CloudFest: Leil Storage Launches Storage Solution for Backup and Archive
Promoting HDD-based file storage for secondary storage
This is a Press Release edited by StorageNewsletter.com on March 20, 2023 at 2:02 pmLeil Storage, a start-up based in Tallinn, Estonia, launches its cutting-edge storage solution at the CloudFest conference in Germany on March 20, 2023. The company aims to revolutionize the storage market for backup and archive by offering purpose-built solutions at low cost, all while being greener than competing options.
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Founded by Aleksandr Ragel, CEO, and Dmitrii Liautov, CTO, Leil Storage has partnered with Western Digital to use Host-Managed Shingled Magnetic Recording (HM-SMR) drives and Power Disable HDD management. This enables the company to offer customers an environmentally friendly storage solution that has lower energy consumption, a lower cost per terabyte, and better performance compared to traditional legacy storage systems.
Leil Storage’s parent company, DIAWAY OÜ, founded by the same founders, has been on the market for 6 years and has earned the reputation of an innovative provider of highly scalable, technically, and financially optimized infrastructure solutions deployed by ISVs, MSPs and SPs in more than 40 countries worldwide.
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The Leil Storage solution is available as a private or public cloud service, and customers can choose between Leil Backup and Archive. They are optimized for storing large amounts of backup and archiving data, ensuring immutability and fast data retrieval, in compliance with the latest EU green agenda.
“Our goal is to provide purpose-built storage that does not do many things in a mediocre way at once, but the best option for backup and archive, which is greener than the competition, embraces cutting-edge technologies to protect investments, and scales out without scaling the bill,” said Aleksandr Ragel, CEO, Leil Storage.
Leil’s major differentiator is its ability to offer a purpose-built redundant and reliable storage solution at price starting from $4 per terabyte per month, all costs included. The company’s target market covers existing partners of all supported backup enablers with 1PB+ storage under management. The mission of the company is to provide data-intensive businesses in backup and archive field, with a superior option that benefits businesses in terms of technology and finances, enabling them to boost their profit margins and provide better terms to their customers, all the way staying greener.
Comments
Secondary storage is hot, no surprise here, as it sees lots of innovations fueled by several new start-ups attracting top VC money. And for a special reason, this is the place where data lands when you speak about protection and preservation, from short period of time with backups but also long cycle, sometimes very long, for archiving. And as many vendors claim, data is the new oil, so it represents a new eldorado.
In terms of market, there are several technologies and access methods - protocols and APIs - in this very competitive market: Flash and HDD-based solution with file and object storage product, de-dupe appliance or VTLs, of course tape, optical with some initiatives, cloud as a destination and others like decentralized/dispersed storage and future developments around holographic, glass and of course DNA storage. We even notice technologies coupling like S3-to-Tape with 8 vendors today as Fujifilm stopped Object Archive.
When such secondary storage solution is designed, 3 key attributes are important to consider: the energy consumption, the reduction of the size of the data stored and the durability often covered by erasure coding models.
DIAWAY is known for its expertise in integration. Its team has built the Acronis 700PB cloud infrastructure, and finally this solution is not a surprise as the business opportunity is huge. In addition, choosing an external business entity seems to be the right one.
Leil* has designed and developed a file storage appliance solution dedicated to secondary storage, in other words for backup and archive or cold data. This solution can even be categorize as an active one as it exposes an industry standard file sharing protocol in fact NFS.
Like Wasabi and Dropbox, the product relies on Western Digital SMR HDD drives in JBOD chassis and the design team has chosen a host-managed model as the acronym HM-SMR confirms. The first benefit is capacity with a gain of 18% as Leil told us and MAID approach reduces a significant energy reduction between 25 to 50%. As said above, the solution targets cold data and with MAID we can consider the solution as a cold storage one.
In addition to this, U.2 NVMs SSDs are coupled in the server for metadata purpose with a goal to maintain less than 1% of the total capacity stored. The host is running Ubuntu Linux, the solution doesn’t rely on ZFS but on a specific POSIX compatible file system specifically designed by the team, its code name is SaunaFS. As mentioned above, the access method exposed is NFS version 4 based on Ganesha with a specific file system abstraction layer on top of SaunaFS. SMB and S3 are not available today. Internally data are protected with Reed-Solomon 6+2 scheme for the moment and would be adjusted to larger stripe and more "parities" for large capacities. The MAID aspect and the erasure coding model is a bit orthogonal as multiple drives will be "touched" instead of one at a time so we imagine that the engineering team has developed some specific data placement algorithms.
Today one server is connected to one JBOD but the next phase is to augment the ratio and reach 1:4 in a scale-out mode with for instance 2 servers and 8 JBODs.
This image above shows that backup and archive flavors of the solution are offered at the same price. Why not but for archive and even more deep archive, tape continues to deliver an attractive TCO so may be some adjustment may be required. We understand that it will add a level of complexity in the sales phase and it is probably better to stay like this.
Pure Storage introduced recently FlashBlade//E model, a capacity oriented unstructured data server exposing NAS and S3 access methods. It is priced at $200/TB. So let’s do the math for 6PB, assimilated to 6,000TB to simplify the demonstration, the lowest price for Leil. Leil costs for 3 years $4.5 x 12mo. x 3y x 6,000TB = $972,000 or $170/TB. With Pure Storage, the difference is not far with just 17% above Leil for a full flash solution with data services and it reaches $1.2 million. So the difference at the end is $30/TB and for 6,000TB it means $180,000 which represents at least 1PB more storage on Leil if we choose to align the price on Pure’s proposal.
In terms of data services offered today by Leil, only snapshot is offered especially for the archive flavor of the solution, to provide the immutability. We’re a bit surprised to not see immutability in the backup offering as it is a good way to prevent ransomware attack. And we expect other features in next phases on the product.
Remember what Kalista is doing with SMR or Spectra Logic with ArcticBlue, a product that was finally stopped, or even before of course Copan Systems and Nexsan, both on the MAID side.
*The name Leil is derived from an ancient and sacred word in Estonian.
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