Aetherstore, looks amazing, what about...
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It looks really amazing, What about the below.
- "Resource Efficient"
Can you define schedule windows when data can be synchronised back and forth? I.e over-night when no one is working so the internal network is not impacted, on a 10/100 network file synching out say, 120GB of data would be a pain during office hours for end users.- AetherStore uses AES-256 encryption to protect data both at rest and in transit.
Practically, how do the clients/servers trust each other? is it with a local self signed cert?- AetherStore automatically distributes and maintains four replicas of your data at all times, so data is available even when machines leave and re-join the network.
I'm assuming that one device is my AetherStore controller, let's assume that controller dies, how do I get control of the AetherStore network from a different device.- Only the Administrator has access to the mounted AetherStore drive.
How is this defined, what if there is pot of data which is not production critical but useful to make an attempt to back up, i.e a photo/video library in a non-profit, which can still be read only accessible to the staff team, or a 7+ year archive which users can have read only access into, historical finance data for example?Last and most importantly, are we going to see this product available in 2015?
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@Breffni-Potter said:
- AetherStore automatically distributes and maintains four replicas of your data at all times, so data is available even when machines leave and re-join the network.
I'm assuming that one device is my AetherStore controller, let's assume that controller dies, how do I get control of the AetherStore network from a different device.No, there is currently not a single point of failure control node in this way.
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Great questions, I must say.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@Breffni-Potter said:
- AetherStore automatically distributes and maintains four replicas of your data at all times, so data is available even when machines leave and re-join the network.
I'm assuming that one device is my AetherStore controller, let's assume that controller dies, how do I get control of the AetherStore network from a different device.No, there is currently not a single point of failure control node in this way.
Does that mean the CORE clients on each machine all talk to each other automatically? So no matter what device blows up on the network you can talk to the remaining systems from any device?
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@Breffni-Potter said:
- "Resource Efficient"
Can you define schedule windows when data can be synchronised back and forth? I.e over-night when no one is working so the internal network is not impacted, on a 10/100 network file synching out say, 120GB of data would be a pain during office hours for end users.No, not currently anyway. In theory this could be added in the future from what I understand of the system design. Although this adds danger in that you would have data stored without protection and only protected later. Having a FastEthernet (100Mb/s) network is not conducive to using storage on the network in general. You can, but boy is that slow. Time to upgrade to GigE and solve that and other issues all at once. I trust you don't actually see any 10Mb/s devices today (I hope!!)
In theory this could be done but would need to be an expert feature for shops that really understand the factors involved in the data protection and are willing to take on a bit of risk or responsibility for risk to modify the current "safe" settings.
Keep in mind that this is a storage pool, not a storage device with replication. So while you might be able to roughly predict where data is going to go, you don't actually pick how it will be stored or where except at the level of the pool.
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Along these lines, though, where you are looking at slow FastEthernet connections, we've talked to ÆtherStore about making this manageable for WAN links so that, when combined with Pertino, OpenVPN or IPSec VPNs, that we could have storage on our desktops all over the country. So it is something that NTG is very interested in too since we have one pool of machines at HQ, one in the lab and then the pool of machines that are located in homes all over the place.
We'd love to throw a big WD Green drive, say 4TB, as a second drive in every desktop that we ship out to staff, throw ÆtherStore on there and combine it over our Pertino network for a low performance, high capacity backup target. That would be awesome.
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@Breffni-Potter said:
- Only the Administrator has access to the mounted AetherStore drive.
How is this defined, what if there is pot of data which is not production critical but useful to make an attempt to back up, i.e a photo/video library in a non-profit, which can still be read only accessible to the staff team, or a 7+ year archive which users can have read only access into, historical finance data for example?So ÆtherStore itself is a block device that has a "local drive appearance." So think of it as an invisible SAN under the hood that shows up as a local drive on one machine, that the admin controls. That "drive" is, for all intents and purposes, a local drive there and acts just like one.
