Wednesday, 12 October 2016
A sprinkling of Internet of Things ... and ... it's alive: Startup
Igneous Systems has re-discovered and re-imagined the idea of customers renting
an externally managed system on their premises, giving it an Internet of Things
(IoT) and public cloud make-over.
Customers
start with a 2x1 system of two dataRouters and one dataBox at a usable capacity
of 212TB. The dataRouters and dataBoxes can scale independently.
The
new angles are that IoT devices can generate vast amounts of data which is
difficult to send to a set of on-premises servers or the public cloud because
transmission is too slow and/or the data is sensitive and needs to be retained
on site.
Igneous's
answer is to store it locally in a public cloud-like, scale-out,
hyper-converged system that can run some compute processes on the data, and be
managed through the cloud. Example compute workloads are auto-tagging, metadata
extraction, image processing, and text analysis.
Igneous
owns and operates the on-premises equipment and the customer has a
capacity-based subscription pricing scheme. The systems are remotely managed
and monitored through a cloud service, and there is automated cloud management
processes for upgrades, troubleshooting, and failure management. Igneous claims
that these functions can be performed on a mirror of incoming and outgoing data
streams without slowing down low-level system functions.
The
Igneous architecture utilises a microservices approach and incorporates stream
processing, an event-driven framework, and container services.
The
equipment is based on ARM-powered nano-servers, with each being a disk drive,
ARM processor and Ethernet link. Igneous calls this a JBOND - Just a Bunch of
Networked Drives. There is a SoC (System On Chip) with a Linux-running Marvell
32-bit Armada 370 processor, with two Cortex-A9 cores running at up to 1 GHz.
Networking is via two 1 GbitE ports, and the nanoservers operate in a kind of
mesh.
It
reminds El Reg of Seagate's Ethernet-addressed Kinetic disk drives, except that
Igneous has had its own nanoservers built and the JBOND is accessed as an S3
data store. Any processing capabilities to operate on the stored data need
adding. Data is stored using erasure coding and failed nanoserver disks have
data rebuilt using other nanoservers.
We
also think 32-bit ARM CPUs look a bit light in compute power terms and 64-bit
ones will need to be used if any serious compute is going to be done on the
data.
Access
is via Amazon's S3 API across a customer's 10Gbit Ethernet infrastructure.
Other public cloud service access protocols will probably be added in the
future.
A
dataBox has 60 drives (nano-servers with 6TB disks) in a 4U enclosure and is a
capacity store. A dataRouter is a stateless 1U server used for protocol
endpoints and keeping track of data in the nanoserver mesh.
There
is some existing third-party software support. For example, Commvault Virtual
Server Protection (VSP) enables users to back up to an Igneous System and
Infinite IO works with Igneous.
This
Igneous nanoserver kit is an interesting start in what we might ultimately call
micro or nano hyper-converged systems. Getting involved with it means
leading/bleeding edge work for Linux and S3 buffs.
Get
a datasheet here. The Igneous Data Service is available immediately to
customers in North America. Customers can purchase annual subscriptions in
increments of 212TB of usable capacity, starting at under $40,000 (equivalent
to 1.5 cents/GB/month). This is claimed to be lower than the cost of S3 (3
cents/GB/month). Volume discounts are available, based on installed capacity or
contract duration. ®
