eScanner Efficiency Sizing Tool From SolidFire

SolidFire, provider of SSD primary storage systems for cloud service providers, announced the availability of its eScanner Efficiency Sizing tool.  

Only available to SolidFire Early-Access Program customers, eScanner is a stand-alone command line utility capable of scanning a series of datasets and determining the capacity they can save by running those datasets on a SolidFire all-SSD storage system.

SolidFire’s eScanner removes the guesswork and time it takes to evaluate a dataset for duplicate data, compressibility, and thin provisioned space savings. The tool calculates the efficiencies gained within a SolidFire storage system by viewing volumes in a read only fashion and can scan block devices, file shares and trees, file lists, or VMFS datastores. All three of these technologies operate in real-time across the system and are capable of reducing capacity requirements by up to 70 percent.

"Talking with customers about SolidFire’s efficiency savings, the question inevitably arises around how much duplicate, compressible, and thin provisioned data exists within their current infrastructure," said Jay Prassl, vice president of sales and marketing at SolidFire. "When customers use eScanner, it provides them with efficiency data that is immediate and accurate. The more volumes scanned, the better the results, so we urge customers to run this tool as widely as possible."

The SolidFire scale-out storage architecture combines nodes in parallel over a 10 GB iSCSI Ethernet grid. A single system can scale to 100 nodes, 1 PB of capacity, and can host more than 100,000 tenant volumes. SolidFire Helix Data Protection eliminates the need for traditional RAID and isolates device failures without affecting performance. Virtualization technology enables cloud service providers to guarantee performance to each volume within the system, while a full REST-based API management layer enables automation of storage deployment, management, and reporting.