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 the 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:

CORE5 End-to-end cyber-resiliency capabilities	API-level: immutability via S3 object locking, retention policies and compliance mode Data-level: including S3 secure connections over HTTPS/SSL and data encryption-at-rest (AES 256 bit) Storage-level: distributed erasure-coding with data integrity assurance Geographic-level: easy deployment in multiple availability zones (data centers or locations) Architecture-level: intrinsic object storage semantics that prevent overwrites of existing data; security-hardened Linux operating system
Comprehensive application support over S3 API	Locking, refer to View and Edit Object Level Data Protection Settings Versioning, refer to View Object Version Information Advanced replication, refer to Create a Replication Workflow Lifecycle management, refer to Manage Lifecycle Policies
AWS IAM compatible model	This ensures strong security and application compatibility with multi-tenancy for backup-as-a-service offerings.
Veeam Integration capabilities	Veeam assistant for ultra-simple deployment with VBR and VBO Support for Veeam direct-to-object backups over S3 Smart Object Storage API (SOSAPI) Multi-Bucket SOBR IAM/STS Secure Mode VM Instant Recovery VM Sure Backup Veeam Ready - Repository and Veeam Ready - Object validated
Enterprise-storage architecture offering	Scale-out data services with stateless S3 API endpoints including integrated load balancer and secure SSL termination Dual-layer data protection for maximum durability, bit-rot error protection Ability to leverage flash for accelerated write performance on HDD platforms Management and Platform Services including API and UI accesses to systems management and remote monitoring APIs Cloud-native architecture with integrated Kubernetes orchestration

ARTESCA and Partner Applications¶

ARTESCA is designed to perfectly integrate with support partner applications such as backup applications.

Scality has a program to test and categorize partner applications for ARTESCA in order to determine how well they integrate with ARTESCA and identify evolutions to enable more robust integration.

They are classified in four categories:

Validated design	This the highest level of certification for partner applications with ARTESCA. When tested, these applications have shown that they ensure a predictable performance for the solution.
Certified solution	These applications are tested with near real-world use cases, and data to ensure a predictable performance for the solution.
Compatible	Partner applications that have been identified as compatible have been analyzed to ensure that they meet the API requirements and can integrate successfully with ARTESCA.
Incompatible	These applications have known incompatibilities and include those with non-implemented APIs, API behavior that does not meet the S3 standard, or have an incompatible architecture.

Validated design, certified solution, and compatible partner applications are supported by documentation. Refer to Partner Applications for more information.

ARTESCA Deployment Options¶

ARTESCA is delivered in three options known as appliances. These differ in the way they are integrated into your system but are managed in the same 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 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 can’t 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	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