ABS is a software-defined, distributed block storage service system. Based on the access characteristics of cloud-based data centers, ABS integrates the features of various modern storage media. Compared to traditional centralized storage and other distributed storage solutions, ABS offers the following significant advantages:
Elastic performance
ABS supports various deployment modes, including a balanced mode using high-performance storage devices as cache and a performance deployment mode based on all-flash storage devices. Users can obtain predictable and stable high-performance storage services with reasonable hardware investment according to specific business scenarios.
ABS detects access points at the computing end and actively optimizes data connections, thereby shortening the I/O path and improving storage service performance.
Supporting iSCSI, NFS, and vhost protocols enables the client to access the cluster storage service through high-performance, low-latency I/O paths, improving overall performance.
Implement a business-prioritized intelligent data recovery and migration strategy, dynamically adjusting internal system I/O based on the intensity of business I/O. This approach ensures business performance while efficiently utilizing hardware resources.
Security and reliability
ABS uses replication and erasure coding technologies to achieve a robust redundancy mechanism, ensuring normal data read and write service in case of physical disk or server failures. In abnormal scenarios, new data is still written in the form of multiple replicas to ensure data redundancy level.
The system uses a strong consistency write policy to ensure data consistency.
Periodic proactive data access checks and repair strategies to detect data errors early and reduce the impact of silent data corruption.
Cost efficiency
ABS is compatible with standard commercial x86_64 and ARM architecture servers, without specific hardware dependencies. Compared to other distributed storage solutions, ABS uses fewer compute resources and allows a flexible choice of deployment modes based on hardware configurations and business needs, further controlling the overall investment cost. Its design without a management node also eliminates the need for users to purchase additional storage management servers.
Linear scalability
ABS supports synchronous online expansion for performance and capacity, including horizontal scaling (dynamically adding server nodes) and vertical scaling (dynamically adding physical drives within a server). After the expansion, the system automatically balances I/O load and data distribution to ensure the linear improvement of cluster performance.
