Case Study: Georgia Tech University Private Cloud for Researchers Didier Contis Director Technology...

Case Study: Georgia Tech University Private Cloud for Researchers Didier Contis Director Technology Services College of Engineering Georgia Institute of Technology Joe Arnold CEO SwiftStack Inc.

2 Session Speakers Didier Contis Didier Contis is the Director Technology Services / College of Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology Greater Atlanta Area. The largest of Georgia Techs six colleges, CoE offers more than 50 graduate and undergraduate degree programs through its main Atlanta campus and satellites around the world. Its 13,000 students use an estimated 150 unique appsthe same ones businesses rely on to design airplane wings, model circuit-board layouts, and much more. Joe Arnold Joe Arnold is co-founder and CEO of SwiftStack, a leading provider of object storage software. SwiftStack's customers include some of the largest web and enterprise IT organizations. Joe managed the first public OpenStack launch of Swift after its release as an open source project. He has been active in the OpenStack community since 2010. Joe is the author of Object Storage with Swift published by O'Reilly Media. Georgia Tech Case Study - OpenStack Summit 2014

3 Object Storage and OpenStack Swift Georgia Tech Case Study - OpenStack Summit 2014 Joe Arnold CEO SwiftStack Inc.

4 Swift Object Storage Key Attributes Open-source object storage system Powers the largest storage clouds Geographically distributed Multi-tenant Massively concurrent Extremely durable Runs on standard Linux Inexpensive commodity x86 hardware Georgia Tech Case Study - OpenStack Summit 2014 October 2013 Swift is a proven solution, suitable for production needs, and should be included in competitive evaluations of object-based storage solutions. February 2014 OpenStack Swift in particular has gained a lot of traction both in the enterprise and in the service provider space October 2013

5 Swift Data Redundancy Swift places 3+ replicas of all data as unique as possible Georgia Tech Case Study - OpenStack Summit 2014 Single Node Cluster Disks are as-unique-as-possible Large Cluster Storage Racks are as-unique-as-possible Muti-Region Distributed data centers are as-unique-as-possible Small Cluster Storage Nodes are as-unique-as-possible

6 Swift Object Storage Filesystem Conceptual View Georgia Tech Case Study - OpenStack Summit 2014 Swift Node CIFSNFS SwiftStack Filesystem Gateway Files

7 Georgia Tech Case Study Didier Contis Director Technology Services College of Engineering

8 Who we are and what we do Georgia Tech: 21,471 undergraduate and graduate students (Fall 2013) Six colleges: Architecture, Business, Computing, Engineering, Liberal Arts and Sciences 6th Top Engineering Graduate Programs 5th Top Engineering Undergraduate Programs 13,000 students in the College of Engineering, largest in the U.S. Georgia Tech Case Study - OpenStack Summit 2014

9 We have been deploying pre-cloud systems since 2007 Meet our federated condominium systems Georgia Tech Case Study - OpenStack Summit 2014

10 Our VDI / App publishing farm Virtual Lab Project and its supporting shared infrastructure (Matrix) Georgia Tech Case Study - OpenStack Summit 2014

11 Our HPC farm PACE: Partnership for an Advanced Computing Environment HPC federation / condominium system. 28,000 cpu cores and 2PB storage Georgia Tech Case Study - OpenStack Summit 2014

12 What we learned: 1) Our HPC and VDI users love compute power 2) They love their research data even more They are not alone. Georgia Tech Case Study - OpenStack Summit 2014

13 All our researchers / students love their research data They love to Acquire Create Exchange Receive Data. Georgia Tech Case Study - OpenStack Summit 2014

14 Here is a research project generating a lot of data Remote Sensing and GIS-enabled Asset Management System (RS-GAMS) Assessment of pavement, bridge, and roadway assets using various sensors Estimated Storage needs: 2,400 lane miles interstate highways currently on files with plan to analyze 2,000 miles in next few months Raw data: 2.2GB per lane mile Processed data: 1.2GB per lane mile 16 Million jpeg files so far !!!! Georgia Tech Case Study - OpenStack Summit 2014

