Vexata VX-OS 3.5 for All-NVMe Flash Storage Performance

Vexata, Inc. has introduced a version of its Vexata OS (VX-OS) software that delivers 5x-10x the performance of all flash arrays at a fraction of the cost, creating the storage for the cognitive computing era.

With VX-OS 3.5, organizations will be able to build a data management infrastructure to enable a storage economy of scale that transforms analytical workloads and makes cognitive computing initiatives possible. By matching its cut-through cache-less architecture with standards-based NVMe over Fabrics (NVMe-oF) support to achieve the low storage latencies, VX-OS 3.5 enables the company to extend its NVMe market leadership after being the first to bring the NVMe flash array in January 2017.

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Through its patented Active Data Architecture, the firm enables cut-through parallel access to all system SSDs, capable of multiple petabytes in a 6 rack unit chassis.

Unlike existing AFA architectures that rely on CPU and local DRAM memory for acceleration – which bottleneck modern NVMe flash SSDs – the company offers a cache-less architecture that unlocks these SSDs and takes advantage of the NVMe-oF latency improvements. This results are NVMe performance and economics.

With no infrastructure changes needed, VX-100 can plug in and provide a path to an all-NVMe-based storage ecosystem. Its bladed system approach enables the company’s customers to upgrade performance and capacity to scale up and scale out in the same physical rack space.

VX-100F array system

When customers install the VX-100F array in a data center, the performance impact is immediate, delivering broad-based performance improvements at low cost points. They will experience fast storage performance, and also experience efficiency on database and server operations.

With the VX-OS 3.5 release, customers achieve:

Economics

Higher capacity in a lower-cost footprint – 435TB of usable capacity in a 6U chassis today, and 1PB by the end of the year. In 2019, the company will support multiple petabytes of capacity with the advent of 32TB drives.
Each enterprise storage module (ESM) is a storage blade that represents more performance than an entire array for most AFA products on the market.
Higher capacity with 8TB drive support, increasing system density while lowering per-gigabyte costs.

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Transformative NVMe performance
The company has been shipping all-NVMe arrays since 2017 and it consistently resets the bar for this protocol’s performance in the industry.

With this release, VX-OS enables:

Latency improvements, including 35μs write latency and 90μs read latency.
Throughput increases from 70GBs to 80GBs to support large data ingest for analytics.
NVMe-oF for 40GBE and 32GB FC fabric interface.
A no-host footprint. Unlike other early implementations of NVMe-oF, the firm ensures no need for proprietary host software, which consumes host CPU cycles.

Operational simplicity

Snapshot management, providing increased compliance support, consistency groups, scheduling and application consistent snapshots.
Multi-chassis management, allowing customers to scale deployments to multiple the VX-100 chassis from a single management console.
Support for OpenStack and Docker Container for wider application.
Comprehensive set of NVMe options, supporting standard FC-attached NVMe, NVMe-oF via GbE using RoCE v2 and NVMe-oF via FC.

“Existing all flash storage arrays force the infrastructure choice to scale up or scale out, but cannot do both,” said Zahid Hussain, founder and CEO, Vexata. “But with Vexata’s Scalable NVMe Storage Arrays, customers have the greatest shared-storage flexibility to economically scale within the chassis and scale out across multiple chassis for analytics, machine learning and other high-performance workloads.“

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Resources:
Webinar: A New Era in storage for Machine Learning and AI Ecosystems
Blog: Democratizing High Performance Data

Read also:
Exclusive Interview With Zahid Hussain, CEO and Co-Founder, Vexata
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