Efficiency

StorONE has implemented many innovations in the S1 system, resulting in a highly efficient storage system that can accommodate an ever-growing need for storage. The S1 storage engine is built on patented algorithms that provide:

• A radical improvement of the auto-tiering mechanism.
• An evolutionary leap in the I/O management mechanism to ensure consistent high performance on a cost-effective hardware-agnostic system.
• A completely rewritten data protection algorithm using its own version of erasure coding. StorONE vRAID provides the fastest rebuild time in the industry. For example, it can recover from a high-density drive (20TB+) failure in under three hours.

I/O stack

The I/O stack has been unified into a single-layer storage I/O engine, enabling it to fully leverage the latest advancements in storage hardware. By adopting a single-layer approach, the S1 engine can maintain shared metadata for all services, facilitating the implementation of features without adding latency. As a result, the S1 engine can fulfill your growing performance demands, supporting modern NVMe flash drives and sustaining over one million IOPS. With the S1 single-layer storage I/O engine technology, you can safely use the highest-density hard-disk drives on the market without fear of prolonged RAID rebuild times.

Auto-tiering

Legacy hybrid storage systems transfer data from the faster flash storage to the slower hard-disk storage only when the flash storage is almost full. This can lead to delays during sudden spikes in I/O operations, as new I/O must wait for the flash tier to clear space by moving data to the slower hard-disk tier, resulting in inconsistent performance and affecting the overall performance of the flash storage. In contrast, the S1 engine uses a new advanced auto-tiering algorithm that moves data to the lower tier when the storage capacity goes above user-defined thresholds and when the upper tier is not busy with incoming writes. This ensures that there is always sufficient space on the flash storage for sudden increases in I/O activity.

Drive protection

Using legacy RAID for drive protection is no longer efficient given the increasing drive density. In the past, legacy erasure coding was believed to be an efficient solution for data protection, as it distributes parity more efficiently. However, its poor performance made it unsuitable for production workloads, limiting its use to object storage systems for archival purposes, and more recently in distributed filesystems.

StorONE has completely rewritten the erasure coding algorithm, resulting in vRAID technology. vRAID technology provides high performance during normal operations and quick recovery in case of failures. It offers data resiliency and performance ideal for demanding production workloads, regardless of the drive redundancy configuration.

The S1 engine, powered by vRAID, provides the fastest drive rebuild time in the industry today. For example, it can take less than three hours to recover and rebuild a 20TB hard disk to a fully protected state with little to no impact on production performance. Unlike traditional solutions that protect drives, vRAID is designed to protect data, enabling the S1 engine to support drives of varying capacities simultaneously. This offers great flexibility, as it allows for a mix of drive capacities within the same logical volume. With the vRAID solution, you can add drives while the system is running. Any drive, regardless of capacity, can be fully utilized. If necessary, you can also remove drives while the system is running (one at a time, until each rebuild is complete).

With StorONE's "Scale-For-Free" pricing model, you can start with a solution that includes 7.68TB flash drives and 16TB hard disk drives, and upgrade to the latest 23TB and 40TB hard disk drives as your data grows, without incurring data migration costs or additional software licensing fees.

The S1 engine offers a complete suite of enterprise data and services. Services such as snapshots (vSnap), replication (vReplicate), and encryption (vSecure) are all included within the S1 system, allowing the S1 engine to maintain common metadata orchestrating these data services. As a result, the S1 engine provides an efficient I/O interaction, allowing IT to use vSnap, vReplicate, and vSecure almost limitlessly, with minimal performance impact.

Total utilization technology

The S1 total utilization technology provides you with a highly efficient engine that extracts the maximum potential from your hardware. For instance, in environments that require high capacity and sequential workload performance, SSD drives might not be necessary. In this case, the S1 engine can deliver high throughput using low-cost HDDs to maximize your ROI.