15 Here is a research project receiving a lot of data Effective Capacity Analysis and Traffic Data Collection for the I-85 HOV to HOT Conversion The effectiveness of the implementation of the HOT lane is being evaluated in a before and after study. Direct fiber network feed from Georgia Department of Transportation to Georgia Tech Over 400TB of videos currently stored on random fileservers, USB drives Lots more video to collect. Georgia Tech Case Study - OpenStack Summit 2014

16 Oh, by the way have you heard about: Research Data Curation The White House Office of Science Technology Policy: has directed Federal agencies with more than $100M in R&D expenditures to develop plans to make the published results of federally funded research freely available to the public within one year of publication and requiring researchers to better account for and manage the digital data resulting from federally funded scientific research. http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2013/02/22/expanding-public-access-results-federally-funded-research http://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/microsites/ostp/ostp_public_access_memo_2013.pdf Georgia Tech Case Study - OpenStack Summit 2014

17 So where do we store all this data? Georgia Tech Case Study - OpenStack Summit 2014

18 Research Data Storage Challenges Our Challenges: Obviously we have a lot of research data. How much ??? (2 PB just for HPC) Cheap enterprise level storage is still expensive Backup is a problem (cost, time) Meet our BIGGEST challenges: Bring-your-own-drive USB, thumb Consumer cloud Dropbox, etc. Georgia Tech Case Study - OpenStack Summit 2014 Storage on demand

19 Research Data Storage Challenges Sometimes important research data might be stored might on not so reliable solution: Due to cost of existing enterprise storage and research programs funding Backup? Could you repeat the question please? Ultimate cheap NFS File Server circa 2006 Refurbished Desktop tower Two 5 ports USB cards 13+ USB drives each shared individually via NFS Georgia Tech Case Study - OpenStack Summit 2014 !!! WARNING UNCONFIRMED REPORT !!!

20 Our magic answer to all our problems ??? Georgia Tech Case Study - OpenStack Summit 2014 VAPOR the hybrid cloud

21 Meet VAPOR Goal: Build a Georgia Tech Distributed and Federated Academic Cloud Proposed design principles: Led by Academic Units in partnership with Central IT (Currently College of Engineering, College of Science, College of Computing, Library, HPC PACE Group, Office of Information Technology) Support Instruction and Research at Georgia Tech Distributed across campus and beyond (Hybrid) Federate multiple departmental projects Design / Architecture by Committee Academic Governance Oversight Need to be able to experiment and iterate quickly !!!! Georgia Tech Case Study - OpenStack Summit 2014

22 Proposed Use Cases for VAPOR Cloud 1.Ephemeral computing: A machine runs for short term use. Possibly for development/testing purposes. 2."Pet" computer: student needs a system which is "permanent", stateful and accessible both off and on campus. Basic usage is like VDI. 3.IaaS: Running campus services (both production and beta) on VMs. E.g. I don't want to manage a hardware layer but I need to set up a purpose built website to host data and services for an international research group and webhosting doesn't meet my needs. 4.PaaS: Running a platform. E.g. I don't want to manage hardware or the OS layer, but please give me a database I can use for this application. Georgia Tech Case Study - OpenStack Summit 2014

23 Vapor Architecture Vision NETWORK (VXVLAN / NVGRE / VPN) NETWORK (VXVLAN / NVGRE / VPN) DATA STORAGE (Swiftstack / DDN WOS / Gluster) DATA STORAGE (Swiftstack / DDN WOS / Gluster) HYPERVISOR or CONTAINER PODs (Hyper-V / KVM / XenServer + NVIDIA vgpu) HYPERVISOR or CONTAINER PODs (Hyper-V / KVM / XenServer + NVIDIA vgpu) COMPUTE STORAGE (Gluster / Ceph / Scale-IO /...) COMPUTE STORAGE (Gluster / Ceph / Scale-IO /...) Self-Service (to be defined / under investigation) Self-Service (to be defined / under investigation) Management (Microsoft Azure Pack / Redhat CloudForm..) Management (Microsoft Azure Pack / Redhat CloudForm..) Amazon AWS Microsoft Azure Microsoft Azure RackSpace NETWORK (VXVLAN / NVGRE / VPN) NETWORK (VXVLAN / NVGRE / VPN) Management On-premise Component Off-premise Component Georgia Tech Case Study - OpenStack Summit 2014

