How a Global Content Leader Rebuilt Their Observability Architecture for Hyperscale
This is the story of how an enterprise cloud content platform architected one of the largest and most resilient SmartStore deployments in production using MinIO AIStor and Splunk SmartStore.
The Problem with Traditional SmartStore Storage
One of the world’s largest content platforms faced a serious scaling issue. They were ingesting multiple terabytes of observability data per day, and that footprint was growing by multiple petabytes every quarter. Their infrastructure, designed in a previous era, struggled to keep up. Performance lagged, costs soared, and expansion added complexity.
The root issue? An architecture that scaled storage and compute together, backed by storage systems that depended on external metadata databases and costly SSDs. They needed to modernize without disrupting operations or exceeding their budget.
The Breaking Point
As data volumes exploded, the symptoms compounded:
- Compute utilization dropped to 3–4%, while storage was maxed out
- Storage growth meant manual rebalancing and fragile expansion workflows
- Relying on SSDs became cost-prohibitive at scale
- Load balancers became single points of failure
- Metadata management created scale bottlenecks
- The risk of downtime grew with every node and rack added
They needed a new approach, fast.
The Solution: MinIO AIStor + Splunk SmartStore
The team redesigned their observability storage stack using AIStor, the enterprise object storage software from MinIO, behind Splunk SmartStore.
The result was one of the largest and most resilient SmartStore deployments in the world.
Deployment Snapshot
- 51.2PB of raw HDD storage
- 16 AIStor nodes, each with 16TB drives
- 38.4PB of target usable capacity (with 12:4 erasure coding)
- 2 × 25GbE network interfaces per node
- No external metadata databas
- Fully supports Splunk hot-warm tiering architecture
Why It Worked
Disaggregated Architecture
By separating compute (SmartStore indexers) from storage (AIStor), each layer could scale independently, eliminating resource waste and overprovisioning.
Inline Metadata
AIStor stores object metadata alongside the object. Without an external database, the team avoided centralized chokepoints and scaled to billions of objects with no impact on performance.
High Throughput on Commodity Disks
Using AVX-512 instructions to accelerate erasure coding, AIStor delivered SSD-class throughput on HDDs. This optimization preserved CPU resources for application throughput while keeping infrastructure costs low.
Intelligent Traffic Routing
AIStor uses MinIO Firewall’s sidecar-based load balancing to route traffic intelligently across storage nodes without introducing performance bottlenecks. Instead of relying on centralized appliances, each client runs a lightweight sidecar that communicates directly with the storage servers. This eliminates extra network hops and allows traffic to scale cleanly with demand. The sidecars monitor node health using a readiness API and reroute traffic around unavailable nodes automatically. This shared-nothing design prevents cascading failures and adds circuit-breaker protection without needing changes to the application.
Seamless Expansion with Zones
AIStor’s zone-based architecture allowed the team to add capacity by introducing new zones without forced rebalancing, data migration, or downtime. New data flowed to new zones automatically.
Enterprise Resilience
- 12:4 erasure coding for high durability at just 33% overhead
- Active-active, multi-site replication with bucket-level notifications
- KES (Key Encryption Service) for efficient, enterprise-grade encryption key handling
The Outcome: Hyperscale Observability, Built the Right Way
By rethinking their architecture with MinIO AIStor and Splunk SmartStore, the team built a storage foundation that matched the scale and speed of their observability data, without introducing operational risk or runaway costs.
- Cost savings from using HDDs at SSD-like performance
- Massive scale with no external metadata bottlenecks
- Continuous uptime via built-in replication and intelligent load balancing
- Faster time to insight by eliminating infrastructure drag
All of it was delivered through software they controlled, running on hardware they selected, with the flexibility to grow further.
Lessons for SmartStore Teams
Think software-first. Simplicity scales. Proprietary hardware doesn’t.
Think disaggregated. Let storage and compute grow on their own timelines.
Think production-ready. AIStor and SmartStore are already proven at exabyte scale.
Ready to Build Your Own?
MinIO Community Edition is open source, cloud-native, and simple to test in your environment. AIStor brings enterprise features like active-active replication, KES, and Sidekick on top of the same proven engine.
- Download it now at min.io
- Or talk to our team about designing a SmartStore backend built to scale.