Efficiency
Some of StorOne’s best innovations have been implemented in the S1 system, resulting in a highly efficient storage system that can accommodate an ever growing need for storage. The S1 storage engine is built on patented algorithms that provide:
- A radical improvement of the auto-tiering mechanism.
- An evolutionary leap in the I/O management mechanism to ensure consistent high performance on a cost-effective hardware-agnostic system.
- StorONE has completely rewritten the RAID algorithm using its own version of erasure coding. StorONE vRAID provides the fastest rebuild time in the industry. For example, it can recover from a high-density drive (20TB+) failure in under three hours.
I/O stack
The I/O stack has been unified into a single-layered storage I/O engine, enabling it to fully leverage the latest advancements in storage hardware. By adopting a single-layered approach, the S1 engine can maintain a shared metadata table for all services, allowing the implementation of features without adding latency. As a result, the S1 engine can fulfill your growing performance demands, supporting up to twelve NVMe flash drives and sustaining over one million IOPS. With the S1 single-layer storage I/O engine technology, you can safely use the highest-density hard-disk drives on the market without fear of prolonged RAID rebuild times.
Tiering
Legacy hybrid storage systems transfer data from the faster flash
storage to the slower hard-disk storage only when the flash storage is
almost full. This can lead to delays during sudden spikes in
input and output (I/O) activities, as new I/O must wait for the flash
tier to clear space by moving data to the slower hard-disk tier,
resulting in inconsistent performance and affecting the overall
performance of the flash storage.
On the other hand, the S1 engine uses a new advanced auto-tiering
algorithm that moves data to the lower tier when the storage
capacity goes above a user-defined evacuation threshold and when the upper
tier is not busy with incoming writes. This ensures that there is
always sufficient space on the flash storage for sudden increases
in I/O activity.
Drive protection
Using legacy RAID for drive protection is no longer efficient given the increasing drive density.
In the past, legacy Erasure coding was believed to be an efficient solution for data protection, as it distributes parity more efficiently. However, its poor performance made it unsuitable for production workloads, limiting its use to object storage systems for archival purposes only.
StorONE has completely rewritten the erasure coding algorithm, resulting in vRAID technology. vRAID technology provides high performance during normal operations and quick recovery in case of failures. It offers data resiliency and performance ideal for demanding production workloads, regardless of the drive redundancy setting.
The S1 engine, powered by vRAID, provides the fastest drive rebuild time in the industry today. For example, it takes less than three hours to recover and rebuild a 20TB hard disk to a fully protected state without any impact on production performance. Unlike traditional solutions that protect drives, vRAID is designed to protect data, enabling the S1 engine to support drives of varying densities simultaneously. This offers great flexibility, as it allows for a mix of capacities within the same logical volume. With the vRAID solution, you can add or remove drive(s) while the system is running. Any drive, regardless of capacity, will be fully utilized. The S1 system also allows you to add or remove one drive at a time.
With StorONE’s “Scale-For-Free” pricing model, you can start with a solution that includes 7.68TB flash drives and 16TB hard disk drives, and upgrade to the latest 23TB and 40TB hard disk drives as your company grows, without incurring data migration costs or additional software licensing fees.
The S1 engine offers a complete suite of enterprise data and services. Services such as snapshots (vSnap), replication (vReplicate), and encryption (vSecure) are all included within the S1 system, allowing the S1 engine to maintain a common metadata table for orchestrating these data services. As a result, the S1 engine provides an efficient I/O interaction, allowing IT to use vSnap, vRelpicate, and vSecure almost limitlessly, without impacting performance.
Total utilization technology
The S1 total utilization technology provides you with a highly efficient engine that extracts the maximum potential from your hardware. For instance, in environments that require high capacity and sequential workload performance, SSD drives may not be necessary. In this case, the S1 engine can deliver high throughput using low-cost HDDs to maximize your ROI.