SmartMulti-Tenant Feature Guide for Block

Background

The requirements for x as a service (XaaS) in public and private cloud scenarios emerge with the soaring development of cloud services. As the number of end users increases constantly, one physical storage device may be used by multiple enterprises or individual users. Therefore, the following challenges arise:

• The logical resources of enterprises or individual users who use a same storage device may interfere with each other or unauthorized access may occur, impairing data security.
• IT service providers need to pay extra costs to manage users.
• Data migration without affecting services is required.

Developed to deal with these challenges, the multi-tenancy technology allows storage resource sharing among tenants and at the same time simplifies configuration and management, as well as enhances data security.

Definition

The SmartMulti-Tenant feature developed by Huawei allows tenants to create multiple virtual storage systems in one physical storage device. With SmartMulti-Tenant, tenants can share hardware resources and safeguard data security and confidentiality in a multi-protocol unified storage architecture.

NOTE:

Difference between multi-tenancy and multi-user technologies: They adopt similar user permission designs that enable different users to share the same storage resources but have different access permissions. However, in the multi-tenancy technology, tenants have independent storage resources, networks, and user information.

Advantages of the Multi-Tenancy Technology

The multi-tenancy technology allows multiple clients to use the same or customized services in the same system architecture in a shared data center. In addition, multi-tenancy implements logical isolation to ensure service and network security of tenants. Resources of one tenant are invisible to other tenants.

In real practices, the multi-tenancy technology aims to improve resource utilization efficiency and reduce the per-unit cost of resource by fully consolidating resources. Figure 1-1 uses an example in daily life to explain multi-tenancy.

Figure 1-1 Multi-tenancy used in hotel resource allocation

The example shows that multiple guests (tenants) can share the same hotel (storage system) and they have different needs. Different hotel rooms (logical areas, namely, vStores mentioned in the following sections) are provided. Therefore, guests can choose desired rooms. For example, there are 50 guests. Some guests want large rooms (large storage capacities) and some need small rooms due to limited budgets. Then, the landlord can divide the whole building into rooms that can meet guest requirements, instead of building a hotel for each guest.

Benefits

Table 1-1 lists the benefits brought by SmartMulti-Tenant.