What is Swarm Configurator?

Swarm Configurator is a tool that determines the hardware specifications needed for the various components in the Swarm cluster. Customer inputs are required with respect to cluster specifications, therefore some data needs to be collected through DataCore Cloud UI, including:

• Storage Characteristics

• Data Protection Requirements

  • Cluster Replication configuration

  • Protection Scheme configuration (for example, Erasure Coding scheme)

• Client Characteristics

Customer Inputs

There are three types of inputs (Storage Characteristics, Data Protection, and Client Characteristics) required from the customer to determine hardware components. The outcome is displayed under the Results tab in the tabular format, which you can download in YAML if needed.

Storage Characteristics

• Number of logical objects in millions

• Average size of the object in MB

Data Protection

There are two types of data protection methods available in Swarm Configurator; you can apply one protection method at a time so choose an option accordingly.

• Replication
  

  

  • Number of Replicas – Capacity is based on replicas; therefore, it is recommended to use less number of replicas. Having more replicas of a cluster requires more memory which results in less I/O capacity and makes the data access slower.
    

• Erasure Coding
  

  

  • Data Segments – The number of data blocks to store the fragmented data.

  • Parity Segments – A calculated value to restore data from other drives. It is added to the end of each data block to verify the number of bits available in the block is odd or even.

  • Segment Size (MB) – The size of each block in MegaBytes.

Client Characteristics

• Number of concurrent clients – The number of clients concurrently connected to the storage for accessing data.

• Write throughput per client Mbps – The rate at which the client writes in megabits per second.

Hardware Components

The inputs from the customer are optional for hardware components. If not provided, Swarm Configurator will calculate the required hardware components based on other inputs such as Storage Characteristics, Data Protection Requirements, and Client characteristics, and represent them into three different categories:

• Storage Nodes

  

• Elasticsearch

  

• Gateway

Outcome

Results

This menu provides the complete result including data collected from the customer and the calculated configurations that are generated through Swarm Configurator. The result is displayed in the tabular format which you can export into a YAML file format.

What is Swarm Configurator – Reverse?

Swarm Configurator – Reverse functions opposite to Swarm Configurator wherein inputs for the data protection method and hardware requirements are collected from the customer. Based on given inputs, this tool determines how much storage is needed. It includes:

• Logical capacity per node (TB)

• Number of objects per node

The customer can move back and forth between Swarm Configurator and Swarm Configurator - Reverse by clicking on the home icon and reverse icon.

Customer Inputs

Data Protection

• Replication

  • Number of Replicas – It is recommended to make maximum two or three replicas for faster I/O capacity and less memory load.

    

• Erasure Coding

  

  • Data Segments – The number of data blocks to store the fragmented data.

  • Parity Segments – An encoded value for each data block to ensure that the number of bits assigned to each data block is odd or even. The parity is added at the end of each data block.

Hardware Components

The input is collected from the customer for the following hardware components:

• Hard drive size in terabytes (TB).

• Number of hard drives required for each node

• Network speed in Gbps

• Number of network ports for each node

• CPU cores required for each node (e.g., 32, 64, etc.)

• Total RAM required for each node in GigaBytes (GB)

Outcome

Results

Based on customer inputs for data protection and hardware components, Swarm Configure - Reverse calculates the storage characteristics.