Declare Storage Policies

Storage Policies are the way to describe different storage tiers in your storage platform. Applied each time an objet has to be stored on the platform, a storage policy describes a set of services that can be polled and which treatment must be applied on the data. The target services are called service pools and the treatments the Data Security.

The Storage Policies are defined in the central Conscience service, they are namespace-wide: spread to all the oio-proxy, then in each service of the platform.

Each storage policy must at least contain a data security policy and can be used to target only certain pools.

Prerequisites

In this guide we suppose you have an OpenIO SDS namespace that is ready to use, in version 4.10.0.

Installation

No specific installation is required, the storage policies are part of the OpenIO SDS core.

Configuration

The storage policies are declared in two files dedicated to the central conscience service. It is usually deployed with the pattern /etc/oio/sds/*/conscience-*/conscience-*-policies.conf and contains both the definitions of all the Storage Policies and all the definitions of the Data Security.

Upon an object upload, the storage policy is loaded in the meta2 service, and the descriptiob * The declaration of the target

Suppose you have configured the following pool in /etc/oio/sds/[NS]/conscience-X/conscience-X-services.conf

[pool:rawx21]
targets=2,rawx-site1,rawx;1,rawx-site2,rawx

You can then define a storage policy that uses this pool to replicate chunks 3 times on 2 different sites following the 2+1 model.

[STORAGE_POLICIES]
DUPONETHREE=NONE:THREECOPIES
DUPONETHREE_MULTISITE=rawx21:THREECOPIES

As shown in the example above, a custom storage policy has been created for multi-site replication.

See also Conscience: Dynamic Load-Balancing, Dynamic Storage Policies.

Data Security

Data security describes the way an object is stored in the storage pool.

Each data security policy is derived from one of the supported security types. For the moment, these are:

  • plain: replication security (replicated data chunks).
  • ec: erasure coding security (data chunks + parity chunks).

By default, there are 3 data security policies available:

[DATA_SECURITY]
THREECOPIES=plain/distance=1,nb_copy=3
TWOCOPIES=plain/distance=1,nb_copy=2
ERASURECODE=ec/k=6,m=3,algo=liberasurecode_rs_vand,distance=1

The policies defined above can be interpreted as the following:

  • 2 replication policies (THREECOPIES/TWOCOPIES for 2x/3x replication).
  • a 6+3 Erasure Coding policy (6 data chunks + 3 parity chunks using Reed Solomon with liberasurecode).

You can add more data security policies on top of the existing ones, or even alter the ones provided by default. Please note that it is not recommended to alter a data security entry after objects have already been created using the corresponding Storage Policy, as it may result in data loss.

Options
Option Description
nb_copy replication only: defines the number of copies to store.
distance defines the minimum distance between chunks to ensure security.
algo erasure coding only: defines the erasure coding algorithm to use.
k erasure coding only: defines the number of data chunks.
m erasure coding only: defines the number of parity chunks.

See also: Erasure Coding.

Usage

When an object is pushed, the storage policy is chosen in the following order:

  • Object-level: when the Storage Policy is explicitly specified when pushing
  • Container-level: when the container where the object is created specifies a Storage Policy to use
  • Namespace-level: default behavior, uses the policy defined in /etc/oio/sds/[NS]/conscience-X/conscience-X.conf

See also: OpenIO SDS Configuration.

Additional notes