Deploying Dell ObjectScale on RedHat OpenShift

A joint post by Itzik Reich & Anuraj PD

Data volumes continue to explode across the enterprise, driven by the proliferation of mobile devices, applications, and the growth of the Internet of Things. As the amount of data businesses generate continues to rise, so does the cost of storing and managing all this information. Traditional storage solutions have become too costly and complex to deploy and manage at the scale organizations require. Public cloud solutions – once heralded as the future of data storage – can introduce unforeseen costs and data latency issues, often making them unpredictable options for long-term storage.

To harness the power of growing volumes of data, ObjectScale provides a next-generation storage solution that can help to reduce costs, simplify management, accelerate access and extract the intelligence from data that organizations need to compete.

ObjectScale is the next evolution of object storage from Dell Technologies. It is a software-defined, scale-out, object storage platform. With ObjectScale, any organization can deliver cloud-scale storage services with the reliability and control of a private cloud infrastructure.

ObjectScale features a Kubernetes-native, containerized architecture built on the principles of microservices to promote efficiency, resiliency and flexibility. Each service is completely abstracted and independently scalable with high availability and no single point of failure. ObjectScale is built on proven Dell ECS’s codebase and has been re-platformed to utilize the native orchestration capabilities of Kubernetes—scheduling, auto-scaling, load-balancing, self-healing, and more.

ObjectScale is optimized for a broad range of use cases, including:

Secondary storage. ObjectScale is an excellent option for secondary or tiered storage, enabling organizations to move infrequently accessed data away from more expensive primary storage.
Modern applications. Designed for modern application development, management, and analytics, ObjectScale supports next-gen web, mobile and cloud applications.
Data Lake. ObjectScale establishes a data lake foundation for organizations of any size, maximizing the value of user data with powerful HDFS services which enables in-place analytics capabilities that reduce risk, resources and time-to-results.
Storage for Internet of Things. With no limits on the number of objects, the size of objects or metadata, ObjectScale is the ideal platform to store IoT data.
Global content repository. ObjectScale enables any organization to consolidate multiple storage systems into a single content repository that is globally accessible.
Geo-protected archive. ObjectScale can serve as a secure and affordable on-premises cloud for archival and long-term retention purposes.
Video surveillance evidence repository. ObjectScale makes for a low-cost landing area or secondary storage site for video surveillance data, which has a high-capacity footprint per file.

We previously discussed how to deploy Dell ObjectScale on VMware vSphere with Tanzu and how to backup and restore a YugaByte DB from/to it.

In this demo, we will deploy and configure Dell object scale storage on the RedHat OpenShift container platform. ObjectScale is a software-defined enterprise object storage designed for Kubernetes. For this demo, we will be using the ObjectScale community edition, which is free for non-production use cases up to 30TB. Components required to complete the deployment of ObjectScale storage are CSI Baremetal Driver, ObjectScale Instance, and ObjectScale ObjectStore.

RedHat OpenShift Container Platform 4.8 is deployed and completed all the necessary prerequisites for deploying the ObjectScale. Refer to the ObjectScale installation guide for the prerequisites. The installation bundle provides a hardware qualification tool to validate the OpenShift cluster readiness before deploying ObjectScale. ObjectScale deployment is supported in both online and offline environments. In the case of an offline environment, the required container images are downloaded and uploaded to local private registries to be used during the installation. We are doing an online installation where the container images are pulled from the docker hub during the installation. To pull the container images from the docker registry it is required to create a secret type docker-registry in both default and objectscale-system namespaces with the docker hub credentials.

Install Baremetal CSI Driver

CSI baremetal driver manages the local disks on the nodes and is installed in the default namespace. Use the helm chart csi-baremetal-operator to install the csi baremetal operator in the default namespace. Wait for the csi baremetal operator to become running and ready. Once the operator is ready, use the helm chart csi-baremetal-deployment to install the csi baremetal driver in the default namespace. The driver will be scanning and discovering all the drives attached to the nodes. This may take some time depending on the number of nodes and drives. After the csi baremetal drivers are deployed and ready, verify that all the drives are discovered, and the storage classes are created.

Install ObjectScale Instance

Objectscale instance provides the portal to create and manage the objectscale objectstore. It is recommended to install the objectscale instance in a dedicated namespace. There will be only one objectscale instance deployed on an OpenShift cluster. The same ObjectScale instance can be used to deploy and manage multiple ObjectStore. In this demo, the ObjectScale instance is deployed in the objectscale-system namespace. Installation of the ObjectScale Instance may take around twenty minutes, wait till all the pods are running and ready. Get the IP address and port of the load balancer from the service objectscale-portal-external. Here, we are creating a DNS record for this IP address with the name objectscale01.vdi.xtremio. Verify the ObjectScale portal access using the URL https://objectscale01.vdi.xrtremio:4443, use the same credentials from the OpenShift identity provider to log in to the ObjectScale portal.

Apply License

Apply the license by going to the menu Settings-> Licensing. ObjectStore can be created only after a valid license is applied. The installation bundle contains the free license to use with the community edition.

Create IAM Account and Users

Create an IAM account in the ObjectScale portal. Once the IAM account is created, create the required storage access users. After the creation of the users, we can download the CSV file containing the access key and secret key for the users. This is the only time we can get keys, it is important to download the key file and keep it safe.

Create ObjectScale ObjectStore

ObjectStore can be installed on its own namespace or can share the namespace of the object scale instance. Here, we are deploying the ObjectStore to the same namespace where objectscale instance is deployed. Provide a name and select the required storage class. We are using the quick create method for this demo and use the default values. If customization is required use the advanced option.

Add IAM Account to ObjectStore

Attach the IAM account with ObjectStore, so that all users from the IAM account can consume the storage from the ObjectStore as per the configured access policy. If required configure the default bucket quota and enable encryption. In this demo, we are not enabling quota and encryption.

Create S3 Buckets

Create S3 buckets as per application requirements. While creating the bucket, configure required features for the bucket.

Configure OpenShift Internal Image Registry

If the OpenShift cluster is deployed on platforms that do not provide shareable storage, the OpenShift Image Registry Operator bootstraps itself as Removed. In the demo cluster, we didn’t have object storage access till the ObjectScale deployment is completed. As we have completed the ObjectScale deployment and configuration we can reconfigure the OpenShift Image Registry Operator to deploy the image registry and access the ObjectScale S3 bucket.

Create a secret with the ObjectScale S3 bucket access key and secret key in the OpenShift Image Registry namespace. Configure the OpenShift Image Registry to use the S3 bucket from ObjectScale Storage. Once the configuration is completed, we can see the image registry pod is running.