NexGen Storage has just announced their new n5 virtual machine storage systems that use SSDs and hard drives, which applies granular quality of service (QoS) levels levels to provision performance across all tiers. They claim that these new storage systems will make storage setup easier for virtualized servers that run business- and mission-critical applications.
NexGen Storage has just announced their new n5 virtual machine storage systems that use SSDs and hard drives, which applies granular quality of service (QoS) levels levels to provision performance across all tiers. They claim that these new storage systems will make storage setup easier for virtualized servers that run business- and mission-critical applications.
The n5 operating system enables performance QoS, allowing customers to provision performance the same way they would provision capacity. Their Dynamic Data Placement functionality migrates data across volumes to maintain QoS for virtual machine storage. In addition, it uses a staged data deduplication process called Phased Data Reduction.
The OS also distributes blocks in every volume among three storage tiers: RAM, PCIe SSDs, and hard disks. Customers can also designate a quality-of-service performance level to each volume (eg. mission-critical, business-critical, and non-critical apps).
The n5 system consists of the following specifications:
- Two 640GB PCIe solid-state storage cards from Fusion-io
- 48GB of RAM and
- 32TB of SAS drives
- 3U iSCSI SAN unit consists of active-active storage processors and either a 16 Gigabit Ethernet or four 10 Gigabit Ethernet ports
- Recommended price of $88,000
- Optional 640GB SSD performance packs and 32TB SAS capacity packs
Deduplication occurs in two phases to avoid impacting performance, Chris McCall, NexGen’s vice president of marketing, explained. Pattern matching on 4 KB blocks happens in the first stage. This is when the system assigns a key to a data pattern without actually storing it and the data can be regenerated when requested. In the second phase, a full comparison of the data in the RAM or SSD occurs. After that, the QoS engine does a full comparison of data while blocks are migrated between storage tiers.
