EasyCo LLC
unveils "ultra performance" storage solution for enterprise
servers.
EasyCo
announces the release of its "Managed Flash Technology"
storage solution for Linux servers. Dubbed "The 300,000 RPM
Disk Drive", MFT combines Flash memory based Solid State Drives
(SSDs) with a patent pending drive management layer which results
in disk performance that is 10 to 30 times faster than 15K RPM
disk drives when working with random IO operations.
Flash SSDs only solve the "read half" of the enterprise
performance equation. By delivering 2,000 to 7,000 4K read
IOPS (IOs Per Second), Flash SSDs randomly read 10 to 30
times faster than 15K SCSI drives. Unfortunately, the
random write performance of Flash SSDs is terrible. With
random write rates of only 13 to 50 IOPS, even applications
that do as few as 5% writes will spend 95% of their time
writing. This renders existing, unmanaged Flash SSDs
as unsuitable for most enterprise applications. This
is what SSD manufacturers refer to as the random write
problem of flash technology.
EasyCo
's Managed Flash Technology solves the Flash SSD random write
problem and delivers sustained random write performance that
is more than 100 times faster than the bare solid state
flash drive. As a result, random write speeds
increase from the 8 to 50 range to 3,000 to 10,000
IOPS. Without MFT, Flash SSDs are only marginally
faster than desktop hard disk drives. With MFT, Flash SSDs
are accelerated into a class by themselves.
EasyCo
's president, Sam Anderson, laughs about the first production
data tests. In our first live test, a prospect copied 218,000 of
their own records, deliberately sorted out of sequential order,
from one database file to another. Running on a 15K SCSI
drive, the file to file copy took over 45 minutes. In fact,
at one point, the client called to ask if the server had
hung (they were testing remotely). The same job on an MFT Flash
drive took only 2 minutes and 45 seconds, or 3,963 IOPS.
Chief Technical Officer Doug Dumitru commented:
Thats only half the story. The MFT technology can also be
used in situations with lots of file system RAM cache."
Many users load up a server with enough memory to store the
entire active database. This solves read performance
issues, but doesn't help applications that do a lot of
writes. MFT allows you to build a system using RAM to
eliminate all disk reads and push real-time writes to an ordinary
disk array at >100,000 random writes/sec. "Its like
having a non-volatile ramdisk without any special hardware. Even
small servers can benefit from this behavior. Many database
import operations end up 100% write-bottlenecked. A
database import job importing 2.2 million voter records for
a local political campaign went from 50 minutes with a
traditional hard disk to less than 3 minutes with
MFT. This shows how even small databases can benefit from
the fast write performance that MFT delivers.
EasyCo foresees a huge market for its MFT solution. Over
the years, processors and memory have grown exponentially faster
while disk drives have remained essentially the same. The
mechanics of rotating hard disks have only improved about
ten-fold in the last three decades in terms of random IO
performance, while CPUs are more than 5000 times as
fast. For many applications this means that random
disk IO is the dominant bottleneck in terms of application
performance. Even servers running nondisk intensive
applications are hitting the limits of disk drives.
Everything from departmental mail servers to web application
portals need random disk IO and hard disks just are not keeping
up.
The MFT solution addresses this issue on several fronts.
First, it allows servers to scale. With MFT, you can
support as much as 10 to 30 times the number of users or hits
with existing CPUs and RAM configurations. Doing this with
traditional hard disks would require arrays consisting of dozens
or even hundreds of drives. While hundred drive
arrays do exist, MFT lets you reach the same level of performance
with a handful of solid state disks occupying 1/50th the
space and consuming 1/500th the power. Second, MFT can put
the snap back into an application. The ultra low latency of
solid state drives directly translates into quicker screen
responses and better interactivity, even with busy servers.
The third front is the performance of single threaded
jobs. These batch jobs are stuck in a time warp, at
the performance levels of a decade ago with nowhere to go.
Adding drives does not help. With MFT running, the
morning picking ticket job finishes in 10 minutes instead
of 2 hours, and a rebuild of your data mining cube finishes
in hours instead of days. One customer reports that
their end-of-day job went from 10 hours and 57 minutes to
just 27 minutes after migrating to an entry-level MFT
server.
EasyCo
is now shipping Linux servers pre-configured with raid
protected Flash SSD MFT storage subsystems. Available
configurations range from 7 GB to over 600 GB of ultra
performance solid state storage. These configurations
deliver from 2,000 RW IOPS to over 50,000 RW IOPS depending
on drive model and quantity. In comparison, 15K SCSI
drives are about 200 IOPS per drive.
Windows solutions and storage appliance solutions should be
available by the fourth quarter
07. EasyCo is also seeking qualified Linux system
integrators, as well as server and storage appliance
manufacturers who wish to distribute the MFT solution with
their hardware.
More information about MFT is available at http://www.easyco.com
.