A Software-Defined Storage Engine
StorONE Does for Storage What Virtualization did for Servers
Why does storage cost so much?
Why does storage only address one use case?
Why do storage refreshes and migrations never stop?
Storage should be shrinking! Thanks to innovations from storage hardware vendors, storage solutions should deliver more performance, with fewer drives and more capacity in a smaller data center footprint. Additionally, IT should see a similar reduction in the cost and complexity of the storage infrastructure.
StorONE is creating a revolution in storage. This revolution enables organizations to lower costs by more than 50%, achieve 100% ransomware resiliency, enjoy continuous data availability, and eliminate storage silos
Three key innovations trigger this storage revolution:
New, efficient storage IO engine
New, consistently performing auto-tiering
New, high-performance erasure coding
The Problem is the Legacy Storage IO Stack
Other storage vendors continue to use a legacy storage IO stack that is now over three decades old. To this IO stack, they bolt on the feature or capability they present as their unique differentiator.
The legacy IO stack requires a different layer for each service or feature the storage system delivers. IO must traverse each of these layers as it works its way to physical media for storage. As the storage system applies each service to the inbound IO, each layer must update a separate metadata table. The layers and the multiple updates of each layer's metadata table add significant latency
Hardware Innovation Should Eliminate Storage Challenges
In the past, vendors hid these inefficiencies by using more powerful CPUs. Over the past decade, per-core CPU performance has been flat. Today, increasingly powerful processors yield only a slight performance improvement over the previous generation.
Innovation 1 - StorONE Rewrote the Storage IO Stack
StorONE is the first company in thirty years to completely rewrite the storage IO stack, collapsing it into a single-layered storage IO Engine capable of extracting the total value of the latest storage hardware innovations. The engine has a common metadata table across all services, enabling the application of features without adding latency.
This engine enables customers to meet performance demands with twelve NVMe flash drives sustaining over one million IOPS. It also enables customers to, with the same engine and within the same storage solution, meet their capacity demands. The StorONE Engine enables customers to safely use the highest density hard disk drives on the market without fear of long RAID rebuild times.
Innovation 2 - StorONE Rewrote Auto-Tiering
Legacy hybrid storage systems move data from flash to hard disk drives only after the flash tier is nearly full. The problem is when the IO burst occurs, which forces the movement of data from the flash tier to the hard disk tier; the new IO must wait for the flash tier to clear space by moving data to the much slower hard disk tier. The result is noticeably inconsistent performance, which leads to the rise of all-flash storage.
The StorONE Engine features a new and advanced auto-tiering algorithm that moves data to the hard disk tier when the solution is not busy with inbound writes, ensuring there is always available capacity on the flash tier for the next IO burst.
In addition, the auto-tiering algorithm benefits from the IO efficiency of the StorONE Engine. The combination of these efforts means the StorONE tiering algorithm can tier from SSD to HDD at 8GB/sec per VOLUME (write update), which is 30TB per hour or ~700TB per day.
The result is that organizations can safely enjoy the cost savings of hybrid storage without the performance inconsistencies of legacy systems.
Innovation 3 - StorONE Rewrote Erasure Coding
Traditional RAID is no longer an effective means of protection from drive failure. The increasing per drive density means that customers forced to use legacy RAID will either experience days of drive recovery times or be forced to use lower-capacity drives that are more expensive per TB. Slow rebuild times force customers to increase drive redundancy settings, which further increases the cost per TB and significantly impacts production performance.
Legacy erasure coding, which more effectively distributes parity, should be a viable alternative, but its historical lack of performance is unsuitable for production workloads. As a result, the only solutions to use erasure coding are object storage systems for the archive use case.
StorONE's third innovation is a complete rewrite of the erasure coding algorithm, delivering high-performance during a "normal state" and fast recovery from a "failed state." The result is StorONE's vRAID which provides data resiliency and performance suitable for even the most performance-demanding production workloads, no matter the drive redundancy setting.
vRAID also uses its high performance and the efficiency of the StorONE engine to deliver the fastest drive rebuilds in the industry today. vRAID can return a volume of 20TB hard disk drives to a fully protected state in less than three hours after a drive failure. Additionally, production performance is not impacted during the rebuild process. Competing solutions take three days or more! During these several days of the rebuild, the systems are susceptible to another drive failure and potentially complete total data loss.
vRAID protects data, not drives. A solution powered by the StorONE Engine simultaneously supports drives of different densities. vRAID allows those drives to mix with drives of different capacities within the same volume.
Customers can start with a solution comprising 7.68TB flash drives and 16TB hard drives. As the organization grows, it can later meet performance or capacity by adding 15.36TB flash drives and 20TB hard disks. Suppose several years later; they need to expand performance and capacity once again. In that case, they can replace the original 7.68TB flash and 16TB hard disk drives with, then available, 23TB and 40TB hard disk drives without data migration or additional software licensing fees, thanks to StorONE's "Scale-For-Free" pricing model.
Data Services Orchestration
The StorONE engine also provides a complete suite of enterprise data services, like snapshots (vSnap), replication (vReplicate), and encryption (vSecure). Another important innovation is the engine's ability to leverage the common metadata table to orchestrate these data services to interact with IO efficiently, enabling IT to use them almost limitlessly without impacting performance.
Virtual Storage Containers
The StorONE engine provides these services to virtual storage containers and maintains service orchestration across all the storage containers. Each storage container can have custom auto-tiering, vRAID, vSNAP, vReplicate, and vSecure policies. Yet all containers can share the same media. The storage engine can move these virtual storage containers between StorONE nodes, separate StorONE clusters, and multiple premises within the data center and to the cloud.
The StorONE Engine - Promises Kept
The StorONE Engine delivers on its promises:
