Today DriveScale announced what it is calling the market’s first Software Composable Infrastructure (SCI) for flash. This new innovation has been designed with cloud infrastructures in mind (specifically targeting modern applications such as NoSQL, Spark and Containers) and aims to make flash deployment more affordable and flexible. SCI for flash can help solve issues such as over-provisioning and scalability that affect cloud-native applications that are flash-based.
Today DriveScale announced what it is calling the market’s first Software Composable Infrastructure (SCI) for flash. This new innovation has been designed with cloud infrastructures in mind (specifically targeting modern applications such as NoSQL, Spark and Containers) and aims to make flash deployment more affordable and flexible. SCI for flash can help solve issues such as over-provisioning and scalability that affect cloud-native applications that are flash-based.
Flash has gone from accelerator/cache to a dominant form of storage both for end-client devices and in the data center. Flash offers several benefits in performance, density and power saving. While these benefits used to be an added bonus, several new applications rely on these benefits to function. Herein lies a problem for certain cloud-native applications. The currently made flash solutions form the large vendors come with unneeded features at higher costs or they are larger than needed for direct attached flash causing overprovisioning. Once IT admins install the flash they lack the flexibility to change the storage to compute ratio and have expensive media sitting idle.
The SCI for Flash software can be deployed on a variety of hardware systems (in particular DriveScale’s own Composable Flash System and Western Digital’s Ultrastar Serv24-HA). The software utilized 100Gb Ethernet to deliver performance of direct attached flash while offering the economics of pay-as-you-grow that some storage systems offer. This gives customers the performance they need without the added cost of under-utilization and over-provisioning. Admins will also have the flexibility to tune performance for certain applications without ever touching the flash.
Key benefits of DriveScale’s Software Composable Infrastructure for Flash include:
- Disaggregation of expensive flash storage allowing it to be shared by multiple applications
- Faster performance for applications dependent on flash storage, compared to flash storage arrays
- Lower TCO due to decoupling of flash storage and compute enabling accurate provisioning and independent scaling and life cycle management
- Ease of deployment driven by software configuration and DriveScale Management System
- Increase in reliability and reduction in downtime
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