About Volumez

What is Volumez?

Volumez is a Cloud-Native, Composable Data Infrastructure.

With Volumez, you can unleash a realm of opportunities as you build your next-generation cloud-native enterprise-grade applications using the highest performing, most resilient, and simplest to manage data infrastructure layer available; and the layer is predictable and cost efficient.

Volumez is a paradigm shift, using new cloud native data path architecture for block and file storage infrastructure.

At its core, Volumez is composable infrastructure software that makes it easy for developers to request and provision storage resources in the same way that they request CPU and memory resources in Amazon Elastic Block Store, Azure Persistent Disk, or Kubernetes Persistent Volume.

Volumez connects NVMe instance storage to compute instances over the network and composes a dedicated, pure-Linux storage stack for data services on each compute instance.  The Volumez data path is direct from raw NVMe media to compute servers, eliminating the need for storage controllers and software-defined storage services.

The data path prescription and orchestration is managed by the storage control plane, provided by Volumez SaaS. The storage control plane is separated from the storage which runs in customer virtual private clouds and data centers.

Volumez is not a storage system in the conventional sense, although it replaces cloud storage systems in practice, demonstrating predictable faster IOPS and reduced latency not offered by any other option. 

Terminology in Volumez

Connectors

You install a Volumez Connector on every cloud instance that is to be used by Volumez. The Connector polls Volumez for storage orchestration commands and uses the Linux OS on the instance to perform the commands.

Orchestrator / SaaS platform

The Volumez control plane is SaaS. It is hosted on the Volumez cloud.

Policies

Policies are templates for the guaranteed performance, resilience, and data governance of provisioned Volumes. You can create or modify your own Policies, or use one of the predefined policies.

Policies allow you to declare the desired characteristics of the volume that you wish to create. Policies are expressed in terms of volume performance and resiliency. Creating a volume automatically allocates and configures whatever is necessary to match these desired outcomes.

Policies can be performance optimized or capacity optimized:

• Performance optimized policies eliminate any added layers that might affect the application data, providing best performance capabilities.

• Capacity optimized policies use a more efficient data management and protection methods that provide optimization for the underlying capacity.
  Volumez uses capacity-saving methods (including compression, deduplication, erasure coding, and thin provisioning) where relevant, to consume the minimum amount of raw media. Using such methods might consume some CPU cycles and might reduce the performance of your volumes (it will still be within the performance range that you specified).

Cloud instances: Application Nodes

Application Nodes are cloud instances which run your applications. Each has a Volumez connector installed on it.

Volumez supports all AWS EC2 instances and Azure VMs that run a supported operating system and contain NVMe. This includes:

• AWS: The i3, i3en, i4i, i4g, im4gn, is4gen families and also the c7gd, c6gd, c6id, c5d, c5ad, r7gd, r6gd, r6id, r6idn, r5d, r5dn, r5ad, x2gd, x2iedn families

• Azure: Lasv3, Lsv3, Lsv2 series Azure Virtual Machines

Cloud instances: Media nodes

Media Nodes are cloud instances that hold raw media (disks that the Volumez service uses to build logical volumes).

Media Nodes hold the data managed by the Volumez service to serve the Application Node requirements.

We recommend that you use Media Nodes that have only one SSD media. Having multiple media disks is supported, but media utilization and balancing the workloads across media may not be optimal. In addition, for optimal resiliency, using multiple instances with one disk in each instance is preferred over using fewer instances with multiple disks. Recommended nodes include:

• AWS: is4gen.2xlarge, i4i.4xlarge, i3en.3xlarge
  Smaller instances from these families are recommended only for lower capacity and performance requirements.

• Azure: Standard_L8s_v3, Standard_L8as_v3

After you install a Volumez Connector on a cloud instance, you must assign it to operate as a Media Node.

Volumes

Volumes are block devices. They comprise one or more Media Nodes serving a specific Application Node provisioned by Volumez.

• You control all the parameters of your Volumes (such as size).

• To control resiliency, you can create ephemeral logical volumes, single-zone volumes with predefined degrees of failure tolerance, and multi-zone volumes:

  • Ephemeral – No mirroring: there is one copy of the data on a single Media Node.

  • Node Mirroring – High Availability within a single Availability Zone. Data is duplicated on other Media Nodes and can survive one or more media node failures.

  • Cross Zones Mirroring – Data is duplicated across more than one Availability Zone. Data can survive a Media Node or an Availability Zone failure.

• You select the Application Node to which the volume will be attached.

Snapshots

Snapshots are point-in-time copies of a Volume. A Volume can have multiple Snapshots, and they can be attached in a matter of seconds to a node, when a recovery is needed.

• Volumez logical volumes support snapshot services (with fast snapshots and fast restores).

• Snapshots are read-only.

Attachments

Attachments are used to manually provide cloud instances (Application Nodes) with access to logical volumes (Media Nodes).

You can attach Volumes and Snapshots to any application node. Multi-attach is not supported yet. In other words, you cannot attach a single Volume or Snapshot to multiple nodes.

What environments are supported with Volumez?

The full Volumez specifications are described here.

• Linux
  For production usage we certify Linux distributions (currently Red Hat Linux, Ubuntu, and Amazon Linux) and cloud platforms (currently AWS and Azure, with GCP and OCI coming soon).

• Kubernetes:

  • EKS for AWS

  • AKS for Azure

What provisioning types are available in Volumez?

The Volumez solution is based on the declarative approach- the customer declares their requirements, which Volumez provides. There is no over-provisioning, which means the customer only pays for what they really need.

• Auto-Provisioning
  You specify your requirements; Volumez creates nodes to meet these requirements. When Auto-Provisioning is used, the configuration is quick and simple. Volumes are dedicated to specified applications. When an application is down, the corresponding Volume’s Media Nodes will be down as well, since they have no application to serve.

• Shared Media
  You specify your requirements; Volumez uses existing nodes to meet these requirements. In Shared Media mode, Media Nodes are shared among multiple applications. Media Nodes will automatically serve the various applications as needed. If one application is down, the Media Nodes will continue to serve the other applications. 

Volumez Dashboard

Volumez presents a system Dashboard, to display all important data in real-time. You can view capacity, IOPS and bandwidth information in real-time.

How is Volumez secured?