Scaling storage with an army of ARM!

Mike Preston really seemed impressed by Igneous’ storage solution presented at Tech Field Day. They offer a really interesting solution to storage. Instead of have multiple drives beholden to a single powerful Xeon CPU, Igneous proposes their RatioPerfect system, one CPU for each drive! They do this with an Ethernet equipped ARM board attached to each drive, what Igneous calls “nanoservers”. These are then put together in a JBOD within a 4U rack. On top of that, Igneous proposes their solution as end-to-end, the customer hooks it up to the network and Igneous takes care of the rest of the management. Give the rest of the piece a look, Matt gets into a lot of detail about their management plane, which he thinks might be the key to future success.

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