Software: The Solution to Your Storage Headaches
Today’s storage market faces a similar problem to what Tesla solved for the automotive industry. To save on gas and to reduce the impact on the environment, many consumers want to “go green” with an electric car. Electric cars are clearly ideal, but before Tesla, automobile manufacturers struggled to produce quality electric cars because they did not invest the time needed to re-architect the automobile to run sustainably and cost efficiently on batteries. The result was electric cars that were incapable of driving long distances only on batteries, and expensive hybrid models that forced the customer to compromise by requiring a standard gas engine and adding huge batteries that diminished trunk space. Tesla made going green easy for the consumer, with electric cars that are easy to drive, can drive for long ranges, and even have much better performance than a standard gas car with greater efficiency.
Tesla achieved this breakthrough with software innovations, which is also the solution to today’s storage headaches. We have already seen the potential of these innovations in other areas of the IT stack. For example, VMware taught us the value of purchasing hardware independently from software in the server market. Microsoft Exchange is purchased independently from the storage systems on which the application will ultimately run. Traditional storage solutions require large amounts of hardware and are very expensive to purchase and operate. StorONE has changed the efficiency equation of the storage stack by completely re-engineering storage software so it now dramatically boosts the utilization of storage hardware and is independent of the hardware. As a result, less hardware – and, arguably even more importantly, less expensive hardware – is needed to obtain the same results.
Other aspects of the data center, including servers and networking, have been virtualized, but no company before StorONE has virtualized storage to the point that a storage system can be created from any underlying hardware. When you deploy VMware server virtualization, you don’t purchase an additional server for each virtual machine that needs to be created. You use one server to create many virtual machines.
StorONE followed the trend of these industry leaders. StorONE’s software-defined storage solution, called S1, allows the customer to run any combination of storage access protocols and use cases, with a myriad of deployment options – all on a single, commodity system. This approach solves the biggest problems facing storage professionals today:
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Multiple, siloed systems that support only a singular use case must be managed and maintained
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Legacy architectures force compromises on everything from performance to data protection
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Legacy architectures force vendor lock in and costly maintenance contracts
StorONE re-wrote legacy storage software algorithms from the ground up to make them completely decoupled from underlying hardware, and to make them highly computationally efficient. As a result, the customer can mix and match storage resources, they can quickly integrate the latest technologies, and they can tap nearly all of the raw performance of which the storage media is capable. At the same time, the customer can obtain enterprise-class data services without an impact on performance. They can use whatever hardware they need to meet their storage needs, at dramatically lower cost.
Topics: Insider, news, data storage, sds, software-defined storage
StorONE Unified Virtual Appliance with Seagate Drives Ideal for I/O-Intensive Environments
NEW YORK – June 25, 2019 – StorONE today announced record speeds using Seagate SSD drives and StorONE’s TRU™ S1 Software Defined Storage solution. In recent performance testing, StorONE combined its software with Seagate’s enterprise-class SSDs in a virtual appliance configuration that reached a breakthrough half a million IOPS with 24 Seagate SSDs and all enterprise-class data protection features running. The high-availability, failure-proof VMware cluster with two nodes achieved this throughput on random reads (4K) and 180,000 IOPS on random writes (4K) with latency of less than 0.2 milliseconds.
The StorONE Unified Virtual Appliance configuration with Seagate drives eliminates the storage performance problems caused by server virtualization. StorONE software runs in a simple ESXi VM using very little memory and compute and does not require expensive server configurations, big memory caches, or other expensive add-on products. The virtual appliance supports all hypervisor platforms including VMware, Hyper-V, KVM, and Oracle VM.
“StorONE’s software elicits the extreme performance of our SSDs in meeting the needs of mission-critical applications,” said Ravi Naik, CIO and SVP Corporate Strategy at Seagate. “With StorONE’s software, users can achieve the maximum utilization of resources from our solid state drives, getting the best possible TCO via optimized storage capacity and performance.”
“Seagate drives offer superior drive design and reliability for enterprise use, and our tests show they offer performance beyond their competitors,” said Gal Naor, StorONE co-founder and CEO. “We are very proud to have the world’s leading data solutions company as an early investor and partner, on whose drive technology we can reach incredible throughput and deliver all essential data services for managing and protecting data.”
StorONE gives the user, for the first time, the full value of the storage resources they purchased. With StorONE’s TRU S1 software, a customer’s hardware investment will match the rated IOPS, throughput, and capacity of the drives regardless of whether they are SSD, NVMe or HDD. In addition, StorONE’s TRU storage software includes enterprise storage features such as unlimited snapshots; support for all storage protocols (block, file, and object) on the same drives; support for iSCSI, Fibre Channel, NFS, and S3; and support for all drive types in the same server. It is also the first and only software solution that can be used for all-flash or hybrid arrays, virtual storage, secondary storage, or cloud storage so there is no need to integrate multiple storage solutions when users can get it in one single software solution.
For a performance demo of the Unified Virtual Appliance with Seagate SSDs visit https://youtu.be/KMDzOzEr79o
About StorONE
StorONE was created to prove that for the first time, enterprises no longer have to compromise to solve their biggest data performance, protection and complexity issues. StorONE’s TRU™ SDS is the most complete storage software solution on the market. It is the first and only software solution that can be used for an all-flash or hybrid array, virtual storage, secondary storage, or cloud storage, and that supports all protocols (block, file and object) – all powered by the same software. At the same time, the StorONE S1 software delivers complete optimization of any hardware, and it is completely future proof. This creates a dramatic reduction in the cost and management of enterprise storage and maximizes flexibility to take advantage of the most recent hardware innovations, making the life of the data center manager easier. StorONE is led by a team with a proven track record of changing the data storage industry and backed by a board that includes industry visionaries from three of the largest companies in the world. StorONE has filed more than 50 patents and has attracted investments from leading venture capital firms and drive manufacturers like Seagate. Additional information about StorONE is available at https://www.storone.com or follow us on Twitter and LinkedIn.
