Evaluator Group Validates StorONE AFA Claim of 1 Million IO/s for $50,000

StorONE, Ic. is making available the results of Evaluator Group‘s testing of the its Intel Optane powered, AFA.next (AFA).

The report details the consulting firm’s testing of the company’s AFA solution and validates its claim as a dollar per IO/s. The system that was tested delivered over one million non-cached IO/s, and it is available on TRUprice website for less than $50,000.

AFA.next appliance

“We found StorONE’s AFA.next to be an impressive solution for enterprises looking to improve storage performance while decreasing latency for critical applications“, said Russ Fellows, senior partner, Evaluator Group. “The StorONE system intelligently uses Optane and QLC flash to provide consistently excellent application performance along with high capacity in a cost-effective and affordable storage array.“

Evaluator Group put AFAn through a series of testing to verify its performance on various workloads with block sizes ranging from 4K to 128K. Their testing measured both read and write IO/s, as well as latency. An 11-page report details all aspects of the testing and guides IT professionals to leverage this type of performance, as it is now affordable.

The AFAn uses Intel Optane as a storage tier, not a cache, enabling write-intensive workloads to benefit from the Optane technology. It also integrates QLC as a capacity tier, automatically moving inactive data from the Optane tier to the QLC tier to lower costs.

Gal Naor, co-founder and CEO, stated: “I am proud that an independent testing company specializing in storage performance confirms what StorONE has been claiming for years: the ability to achieve maximum per drive performance. In this case, from 4 Optane drives with a single node, we delivered more than one million IO/s! Our competitors need dozens of drives and numerous nodes to achieve a quarter of that.We began our mission of transparency by publishing prices, and now, we are sharing the performance results of our most entry-level system. I continue to call on all the storage field players to share their prices and performance results with the whole community.“

Some of key findings of report (based on testing performed on an entry-level $50,000 system) are:

• Customers can expect a linear scale of performance in more robust configurations.

• Over one million, non-cached read IO/s at sub-1ms for transactional (4KB)

• All tests had media failure protection active (StorONE’s vRAID)

• 32KB read: 223,182 I/O/s at 0.86ms latency.

• Less than $0.05 per IO/s.

• Nearly 7GB/s of read throughput for large block (128KB) workloads.

• No Caching. Performance. Guaranteed data integrity.

Database Storage with Future
Because of the expansion of in-server RAM, database servers are write-intensive to the storage tier. They need high IO/s write-performance at very low latencies. The entry-level AFAn system is for these database workloads, delivering hundreds of thousands of write IO/s at low latencies. However, because it leverages the StorONE Enterprise Storage Platform software, organizations can expand the use case beyond just database storage and provide storage for virtualization and file-based workloads.

“StorONE is taking a different approach to the storage market than most other storage vendors. Instead of placing one feature on the legacy storage engines, we created a new engine that can extract maximum performance from all the available resources with all features active. In some cases, like Intel Optane, that means delivering over one million IO/s from just a few drives; in other cases, it means ensuring that it protected a write-sensitive but cost-effective technology like QLC from early burnout. The AFAn embodies these efforts into a single solution that delivers unprecedented $ per IO/s,” said George Crump, CMO, StorONE.

Full copy of the report (registration required)