LizardFS File Storage Solution powered by DIAWAY

Elasticsearch Storage

LizardFS has native clients for Linux, MacOS and Windows which are visible as a mount point or additional letter of the drive. You can also use NFS. This way you can connect nearly any application to LizardFS and pinpoint its location for sending the logs.

Because Logstash, Elasticsearch and Kibana are Linux based applications they can also have mounted LizardFS and see the logs that were saved by the applications.

This way you can take advantage of Erasure Coding over a simple replica and save up to 70% of your storage

Education / Science

University – Department of Bioinformatics – Genome Institute

Genome research is continually generating large files. After completing phases of research the files are getting even larger (next part of the genome is added).

Thanks to LizardFS it is possible to write only the part that is added – the rest of the file remains the same because the chunks have not changed. Plug and Scale is important as the need for Data Storage is constantly growing.

General-purpose File Storage

In the field of data storage, the most popular solution until now has been a Disk Array. However, this technology turned out to be costly, generating large costs for ongoing maintenance and scalability. Once the storage capacity of a Disk Array was full, the only way to continue to store more data was to buy another costly “shelf” from the same producer. When the possibility of adding additional elements was fully exhausted, one had to migrate all the data to a larger, usually much more expensive Disk Array. Thus, one was left with an old and now redundant Disk Array.

LizardFS makes it possible to build storage on multiple servers, regardless of their manufacturer. Increasing storage capacity is accomplished by adding additional server(s) with hard drives to the cluster. This type of solution ensures readiness for exponential growth of storage whilst using servers from DIAWAY. Thus significantly decreasing overall data storage costs. Check out LizardFS Infrastructure online TCO tool by DIAWAY.

Docker’s volumes & Backups

Using LizardFS for docker volumes is one of the main use cases with containers. In environments with many docker instances, devops team struggle with efficient and consistent backups. Usually such consistent backups require a stop (put down) docker image for all the period of time needed by backup software to synchronize data between current state and backup.

When we use LizardFS as storage for our containers’ volumes we do not need to wait for backups, since even PetaByte size containers need to be stopped only for a fraction of seconds in order to prepare consistent data for backup thanks to the instant snapshot feature of LizardFS.

Another reason for using LizardFS for Docker volumes comes along with all the benefits of having a distributed file system like for example sharing data between other containers run in other servers.