Dell PowerScale CloudPools With Wasabi With Dell ObjectScale

How do I use Dell PowerScale (Isilon) CloudPools with Wasabi with Dell ObjectScale?

Dell PowerScale is supported for use with Wasabi with Dell ObjectScale. Wasabi integrates with PowerScale using the CloudPools feature. CloudPools provides policy-based automated tiering that lets you seamlessly integrate with Wasabi as an additional storage tier for the PowerScale cluster. To utilize PowerScale with Wasabi with Dell ObjectScale, please follow the instructions in this article.

Use case: Long term retention in cloud

Prerequisites:

• PowerScale’s external network is publicly routable

• Outbound port 9021 needs to be open to send traffic to Wasabi with Dell ObjectScale

• Select the appropriate Wasabi with Dell ObjectScale service URL depending on your region  

• Minimum PowerScale software release 8.0. and above. Please check with your Dell representative on recommended release for CloudPools.

• CloudPool license for your PowerScale OneFS

• An active Wasabi with Dell ObjectScale storage account

• A Wasabi bucket with a user for accessing the bucket using access and secret keys  

PowerScale OneFS Configuration:

1. Once you login to the PowerScale cluster, click on "File System -> Storage Pools".
   

   

2. Click on the CloudPools tab.
   

   

3. Click on "Create a Cloud Storage Account".

   

4. In the “Create a cloud storage account” window, input the required fields as follows-

   • Name or alias - Enter a name for the cloud storage account to be used within the PowerScale Cluster

   • Type- Choose "Type" to be "Dell EMC ECS Appliance"

   • URI- Set to "https://s3-nns.us-east-1-dell-obs.wasabisys.com:9021”. To use a different Wasabi storage region please use appropriate service URL.

   • Username- Set your Wasabi user Access key as your ‘username’

   • Key (password)- Set your Wasabi user Secret key as your ‘Key/password’

   • Proxy- Leave default “no value” for Proxy or select a proxy if you are using one

   • Click "Connect Account"

     

5. To create a CloudPool to point to Wasabi, click on “Create a CloudPool”
   

   

6. In the Create a CloudPool window, enter the following details-

   • Name: Enter a name for the CloudPool

   • Type: Select Dell EMC ECS Appliance from the list

   • Vendor: Enter Wasabi

   • Description: Enter a description for the CloudPool

   • Accounts in CloudPool: Select the Cloud Storage account that was created above

     

7. Once the cloud pool account is created,  we create a file pool policy to move the desired files to Wasabi.

   Click on “File pool policies” and click on create a "File Policy"
   

   

8. Enter the details for creating the file pool policy-

   • Policy name- Name for the policy

   • Description- Enter an appropriate description

   • Create a file matching criteria- In the example below - the criteria is applied to a specific path and files accessed older than 30 days.- essentially any file in the given path which has not been accessed for last 30 days will be  moved to the CloudPool

   • Scroll all the way the bottom of the File policy screen and choose "Move to cloud storage" and set the value to "wasabi"

   • Optionally you can choose to encrypt or compress the data before transfer - please refer to your PowerScale OneFS guide for more information about these features.
     Configure data caching and retention period in cloud. For more details on local data cache and data retention for CloudPools refer to PowerScale OneFS guide for more information.

   • Click on "Create Policy"

   

   

9. PowerScale OneFS, by default, is configured to run the smart pools job every day at 10PM. To manually invoke a data transfer to the CloudPool follow the steps below.

   • Navigate to "Cluster Management -> Job Operations"

     

10. Click on "Job Types"

    

11. Scroll down to "Smart Pools" and click on "Start Job" to manually invoke an upload to Wasabi

    

12. To edit the CloudPool job schedule, click on “View/Edit”,  and configure the schedule.

    

Viewing CloudPool data on Wasabi and PowerScale:

Below are two ways to confirm PowerScale CloudPool data been uploaded to Wasabi:

1. Using a S3 Browser or a similar software to browse your Wasabi with Dell ObjectScale account. PowerScale creates two buckets- one for metadata and second bucket for data. The bucket which starts with name "d00" contains the data and bucket with starts with name "m00" contains metadata.

   Metadata bucket:

   

   Data bucket: 

   

   Contents from the "Data bucket"

   

2. From the PowerScale command line, you can run a get command to view details of the directory path that was added in the file pool policy:
   "wasabi-98-1# isi get -DD /ifs/home/cp-test2 | more”

   Expected Output:

   

   If the value is set to "True" in "SmartLinked" - the file data has been stubbed and uploaded to Wasabi.