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

Access the configurator here: https://support.cloud.datacore.com/swarm-configurator/index.html

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 and is downloadable 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 the Swarm cluster; you can apply one protection method at a time so choose an option accordingly.

• Replicas
  

  

  • Number of Replicas – Requires a minimum of 1 replica.
    

• Erasure Coding
  

  

  • Data Segments – A number of data segments created for each logical object.

  • Parity Segments – A number of parity segments for the given number of data segments.

  • Segment Size (MB) – The maximum size of each segment. The object gets split further if the segment size is more than the maximum size.

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 megabytes 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

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 specifications are collected from the customer. Based on given inputs, this tool determines how much storage is available for the given hardware. 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 – A number of copies of data to be maintained.
    

    

• Erasure Coding

  • Data Segments – A number of data segments created for each logical object.

  • Parity Segments – A number of parity segments for the given number of data segments.

Hardware Specification

The following inputs are collected from the customer:

• Hard drive size in terabytes (TB).

• Number of hard drives required for each node

• Network speed in Gbps

• Number of network ports on each node

• CPU core on each node (e.g., 32, 64, etc.)

• Total RAM available on each node in GigaBytes (GB)

Results

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