Why Depend on a Gateway for StorageGRID Communication with FabricPool

[JFM]

Here's another question: Why can OnTAP not talk directly to StorageGRID storage nodes for storing data in a FabricPool setup? Why not include the required logic within OnTap to deal with storage node load balancing, failures, etc.? I'm curious to know or have a peek at the design principles behind this. 

[elementx]

My first thought reading this was why would I, as StorageGRID administrator, let anyone bypass my gateway.

[JFM]

The Free version of the gateway seems to be pretty dumb in nature... instead of depending on another piece of software, why not build this basic capability in OnTAP? 

[aronk]

The StorageGRID Gateway takes into account node resource utilization, it does more than even a third-party load balance can do. Since you need an admin node anyway, and, the Admin node can really be thought of as a Gateway node with Admin capabilities. A small deployment would use the admin node as the load balancer.

Ontap FabricPool is open to any S3 endpoint and vendor agnostic, it makes more sense to expect the load balancing of the endpoint to be handled externally and allow the target platform to provide the requirements. 

[elementx]

> why not build this basic capability in OnTAP? 

Because it would cover just one of several supported S3 back-ends, necessitate more patches for ONTAP (whether the user uses that feature or not) and ONTAP would *still* access SG via SG100+ appliances or VM-based SG NLB's, increasing latency and maintenance (as I said I can't imagine that any SG admin would let S3 clients directly access storage nodes, with or without client-side load balancer in place - what would they do if there were two very dissimilar ONTAP clusters using the same SG cluster for FP, or simply other workloads with different requirements?)

[aronk]

You could use DNS RR, or let Ontap failover across multiple IPs assigned to an FQDN, but it would not have any intelligence or advanced Load Balancing features.  Im not sure why this would be a benefit though, and would limit the StorageGRID administrators ability to make use of features like traffic classifiers to ensure the proper quality of service.

[JFM]

I understand the idea of providing engineered appliances (SG100, SG1000) with flexibility and being feature-rich... but for smaller installations, those customers who go with the OVA, the same basic feature could be built into OnTAP... 

[Mjizzini]

The gateway node provides access to the S3 buckets in the grid holding the storage client data and metadata as well as the NAS Bridge configuration data. It is an essential part of the StorageGRID. The grid is a standalone product that can work with ONTAP as well as other Venders in the Market.