… With Software Using Application Hosts’ Local Disks to Realize Virtual SAN

ScaleIO, Inc., in software-defined storage, emerged from stealth mode and announced the release of its ECS v1.1 scale-out storage software.

With ECS v1.0 already deployed by enterprises and managed service providers, such as SAP AG, Check Point Software Technologies Ltd., Aer Lingus Goup Plc., OCF Plc accounts, and Colt, ScaleIO brings operational flexibility and cost savings to high-performance databases, virtual servers, end-user computing, and HPC.

It eliminates the dependence on complex, expensive external SAN storage and fabric by presenting business application servers’ local disks as a high-performance, shared virtual SAN. ECS provides scalability and enterprise-grade resilience while also reducing storage costs by more than 80%, delivering a direct savings of over 28% on an organization’s total IT budget.

"As enterprises consolidate into mega-data centers and SMEs move to cloud and hosting infrastructures, data centers are rapidly expanding to many thousands of servers. As a result, data center operators face constantly increasing levels of complexity and costs," explained Boaz Palgi, CEO of ScaleIO. "ECS helps organizations manage these challenges by providing a scale-out storage solution that was designed for hyper-scalability, high performance, unprecedented elasticity, and low TCO. ECS makes storage as inconspicuous as CPU and RAM. Running seamlessly alongside business applications, ECS enables data centers to be built wall to wall from commodity servers only."

With ECS, any administrator can add, move, or remove servers and capacity on demand during I/O operations. The software responds automatically to any infrastructure change and rebalances data accordingly across the grid. It helps ensure high level of enterprise-grade resilience by deploying advanced clustering algorithms whose distributed rebuild capabilities achieve the quickest handling of failures while maintaining storage performance.

Breaking traditional barriers of storage scalability, ECS scales out to hundreds and thousands of nodes. Performance scales linearly with the number of application servers and disks. Deploying ECS in both greenfield and existing data center environments takes only a few minutes.

ECS can be managed from both a command-line interface (CLI) and a graphical user interface (GUI). ECS v1.1 natively supports all the leading Linux distributions and hypervisors; works agnostically with any SSD or HDD, regardless of type, model, or speed; and runs on x86, ARM, and other chipsets – giving organizations complete freedom of choice. Additional functionality includes encryption at rest and QoS of performance.

"Software-defined storage enables IT organizations to break out of the traditional SAN model that requires a staff of minions to perform mundane storage tasks," commented Matthew Brisse, storage research director at Gartner. "Software-defined storage enables the promise of storage elasticity to match storage needs for traditional, virtual, and service-oriented cloud strategies in response to the ever-changing business requirements found in most IT organizations."

"ScaleIO offers an innovative solution enabling customers to utilize capacity on hundreds of compute nodes and to aggregate that capacity into a single shared LUN," said Julian Fielden, MD, OCF. "OCF has deployed and tested ScaleIO ECS on a cluster with several hundred nodes in a large customer’s HPC environment. The software made previously unused capacity available to the business applications and to a distributed file system while demonstrating impressive performance and resilience."

ECS has been deployed in other environments, including development and testing, virtual desktop infrastructures, high-performance databases, private clouds, and environments competing with Amazon EBS.

ScaleIO ECS v1.1 is available.

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