What are the new features in Cassandra after upgrading StorageGRID from 11.4 to 11.5?

Applies to

• StorageGRID 11.5
• DataStax Enterprise (DSE)

Answer

• DSE Cassandra is updated 5.1.14 to 5.1.22.
  • This fixes a few memory leaks and other occasionally-hit bugs.
• New Cassandra diagnostics are added to Support Diagnostics. 
  • The Cassandra grafana pages are revised to show better information and show it more clearly.
• A new auto-compactor module is developed.
  • It will automatically trigger major compaction whenever it detects >20% free space can be reclaimed AND sufficiently idle system.
  • This can reduce metadata load by up to 4x on a queue-type workload.
• Hints (data to be sent to a down node) are previously stored for 3 hours then discarded.
  • Now StorageGRID will store them until disk space on rangedb0 starts to get full.
  • This means that the window-of-inconsistency after a node is down is measured in minutes instead of weeks.
• Cassandra reaper has a number of improvements to increase repair speed and reliability.
• Cassandra will automatically be restarted if it is nearly out of memory.
  • This avoids the "garbage collection spiral" where a java process will run for any minutes spending almost all its time garbage collecting.
  • Now it quickly resets and gets back into the cluster.

Additional Information

Release notes for DataStax Enterprise 5.1
DSE 5.1.x is compatible with Apache Cassandra™ 3.11 and adds additional production-certified changes,

admin@DC1-S1:~ $ su -
Password:
root@DC1-S1:~ # cql
Connected to StorageGRID at localhost-grid:9042.
[cqlsh 5.0.1 | Cassandra 3.11.3.5122 | CQL spec 3.4.4 | Native protocol v4]
Use HELP for help.

root@DC1-S1:~ # /usr/local/servermanager/reader.rb
Collection Time                2022-12-22 09:05:27 UTC
Host Name                      DC1-S1
IP Address                     192.168.0.6
Operating System Kernel        4.9.0                Verified
Operating System Environment   Debian 10.9          Verified
StorageGRID Release            11.5.0               Verified
Storage Subsystem                                   Verified
Network Monitoring             11.5.0               Running
Time Synchronization           1:4.2.8p12 dfsg      Running
adc                            11.5.0               Running
dds                            11.5.0               Running
dmv                            11.5.0               Running
ldr                            11.5.0               Running
rsm                            11.5.0               Running
ssm                            11.5.0               Running
acct                           11.5.0               Running
idnt                           11.5.0               Running
kstn                           11.5.0               Running
stat                           11.5.0               Running
chunk                          11.5.0               Running
dynip                          11.5.0               Running
miscd                          11.5.0               Running
nginx                          1.14.2               Running
cassandra                      5.1.22               Running　　
persistence                    11.5.0               Running
jaeger agent                   11.5.0               Running
node exporter                  0.17.0 ds            Running
cassandra reaper               2.0.3                Running
update snmp firewall           11.5.0               Running