Introducing ARTESCA¶

ARTESCA is a storage software that provides simple and secure S3 object storage designed to provide the strongest form of data immutability as well as end-to-end resilience.

As such, ARTESCA is a key piece of a data protection ecosystem used to migrate data from everyday live applications to secured storage. It enables businesses to protect the critical data consumed by the applications they use to run their business, and to restore such data if it is damaged or lost.

Data protection has become increasingly important today due to rising threats of ransomware and malware. This has made the need for long-term immutable backup storage critical as a way for businesses to ensure that they can restore data and recover business operations after an attack. In essence, backups are a secondary copy of all the primary information needed by the business. This can be structured data such as databases and unstructured data such as files, documents, specialized images, VM images, etc.

The components of the data ecosystem involved in backups are:

Business applications that use and produce data.
Backup applications that manage and track the data backups and, when needed, restoration. (e.g. Veeam, Commvault, etc.)
ARTESCA, as the storage software solution, stores the backup data in an immutable way.
Storage solutions such as public or private clouds, tapes, air-gapped off-site copies, etc.

ARTESCA Key Features¶

ARTESCA has been designed to fit seamlessly into this ecosystem providing the following features.

ARTESCA Overview Page¶

The Overview page is the first page ARTESCA displays after you log in to the user interface. It summarizes the health and the usage of the ARTESCA instance, and provides an overview of the configured S3 endpoints and connectors.

For more information on the Overview page, refer to Understand the ARTESCA Overview Page.

Tip

Click the Overview menu in the top navigation bar at any time to return to this page.

ARTESCA Demo Environments¶

You can deploy ARTESCA or ARTESCA+ Veeam in a demo environment to get familiar with the product.

The demo mode is not intended for production use and neither for validating performances.

The following demo environments are supported:

ARTESCA and Partner Applications¶

ARTESCA is designed to perfectly integrate with supported Partner Applications such as Backup and Archive Solutions and Big Data Storage Solutions.

Additionally, to help you understand how well an application integrates with ARTESCA, Scality runs a dedicated certification program to test and categorize partner applications.

ARTESCA Deployment Options¶

ARTESCA is delivered in several options known as appliances. These differ in the way they are integrated into your system but are managed in a similar way after installation. All of the appliance options provide complete, full-featured instances of the ARTESCA software, differing only in their target deployment experience.

The choice of appliance determines how ARTESCA is integrated with your servers and other applications.

ARTESCA Fleet Management with Maestro¶

For organizations managing multiple ARTESCA deployments, Scality provides Maestro, a lightweight application designed to offer centralized monitoring and management for a fleet of instances.

Maestro uses an outbound-only connection model: ARTESCA instances initiate all communications to Maestro, removing the need for inbound VPN access to ARTESCA. This simplifies deployment and security by requiring only outbound traffic authorization from ARTESCA to Maestro.

Maestro is beneficial for:

Scality Cloud Service Providers (SCSPs): To collect and aggregate usage data across various customer deployments for consumption-based (PAYG) billing.
Enterprise Edge Solutions: To provide centralized visibility and health monitoring across distributed branch offices.
Customers having DR architectures where two ARTESCA are deployed on two different sites.
Customers having multiple ARTESCA instances to address different use cases.

For detailed installation and configuration instructions, refer to the Maestro documentation available in the Documentation portal.

ARTESCA Hardware Failure Tolerance¶

This section clarifies what ARTESCA supports in terms of hardware failure events depending on the architecture of the cluster. Note that a drive is considered as failed as soon as ARTESCA detects a Write IO Error. In such a drive failure event scenario, ARTESCA will automatically deactivate the disk and start repairing the data on the remaining healthy drives. If the hardware failure events go beyond what is listed below, ARTESCA cannot guarantee the availability and health of the data.

The scope of what is protected is summarized in the table below:

Architecture	Supported Failure Events	Network Protection	Local Protection
1 node (+8 disks)	Can lose up to 2 drives simultaneously	No	8 + 2 and 3 copies for objects up to 64KB
3 nodes	Can lose up to 1 node and one drive on remaining nodes simultaneously	2 + 1 and 2 copies for objects up to 59KB	9 + 1 and 2 copies for objects up to 64KB
6 nodes	Can lose up to 1 node and one drive on remaining nodes simultaneously	5 + 1 and 2 copies for objects up to 59KB	9 + 1 and 2 copies for objects up to 64KB

ARTESCA RAID Failure Impact¶

This section clarifies what ARTESCA supports in terms of RAID card failure events, depending on the cluster architecture. Note that a RAID card is considered to have failed when the motherboard can no longer reach it. If for any reason the RAID card resets, ARTESCA will automatically disable all disks on the RAID card and it will be considered as not failing.

For a cluster of 3 or 6 nodes with Network Protection, you can lose a RAID card. This will be considered a loss of one node.

For a 1-node cluster, with or without a 1 or 2-node extension, data may be lost if the RAID card was unable to clear the cache.

Failure Type	Description	Severity - Risk of Data Loss	Recommendations
RAID Card complete failure	The RAID card is dead and needs to be replaced.	May have Data Loss (the cache was not flushed for example)	Having a 3+ cluster

ARTESCA Industry Conventions¶

Across Scality product documentation and user interfaces, you will see two different types of units to express storage capacities:

KB (kilobyte), MB (megabyte), GB (gigabyte), TB (terabyte), PB (petabyte), etc.

Also known as decimal calculation, these units express raw or unformatted capacities using a base 10 calculation.
- 1 KB = (1 * 10^3) = 1 000 bytes
- 1 MB = (1 * 10^6) = 1 000 000 bytes
- 1 GB = (1 * 10^9) = 1 000 000 000 bytes
This notation is the most commonly used across the industry to express raw capacity for disk drives, flash storage, or raw available storage for example.
KiB (kibibytes), MiB (mebibytes), GiB (gibibyte), TiB (tebibyte), PiB (pebibyte), etc.

Introduced in 1998, this notation represents storage capacities using a base 2 calculation (also known as binary representation). This is the capacity representation used in the IT industry.
- 1 kibibyte = 1 KiB = (1 * 2^10) = 1 024 bytes
- 1 mebibyte = 1 MiB = (1 * 2^20) = 1 048 576 bytes
- 1 gibibyte = 1 GiB = (1 * 2^30) = 1 073 741 824 bytes

The difference in the actual number of bytes between the base 10 and base 2 representation is substantial and needs to be taken into consideration.

In ARTESCA documentation, HDD or SSD drives, raw capacity and licensed capacity are expressed using the industry-standard decimal representation.

Used space, and storage space advertised by most client applications are represented using binary notation (expressed as TiB or PiB). The ARTESCA UI displays capacities using the binary notation.