About Seagate
Seagate crafts the datasphere, helping to maximize humanity’s potential by innovating world-class, precision-engineered data management solutions with a focus on sustainable partnerships. Learn more at www.seagate.com. Follow Seagate on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Spiceworks, YouTube and subscribe to our blog.
Topics: data storage
Innovation Over Integration Yields Unprecedented Storage Efficiency
We live in an age of tremendous storage hardware innovation.
Solid-state drives (SSDs) that are capable of delivering more than 100,000 input/output operations per second (IOPS) in raw performance have hit the market. The reality, though, is that customers are not getting the full benefits of these innovations. They are only able to obtain a fraction of these levels of performance from their storage arrays, because the storage array is bogged down by wildly inefficient legacy storage software algorithms.
Most storage vendors take 12-36 months to come to market since they simply integrate their inefficient legacy storage software code base with a couple of new features and faster hardware. This does not fix the storage hardware utilization problem, because it does not address the underlying root of the problem. True innovation that re-writes core storage algorithms is required to tackle this issue.
StorONE has taken the innovation, rather than the integration, approach. At StorONE, we have spent six years re-writing the storage software stack from the ground up so that customers can enjoy the full potential of modern hardware capabilities. Through high performance erasure coding and algorithm techniques, we created our Unified Enterprise Storage (UES) platform, S1. S1 unlocks previously unobtainable levels of storage system efficiency – something that we call Total Resource Utilization (TRU). Through changing the efficiency equation, S1 enables you to utilize significantly more of your hardware’s capabilities. The same results are achieved with far less hardware.
StorONE’s innovation-first culture has led to a total of 33 patents that have been granted in only six years, and we have tens of additional patent applications pending. Our large number of patents reflects our heavy investment in research and development, as well as our focus on re-architecting the storage stack for levels of efficiency that are, quite simply, transformative for our customers’ businesses.
Most recently, in the first quarter of 2019, StorONE was granted two new patents. Patent No. 10198321, entitled “System and method for continuous data protection,” recognized our groundbreaking approach to integrated data retention without compromising on performance, and Patent No. 10169021, entitled “System and method for deploying a data-path-related plug-in for a logical storage entity of a storage system,” addresses creating, verifying and executing tasks that ensure availability of data in distributed storage systems.
The new patents reflect the core focus of StorONE and of S1, which is to enable customers to obtain high-performance storage without sacrificing on enterprise-class data protection services, at a cost point that is in fact lower than both legacy storage architectures and cloud storage services.
At the core of how we are removing legacy constraints, is the fact that we have designed our data services to be highly computationally efficient, so that they are not hogging valuable CPU cycles that should be spent on serving the application itself. The customer gets more value out of each core and out of each gigabyte of storage capacity, because they do not need to overprovision on one or the other to obtain the levels of performance that they need. S1 supports the full range of high-performance and high capacity use cases, including all-flash and secondary storage, with a fully flexible, mix-and-match approach that provides the freedom for you to quickly integrate the newest innovations and to customize your infrastructure according to your unique application needs.
How to Reduce the Cost of Storage Operations
Storage managers have always been pressured to do more with less.
That pressure intensifies as the volume of data explodes, as the number of performance-hungry workloads grows, and as faster-performing but also more expensive storage technologies such as solid-state drives (SSDs) and non-volatile memory express drives (NVMe) enter the equation. Delivering the throughput, processing power, and storage capacity required by today’s workload ecosystem without breaking the bank necessitates new levels of hardware utilization that are not possible with legacy storage software.
Amazing innovations have occurred over the past five to ten years within storage media; for example, there are enterprise SSDs available on the market today that are capable of achieving hundreds of thousands of Input/Output Operations Per Second (IOPS). However, most storage software stacks have not been re-written to utilize these drives abilities, resulting in wild inefficiencies that the customer ends up paying for.
In the era of Moore’s Law and hard-disk drives (HDDs), storage software programmers did not need to worry about writing efficient code. Central processing unit (CPU) performance was accelerating at a rate with which storage media simply could not keep pace, so bloated storage software could be masked by significantly lagging HDD performance. Programmers prioritized getting their software to market as quickly as possible, versus taking the extra time that would be necessary to write more efficient code.
Today, the tables have turned as CPU performance gains have become incremental and storage media performance accelerates and density increases drastically. The end result is storage arrays that deliver only 20% or less of the IOPS that the storage media is capable of, forcing customers to dramatically overbuy to meet storage performance or capacity needs.
Extracting as much functionality and value as possible from every CPU cycle requires a rethink and a ground up re-write of the storage controller to serve as a consolidation engine.
Consolidating to a single interface for the storage operating system and services streamlines deployment and management of the underlying storage infrastructure.
- Storage managers can more easily make changes. For example, they do not need to worry about dealing with complex RAIDs when a capacity expansion is required.
- Furthermore, this reduces the impact of notoriously CPU and memory-intensive storage software services such as snapshots thus freeing up IOPS and throughput for the application itself.
- Lowering storage controller CPU resources enables the system to utilize fewer drives and use lower-priced CPUs, all without sacrificing performance and storage services.
