SanDisk today announced the availability of ZetaScale software, a hardware-agnostic solution designed to optimize enterprise applications for use with flash storage. ZetaScale provides access to flash storage for applications such as in-memory computing, analytics, and NoSQL databases which have not necessarily been architected to take advantage of flash memory. ZetaScale can be deployed within data centers without making other changes to the existing environment.
SanDisk today announced the availability of ZetaScale software, a hardware-agnostic solution designed to optimize enterprise applications for use with flash storage. ZetaScale provides access to flash storage for applications such as in-memory computing, analytics, and NoSQL databases which have not necessarily been architected to take advantage of flash memory. ZetaScale can be deployed within data centers without making other changes to the existing environment.
SanDisk argues that one of the key obstacles to making the most of currently-available flash technologies is that disk-based APIs dominate storage access across many common enterprise applications. Applications on HDD-based storage access tools don't make use of flash-specific APIs, while operating system and filesystem codebases often lack the parallelism needed to achieve the greatest potential throughput of flash memory. ZetaScale’s APIs address these drawbacks and are designed for a gamut of flash storage including SSDs, DIMMs, PCIe memory, and NVMe. ZetaScale also allows in-memory computing applications to expand their working dataset from DRAM into lower-cost flash.
In SanDisk benchmarks, a single-node Cassandra NoSQL database that achieved four times higher performance when used with SSDs (versus HDDs) was able to reach nine times higher performance when used in conjunction with ZetaScale. MongoDB applications using ZetaScale and SSDs with a single node reached more than three times greater performance versus utilizing SSDs alone. ZetaScale uses a key-value object store to streamline block access, and optimizes threading for concurrency and latency. The software also provides atomic operations, transactions, and snapshots.
SanDisk is offering a ZetaScale software development kit incorporating libraries and APIs for NoSQL and in-memory computing applications at no charge to qualified developers. One example of such an integration with ZetaScale is a newly-announced partnership between SanDisk and GigaSpaces Technologies on the availability of GigaSpaces XAP MemoryXtend.
XAP MemoryXtend provides persistent storage and the opportunity to run larger datasets for analytics via a hybrid architecture that spans DRAM and flash to support low latency data processing, linear scalability for both data and processing, and high availability across servers and data centers. XAP allows users to boost an application’s performance without changing the underlying hardware in order to achieve better availability and uptime and minimize license and hardware costs.
