Zstor: Ultra-Low Latency NVMe Over Fabric Storage Array

Zstor GmbH, provider of high performance storage solutions for compute-intensive applications, announced its new storage array family based on the latest NVMe specification.

The new Zstor NV-Series, developed in collaboration with Mangstor Inc., uses Ethernet or IB Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA) networks to deliver the low latency benefits of the NVMe standard to a shared storage environment, enabling flash memory to be deployed centrally for access by many servers. This NVMe over Fabric solution combines a fast, efficient multicore compute platform with a powerful software storage stack to improve I/O performance and server storage scalability for high performance, latency-sensitive applications.

The NV-Series uses Mangstor, Inc.‘s NVMe SSDs that are driven by a 100-core DSP and algorithms optimized to deliver leading performance by efficiently managing and scheduling the individual NAND memory cells. This ability to run advanced device control logic on a highly efficient multicore DSP (rather than on the host server processors) provides a key advantage. This I/O offload architecture results in I/O performance with low and very consistent latency to attached application servers.

Write and read latencies start at 30/110μs and are consistently low from idle to millions of IO/s. With this mix of high bandwidth and low latency, the NV-Series is positioned to support a variety of compute-intensive applications. Using an innovative storage stack, which optimizes data movement from the RDMA network to the flash storage, servers have read and write access over RDMA to the array, resulting in similar latencies as if the servers were accessing local PCIe SSDs. The 2U model of the NV-Series delivers over three million random read IO/s and over 2.25 million random write IO/s (both tested at 4KB block sizes).

The performance of the NV-Series makes this storage array portfolio suited for such database applications as OLTP, OLAP, data mining and data warehousing, and for such HPC applications as oil and gas exploration, financial processing and analysis, pre- and post-video editing, online trading, virtualization, and science-related simulations.
 
“Customers that use the Zstor NV-Series storage array will benefit from an increase in the number of transactions per second processed, a reduction in time where there are no user actions, and a higher number of completed transactions,” said Helmut Kopel, CEO, Zstor. “Our NV-Series NVMe over Fabric array not only delivers four to six times higher performance to servers when compared to other all-flash arrays, but does so at very aggressive acquisition costs.”
 
The NV-Series is based on NVMe SSD technologies developed by Mangstor and includes a 100-core DSP that controls many logical devices efficiently through parallel programming. It also includes Mangstor’s TITAN software which tightly integrates Mangstor NVMe SSDs with a high performance, low latency RDMA network to deliver performance and extremely efficient use of x86 server capabilities. This combination of advanced technologies and innovation earned the Best of Show award at the 2015 Flash Memory Summit in the category of Most Innovative Flash Memory Technology.

To interoperate with leading OSs on attached application servers, the NV-Series comes with drivers for Windows and Linux OSs. The drivers provide a local block storage interface that enables servers to efficiently access storage in block mode or through the file system on the server, bypassing legacy iSCSI or FC storage I/O interfaces. This results in application servers that have high bandwidth and low latency SSDs with the cost and efficiency benefit of not having to populate every server with dedicated SSDs.

Now available, the NV-Series is offered in net capacities that range from 5.4TB up to 16.2TB and housed in a 2U rackmount chassis powered by a high compute multicore platform. Depending on the model, the NV-Series varies from two to four high-speed Ethernet or IB ports with up to 56Gb/s data transfer rate per port.

A limited 5-years hardware warranty is included.

Pricing starts at €39,950 excluding VAT.

Custom NVMe-based storage solutions are available from Zstor – special project pricing can be prepared by the Zstor sales team.