The company is a UK-based enterprise designing, developing and building a Ceph-based storage appliance. This system named HyperDrive uses ARM CPUs for tasks specific needs with a low power consumption in mind.
Phil Straw, CEO of SoftIron, insisted on the next phase of IT infrastructure with several fundamental drivers where the data is considered as the most precious asset and the processing becoming disposable and by nature ephemeral.
Hybrid and Edge create a pressure on Data Center design with the necessity to move data where they will be used. Again it illustrates the data gravity effect and the bigger the data volume is the bigger the difficulty to centrally process them. And of course power consumption and energy optimization become key at scale.
Four key challenges are defined and addressed by SoftIron, let me summarize them:
- As an on-prem vendor, SoftIron preaches on-prem or hybrid model but the reality is not a vendor centric-view, it will pushed by users. We understand that vendors goal is to limit on-prem erosion. Personally I don't know and I'm not sure hybrid is better . What are the criteria to judge this?
- The second question is about open source software (OSS) vs. proprietary and for sureOSS drives DC and cloud [r]evolution. SoftIron claimed that OSS plus specific hardware can deliver better value than proprietary approaches.
- Hardware has a key role to play even with SDS. Good point it confirms a use case model.
- Security in the source of chosen components validating here the choice by SoftIron to manufacture its own appliance.
The key message here is that SoftIron designs system and not just assemble components like many server vendors like cars manufacturers.
Three products are offered:
- HyperDrive is a Ceph-based appliance coupled with a management tool named HYperDrive Storage Manager and HyperDrive Router as a gateway for specific access needs,
- HyperSwitch is a wire-speed network switch purpose built for hyperscale and enterprise storage based on SONiC,
- HyperCast is a high density concurrent transcoding device based on FFmpeg.
The design shows 14 drives in 1U attached to each SoC and connected via SATA 3.IT confirms the role of tier 2 of Ceph. NVMe is on the roadmap and should arrive soon contributing to boost I/O performance for the system. The cooling of the server is paramount as it contributes to the TCO, imagine servers up and running for 5 years... The team insisted on the sourcing of components chosen for their appliance which is not the case for other server vendors. The company has developed 6 models from full HDDs with 120TB to hybrid with 168TB to full SSDs with 112TB. In addition to these nodes, you add one or multiple Routers to expose various access protocols such iSCSI, SMB, NFS, Custom, CephFS and a the Storage Manager to control the Ceph environment.
An independent firm StackHPC demonstrated performance and compares results with a reference architecture. To summarize, the HyperDrive delivers 817MB/s in write sequential non cached which is 26% better than the reference configuration and +44% at 3300MB/s in read random cached access. The test was pretty complete and we invite the reader to check the entire report available here.
An independent firm StackHPC demonstrated performance and compares results with a reference architecture. To summarize, the HyperDrive delivers 817MB/s in write sequential non cached which is 26% better than the reference configuration and +44% at 3300MB/s in read random cached access. The test was pretty complete and we invite the reader to check the entire report available here.
SoftIron is a unique approach in storage coupling Ceph with a specific optimized hardware they design and build to deliver a ready to use hyperscale appliance. Adoption has started and seems to accelerate...
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