Dan Frith saw Excelero emerge from Stealth at Storage Field Day last year. Now the company has released a major update to their NVMe pooling software solution, NVMesh 2. This adds MeshConnect with TCP/IP and Fibre Channel support, MeshProtect with parity-based redundancy and mirroring, and MeshInspect for analytics. Dan sees this release smoothing out some of the rough edges of NVMesh 1, and making it a lot more attractive for enterprise customers.
Performance Analysis of SAS/SATA and NVMe SSDs
Chris Evans reviews a performance analysis paper, breaking down the performance gains of NVMe vs SATA NAND disks in databases. This includes a look at real world applications. It shows the benefit of the reduced complexity and overhead of NVMe compared to SATA on otherwise identical storage media. As Chris notes, the lower CPU utlization and wait times have led to companies like E8 Storage and Excelero to develop new storage architectures. And in the HCI space, Scale Computing and X-IO are finding new ways to use the compute.
Excelero NVMesh: lightning fast software-defined storage using commodity servers & NVMe drives
Jon Klaus came away from March’s Storage Field Day impressed with Excelero. The company came out of stealth at the event with their software defined block scale-out storage, NVMesh. This uses commodity servers and NVMe drives to deliver impressive performance. Jon gives a review of their overall architecture, their value proposition, and general impressions from their presentation.
Excelero’s NVMesh Magic
Excelero made a big splash with delegates from their debut at Storage Field Day in March. Rich Stroffolino has been mulling over their presentation and wrote up his thoughts. The company’s scale out storage architecture really seemed to excite Rich at the possibility, as it was able to achieve millions of IOPS on relatively cheap hardware. This combination, despite a dearth of data services, seemed to open up a lot of possibilities.
Open19 Brings a new build paradigm to HyperScale Buildouts
At Storage Field Day, Excelero gave some of their presentation time to Open19, an project from LinkedIn to standardize and speed data center deployment. Using a Lego like approach to speed plugin time, their technical specifications allow for delivery of a rack of components in as little as two hours, down from an estimated eight. While this approach might not fit data centers with a lot of legacy equipment, Matt seems to like it for new build outs. Make sure to check out Matt’s piece and their video from the event for more specifics.
Excelero achieves amazing stats at #SFD12
Matt Leib got to see Excelero’s debut at Storage Field Day last month. It’s a presentation that’s gotten a lot of the delegates excited, and Matt is certainly no exception. Their storage solution allows you to access disks in a storage array via their own RDDA, essentially NVME over Fabric. This makes the overhead for disk access negligible. Using commodity networking, this essentially allows the NVMe drives to effortlessly scale. The company demoed getting millions of Iops with minimal latency on hardware costing less than $15,000. Matt summed the presentation up by calling it “[a]stounding technology”.
What Next for the new Tier 0 Storage?
Chris Evans takes a look at the state of tier 0 storage, the custom hardware platforms that can deliver millions of IOPS. This was given a shake up recently with Dell EMC’s announcement that they aren’t moving forward with DSSD. Chris thinks the problem with these custom platforms is they can’t keep up with the rapid pace of flash storage development. He sees the future of tier 0 high performance storage with software defined solutions on commodity hardware, like what we’ve seen recently out of Excelero and E8 Storage.
Excelero NVMesh 1.1
Andrea Mauro might not have been at Storage Field Day earlier in March, but he wrote up his thoughts on Excelero’s launch presentation at the event. He’s intrigued by their NVMesh 1.1 product, which is a Software-Defined Block Storage solution, which offers low latency, scale-out performance on NVMe, and virtually 0% strain on the target CPU.
Hardware vs. software innovation – round 4
Ray Lucchesi considers Dell EMC’s decision to kill their DSSD NVMe storage device, and frames it in the continuing debate over hardware vs software innovation. Ray thinks it’s further evidence that we are in a software innovation cycle. As further evidence, recent releases by both Excelero and E8 Storage. Both are using commodity hardware to achieve high level performance, over 4 million IO/sec with ~120 to ~230µsec response times. It’s an interesting discussion, and Ray gives both sides their due.
Excelero – The Latest Software Defined Storage Startup
Chan Ekanayake wrote up a highly detailed piece about what he saw from Excelero, who came out of stealth at Storage Field Day last week. He starts out by outlining the state of non-flash storage in the enterprise, which he sees as both consolidating with fewer players and embracing NVMe as the focus for innovation in the near future. This leads into his dicussion of Excelero, who is coming out of the gate with a true scale-out SAN solution. Chan outlines how they are able to get a ton of IOPs our of relatively modest hardware, all while keeping 0% load on the target CPU. Chan was definitely impressed, stating Excelero is “probably one of the best if not the best solution of its kind available in the market right now”. For use cases and technical details of how it all works, make sure to check out the rest of Chan’s piece.
Excelero are doing what? For how much?
Dan Frith got a look at Excelero’s NVMesh at Storage Field Day last week. NVMesh is a virtual SAN specifically designed for the particular capabilities of NMVe drives. Dan was impressed by the speeds attainable by the solution, which scale almost linearly as additional drives are added. More impressively, this is done with no load on the target CPU, with data being interacted directly with drives via RDDA. He isn’t quite as sure if it’s ready for mass adoption yet, Excelero isn’t ready to wrap in a bunch of data services in version 1.1. But if speed is your primary concern, Dan thinks Excelero has a compelling offering.
Storage Field Day 12 Day 1 Recap and Day 2 Preview
Adam Bergh wrote up his thoughts after the first day of Storage Field Day, held last week in Silicon Valley. First up was Ryussi with their MoSMB solution. Adam found it an interesting SMB3 stack, ideally suited for scalable environments due to it’s lightweight and performance considerations. Starwind then presented, and Adam enjoyed hearing about their Cloud Gateway hardware, basically a hard drive without the drive to make cloud storage more addressable to your server. Elastifile presented about their distributed file system for block storage on Linux, using a very interesting consistency algorithm to keep performance from suffering. Finally, to finish the day, Excelero presented, launching their NVMesh solution. Adam was impressed when he saw 2.4 million IOPs at 0.2ms latency using relatively inexpensive hardware.
4.5M IO/sec@227µsec 4KB Read on 100GBE with 24 NVMe cards
Excelero Storage launched at Storage Field Day last week. Ray Lucchesi was in the audience, and got to see some interesting performance numbers from their NVMesh, their software defined block storage for Linux. Ray is definitely enthusiastic about what he saw, with good reason. Excelero showed off getting 4.5 million 4K random reads and 2.5 million 4K random writes on $13,000 worth of hardware, all with 0% target CPU usage. Check out the rest of Ray’s piece for the details.
