Varnish and NetApp StorageGRID: a case study in edge logic and object storage

Object storage systems allow vast quantities of unstructured data to be stored and accessed via APIs or HTTP/HTTPS, whether it is media content, website data or financial data sets. When this mission-critical data is kept in object storage, availability and performance are crucial, no matter the levels of simultaneous demand. That’s why Varnish Enterprise is the perfect partner for object storage systems, and why we have partnered with NetApp to deliver high performance, scalable and resilient object storage, as part of their leading software-defined solution, StorageGRID. Adding the powerful Varnish caching layer to StorageGRID guarantees uptime and performance, even in times of huge demand for high-use assets.

With Varnish Enterprise, download speeds increase by over 4000% and scaling StorageGRID to a global user base is easy, requiring no modification to the existing StorageGRID solution. Using Varnish Enterprise on StorageGRID ensures consistent high performance delivery of assets, including video-on-demand content, and increases the scale and capacity to unify an unlimited number of StorageGRID sites around the world. As well as high performance and scalability, Varnish Enterprise adds edge logic functionality for true edge computing. Let’s take a closer look at these three aspects in turn.

Accelerate access to critical data, with increased throughput and lower latency

Adding a caching layer like Varnish Enterprise on top of StorageGRID ensures lightning-fast delivery of any assets stored as object data, such as video, audio, images and log files. Varnish Enterprise with StorageGRID can hit 4000% faster download speeds, and Varnish has benchmarked the average download speed increase as being from 80 MB/sec to 4.5 GB/sec. Faster downloads means higher productivity, and business applications can run faster and more efficiently to consume more data, produce results faster and become more valuable.

Varnish Enterprise is an edge computing platform

Varnish Enterprise is built around the idea of VCL (Varnish Configuration Language), which is the programming language used to customize Varnish to do anything and solve any problem. VCL adds edge logic to StorageGRID, and facilitates endless possibilities in terms of adding new functionality. Examples include WAF, service integration, load balancing, traffic routing, download error correction, enhanced content security and application logic. Varnish can also generate, sign, or re-sign S3 v4 requests. Another edge logic example is to use Varnish to federate queries across multiple StorageGRID installations, enabling usage of 9x more sites while maintaining a unified S3 namespace. Updates can be pushed instantaneously with zero downtime, and Varnish edge computing functionality comes as standard, in addition to Varnish Enterprise’s pioneering performance, speed and scale.

For more information: https://book.varnish-software.com/4.0/chapters/VCL_Basics.html

Scale globally - Meet every audience size and stay online

Varnish Enterprise can scale StorageGRID to a global audience, supporting 100,000+ concurrent downloads and offering multiple terabits of bandwidth. Features like global CDN caching and cross-server content replication make it possible to distribute on-premises content to markets across the world. High availability functionality within Varnish Enterprise guarantees site performance—regardless of demand—without over provisioning. Varnish and StorageGRID also handle VoD at scale with ease, making the solution ideal for rapidly delivering high resolution streaming video and audio without undue strain on resources.

Read the official announcement for the partnership here.