snapshots and their management, copy-on-write clones, thin provisioning, volume encryption (also e2e using user-managed keys), cross-site replication of storage* (synchronous and asynchronous), snapshot backup to S3*, online cluster expansion (with automated re-balancing) and full cluster-backup to S3*. Individual logical volumes can be grouped into logical pools, which are limited by maximum provisioned capacity, iops and throughput; Logical volumes can also individually be limited by iops and throughput.

Deployment of Simplyblock clusters and CSI drivers is fully automated and api-driven.

*release of feature postponed