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: "That's 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. "It's 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 non disk 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. End-user pricing starts at
under 2,500 US Dollars and extends upwards to over $50,000
depending on the configuration. Excellent reseller
discounts are available.
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
.