24 Today we are focusing on. Data Storage Georgia Tech Case Study - OpenStack Summit 2014

25 Vision of the Data Storage layer Will hold a large portion of GT Research Data Probably multiple data storage layers (multiple vendors / technology) Some of our current requirements: Distributed and Resilient (support multiple catastrophic failures) Limit vendor dependency / lock-in (priority to open source) Leverage de-facto standards (S3 / Swift) Support multiple entry points (API, Cloud NAS, pluggable services) Flexible design to limit the need to migrate data to new systems down the road Integration with Georgia Tech identity management system (LDAP & AD) Georgia Tech Case Study - OpenStack Summit 2014

26 Services supported by the Data Storage Layer / Swift DATA STORAGE ( SwiftStack Storage as a service) DATA STORAGE ( SwiftStack Storage as a service) Research Data Curation Filesystem Gateway (CIFS / NFS / GPFS/ .) Filesystem Gateway (CIFS / NFS / GPFS/ .) Research Data Repositories Dropbox type service Research Data Storage Georgia Tech Case Study - OpenStack Summit 2014

27 Why Swift / SwiftStack for the Data Storage Layer? Like: Swift is open-source (limit vendor lock-in in our mind) Turn key approach / manageability provided by SwiftStack Growing ecosystem around Swift Low hardware requirement / homogeneous hardware not required System seem robust -> replication rather than RAID technology Price is right !!! (so far.) Dont Like: It is object storage / not native filesystem Still young project / product Georgia Tech Case Study - OpenStack Summit 2014

28 Research Project Candidates to use Swift Projects in Aerospace, Transportations and BioEngineering currently targeted Examples of research projects looking / experimenting with Swift: Effective Capacity Analysis and Traffic Data Collection for the I-85 HOV to HOT Conversion Remote Sensing and GIS-enabled Asset Management System (RS-GAMS) Georgia Tech Case Study - OpenStack Summit 2014

29 Our current strategy to engage research groups Goal: Incentivize researchers to store data directly into Swift as objects when it makes sense This means demonstrating advantages from: Indexing Metadata Scalability Performance Future benefits (analytics) It also means making an up-front investment: In training and technical assistance Providing free storage Georgia Tech Case Study - OpenStack Summit 2014 SwiftStack CIFS/NFS Gateway Swift HTTP APIs Swift Node Files Swift Node Swift Node ScriptsApps

30 Filesystem Gateway Using Object Storage natively is difficult Lots of workflow based on using files. Our students are using Windows / Linux applications packages which are not object friendly. Latency / speed is also an issue Strategies being deployed or investigated: SwiftStack gateway w ith lots of cache Would like a GPFS Gateway (High Performance Computing) Storage abstraction technology (Software defined storage utopia. EMC ViPR Data Services ?) Georgia Tech Case Study - OpenStack Summit 2014 Directory

31 Swiftstack FileSystem Gateway

32 Filesystem Gateway No Data Lock In No lock in due to encoding with SwiftStack gateway Data in/out same via Swift API or via CIFS/NFS filesystem Traditional gateways (like S3/Glacier, Avere, Panzura) are a 'medieval marriage....forever These gateways severely lock data in all data going in via gateway MUST come out through same gateway It's a "Hotel California for data you can check-out any time you like, but you can never leave Other gateways with lock have other benefits/features E.g. deduplication, compression, etc. Or offer POSIX required for some applications Georgia Tech Case Study - OpenStack Summit 2014 SwiftStack Filesystem Gateway Swift HTTP APIs Swift Node Swift Node Swift Node Objects Files

33 Filesystem Gateway Simplified Account Management Traditional gateways often use one 'cloud' account for all access E.g. organizations single S3 account shared by all users Simple to use but makes security and account management meaningless SwiftStack filesystem gateway uses separate account for each user Same individual account used for both filesystem and direct object access ACL's, access, usage all map back to that user's account regardless of path So authentication of access by either object or file is the same Authentication, permissions, and utilization (for chargeback) are meaningful Greatly simplifies management/access for operations teams deploying Swift Common authentication mechanism means far less to integrate Georgia Tech Case Study - OpenStack Summit 2014

