Mars 400’s server platform accommodates 8x 64-bit Quad-Core ARM Cortex-A72 servers in a one rack-unit (1RU) chassis. Two in-chassis redundant switches provide 4x10 Gbps uplink for horizontal scale out and client access. It eliminates network - storage device bottlenecks by pairing a single server node with a single storage device.
Every ARM server node provides dedicated CPU, memory, storage and network interface resources to its supported object storage device (OSD). As a result, OSD performance is far more balanced than traditional single-server node designs supporting many OSDs.
Further, Mars 400’s architecture provides greater accessibility due to its lack of a single point of failure. Also, by limiting the failure domain to a single disk, the Mars 400 exhibits faster recovery from microserver failures. The powerful 64-bit ARM Cortex A72 server enables Mars 400 to provide much higher bandwidth and IOPS compared to its companion product Cortex-A9 based Mars 200. Mars 400 integrates the ARM MicroServer, Ceph, and the UVS web-based user interface as a distributed Software Defined Storage turnkey solution. Ceph open source software defined storage platform implements object storage on a distributed computer cluster, and provides interfaces for object-, block- and file-level storage. However, managing and tuning Ceph to achieve outstanding performance and reliability challenge IT administrators unfamiliar with Ceph.
Ambedded’s Unified Virtual Storage (UVS) manager 2.0 is a web-based user interface that administrators use to simplify deploying, managing and monitoring Mars 400. UVS 2.0 supports the pre-installed tuned Ceph Luminous 12.2.x distribution. UVS 2.0 automates the process of provisioning Ceph as object-, block- and file-level SDS with a straightforward graphical display. UVS 2.0 includes a dashboard, cluster deployment & scaling, OSD & MON node management, object storage pool management, block image, file system support, replication/erasure coding data protection, CRUSH map configuration, in-line compression, S3/SWIFT object storage gateway and user management, multi-site active-active Disaster Recovery configuration, client user capability & keyring management, OpenStack backend storage pool management, iSCSI gateway/LUN management and much more. UVS 2.0 supports simple software upgrades without disturbing normal operations.

Ambedded will present Mars 400 at the upcoming OpenStack Summit Vancouver, Computex Taipei, and ISC18 Frankfurt events.