So while the admin alone has access to that drive, the admin can choose to share that drive via SMB and make it a network share. Now, suddenly, your ÆtherStore drive has turned into the backing store for a fileserver that you can share out however you like. Want to make it a public ISO and software repository for the whole company? Make it "Read" but everyone. Want to let anyone store stuff there, open up write permissions. It's not NTFS yet (I'm pushing, trust me) so you are limited to LUN provisioning (making separate block devices for each security need) and the granularity of SMB permissions at the moment when doing this. But combining those two gives you quite a bit of power to cover a lot of really useful use cases.
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@scottalanmiller Yes because then you have an insanely cheap geographically irrelevant backup scenario. Lot of companies would dive at the chance for that, building burnt down? not a problem there are 10 others.
The lack of NTFS is a shame but hopefully that will be addressed.
The scheduling, yes I agree needs to be an "expert mode" hidden away feature but for non critical data I can see it being useful.
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@Breffni-Potter said:
The lack of NTFS is a shame but hopefully that will be addressed.
I sat with engineering to talk about this specifically. They are very aware of the need and the priority of this. I spent a lot of time talking about why this mattered, how it would be used, etc.
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@Breffni-Potter said:
The scheduling, yes I agree needs to be an "expert mode" hidden away feature but for non critical data I can see it being useful.
In the same vein I'm pushing for (and will certainly be getting) a similar feature for controlling replication level. Right now it is four times replication. But what if it is just a cache and I don't want replication at all, or I'm on RAID 1 sets and just want 2x replication? Or what if devices are really fragile (hopefully only from a network visibility perspective) and want 8x replication? I want control of that under an "experts" area and that, I'm told, I will definitely be getting.
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I've seen and heard about Aetherstore for a a while. It is very interesting what they are doing with it. Oddly enough, it seems eerily similar to a program from years ago called Medley 97 (which shared storage, as well as CPU and RAM between machines in a local network).
I'm glad to see things like this making their way back into modern times.
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@dafyre said:
I've seen and heard about Aetherstore for a a while. It is very interesting what they are doing with it. Oddly enough, it seems eerily similar to a program from years ago called Medley 97 (which shared storage, as well as CPU and RAM between machines in a local network).
I'm glad to see things like this making their way back into modern times.
It is a lot more like Gluster.
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I wonder how this would do (or even if it could be set up) as shared storage or CSVs for a windows failover cluster.
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@dafyre said:
I wonder how this would do (or even if it could be set up) as shared storage or CSVs for a windows failover cluster.
No, it is not that kind of storage. How would you present it since it can't be shared as a SAN (iSCSI, FC, etc.)
Even if you could, it is not architected for that yet. Eventually this is a real possibility but not today.
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The number of ways this could break catastrophically actually blows my mind!
You'd need a large dependable desktop fleet for this to make much sense. $0.02.
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@MattSpeller said:
The number of ways this could break catastrophically actually blows my mind!
You'd need a large dependable desktop fleet for this to make much sense. $0.02.
It's quadruple mirrored network RAID 1. It's pretty reliable with minimal effort. And that's if you use stock drives. Do RAID 1 on the desktops and you move to RAID 1{1} at 4x2 mirroring (8 times total mirroring.)
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@scottalanmiller said:
It's quadruple mirrored network RAID 1. It's pretty reliable with minimal effort. And that's if you use stock drives. Do RAID 1 on the desktops and you move to RAID 1{1} at 4x2 mirroring (8 times total mirroring.)
Good lord.
Wouldn't this exponentially increase your network traffic as well? Re-Sync'ing all those mirrors all the time? Yuck!
I'm a bit conservative on this one, I'll wait and see how it plays out.
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@MattSpeller said:
Wouldn't this exponentially increase your network traffic as well? Re-Sync'ing all those mirrors all the time? Yuck!
This is why I'm after the scheduling, so it can only hog the network after hours.
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@MattSpeller said:
Wouldn't this exponentially increase your network traffic as well? Re-Sync'ing all those mirrors all the time? Yuck!
Why would they resync? What are you picturing happening? It's block level replication. So they stay in sync. On a normal GigE switch network this would create completely unnoticed traffic for normal amounts of storage. Remember "network traffic" is a weird concept as this would only create traffic peer to peer amongst four nodes. So what network impact are you imagining?
