A*Star DSI Showcases Enterprise NAS Built for SMR HDDs

A*STAR’s Storage Institute (DSI) will showcase its next generation Non-Volatile Memory systems and solutions at CeBIT 2014, Germany.

The DSI team will demonstrate a new range of advanced file system design, hardware controllers, emerging disk technologies and new programming paradigm targeted at Non-Volatile Memories (NVM) of the future that will enhance storage and processing efficiencies in data centres.
 
According to a recent report by Gartner (Matthew Brisse, Data Centre Storage, December 10, 2013), storage architectures must be robust and agile to meet the challenges of data centre modernization and cloud initiatives. The efficiency of businesses and service quality is highly dependent on the performance, scalability, reliability, security and cost of the underlying IT solutions.
 
The incorporation of NVM technologies into data centres will improve speed and scalability. DSI has developed an advanced file system and memory stacks (NVMOS Stacks) called the Database booster which has been tested against industry benchmarks (results of database performance are benchmarked against the Transaction Processing Performance Council standards) and demonstrated its ability in improving database performance by up to nine-fold as compared to traditional approaches. This system can be deployed in high speed NAS servers, high performance database servers, and used for real-time big data analysis, high speed cloud gateway and large-scale parallel storage systems such as Hadoop.

Other technologies on display include the Enterprise NAS, a high performance storage system built for the Shingled Magnetic Recording (SMR) drives that are 10 times more efficient than Facebook’s Flashcache system in terms of latency (results of throughput and latency performance are benchmarked against Facebook’s flashcache-3.x series). This was achieved with the use of DSI’s intelligent file caching technology.
 
Another advancement is DSI’s Hardware Security Accelerator (HSA), a PCIe-based hardware security encryption device that provides techniques which ensure the fastest encryption performance. At the same time, the device provides high level of security for symmetric encryption. The system’s encryption throughput performs up to seven times better than existing solutions from other hardware security players. HSA can be deployed as a block device encryption solution for enterprise NAS such as VMs, database and file servers.

Dr Pantelis Alexopoulos, executive director, DSI, said: “As data grow unabated, increasingly information storage systems need to go beyond current methods and approaches to bridge the gaps of today’s technologies to the future needs. I am pleased to report that DSI has been making research advancement in developing future data centre technologies and solutions to meet the challenges of social networking, big data and cloud computing.”