34 File System Gateway Benefit Data Access Migration Multiple access paths to data simpler for both users and developers Example: -Data acquisition devices capture research data -Device software uses Swift HTTP APIs to write directly to Swift storage -User later browses filesystem gateway with analysis tool that only knows how to work with files -Data capture and use much simpler for users with multiple access paths Makes Swift storage much more flexible to use and grow -Applications and devices can be migrated over to direct object storage over time -Legacy data capture/analysis can continue to use only files -Users can migrate access paths as data handling tools and practices evolve Georgia Tech Case Study - OpenStack Summit 2014

35 Back to our programming Georgia Tech Case Study - OpenStack Summit 2014

36 What about our Research Data Curation problem? Initiative lead by Georgia Tech Library Migrate from Dspace to a Research Data Curation repository built around Fedora (repository infrastructure) and Hydra (front end repositories) Fedora 4.0 will connect to Swift via JBoss ModeShape and Infinispan storage subsystem Infinispan connection to Swift initially to use the Swift3 (S3) emulation layer Georgia Tech Case Study - OpenStack Summit 2014

37 Swift zones distribution across campus Zone ECS 1 Zone PACE 1 Zone ISYE 1 We expect more zones to come on-line in the next 12 months Geographically distant region is on the roadmap (using hosting agreement with other Universities and Internet 2) Federated and Distributed Academic cloud: Each zone is located in a server room which is owned and operated by a different GT department.. No one own the cloud VAPOR ??? Georgia Tech Case Study - OpenStack Summit 2014

38 What hardware are we using? Supermicro chassis, primarily 24 bays chassis Hardware configuration is heterogeneous (different drives capacity, no same number of storage nodes per zone) Drives are mix of Enterprise / Consumer grade. Mainly 1TB or 2TB Most storage nodes have 10GB network connectivity (SolarFlare or Mellanox Connect- X). Currently SFP+ 10GB 10GB Base-T is next LSI SAS Adapter 9211-8i (do not forget to re-flash if needed to change card from Integrated Raid to Integrated Target) SSDs for Account/Container Ring (60GB to 120GB) Memory to TB ratio?? 1GB of memory per TB can be expensive Georgia Tech Case Study - OpenStack Summit 2014

39 Distributed management of our Swift Infrastructure Sysadmin from multiple departments share administrative responsibilities. Would like more delegation granularities down the road: delegation on a per zone / region basis to enable for node management of cluster operator role. Students are a great resource to replace dead drives. If they know which one to replace.. Georgia Tech Case Study - OpenStack Summit 2014

40 SwiftStack Auth and LDAP Initially was considering using AD Integration LDAP was a definite requirement. Availability delayed some of our testing / usage. Georgia Tech LDAP size is fairly large: -ou=accounts -> 300K entries -ou=people -> 2M entries So far so good. Initial integration was easy (5 minutes) but we waited until code was stable.. Anyone with a GT valid account can access the Swift cluster !!!! -(but we have not advertised its existence. Please dont tell our students) Georgia Tech Case Study - OpenStack Summit 2014

41 Our Financial Model Approach Limit recurring cost at all costs !!!! Fund recurring cost at the central level (licensing for example) Focus on Bring Your Own: Zone (BYOZ) Server (BYOS) Drive (BYOD) We envision to use HDDs as a form of currency with research groups. 4TB of data to store = 3 x 4TB HDD payment for 5 years. Hopefully storing 4TB will be negligible in 5 years when drives start to die. Georgia Tech Case Study - OpenStack Summit 2014

42 ITS ALIVE. Okay So Whats Next Implement Quotas probably container based Quotas Re-architect the proxy layer this summer. Dedicated proxy nodes and possibly Load Balancer (Netscaler / F5) Might deed to identify High performance NAS Gateway for specific workload ('medieval marriage....forever) Investigate support for a GPFS based Gateway Keep educating people on long term benefits of using Swift API to access data Unified access to data via SwiftStack FileSystem Gateway (convergence) Georgia Tech Case Study - OpenStack Summit 2014

43 Managing Swift with SwiftStack Georgia Tech Case Study - OpenStack Summit 2014 Joe Arnold CEO SwiftStack Inc.

44 SwiftStack Object Storage Software Georgia Tech Case Study - OpenStack Summit 2014 Standard Hardware & Linux Distribution DEPLOY Deploy in Minutes not Days INTEGRATE Seamlessly SCALE Without Disruption OpenStack Swift (support included) Simple, Web-based MANAGEMENT

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