Nyriad promotes performance with HDD-based storage array

Nyriad joined the recent IT Press Tour and we had the opportunity to learn more about the company and the product strategy from Derek Dicker and his team.

The company has had several lives if I can say that, starting in New-Zealand in 2015 with the idea to build a new very efficient and resilient block storage system leveraging GPU for erasure coding intense computation and more recently as a US company, with a new team, at least for some of them, to promote an industrial flavor of this array. Today the firm has around 60 employees with approximately 70% in the engineering team. In terns of money raised, a total of $63 million has bee reached so clearly in this business climate and market segment, a new round will be needed.

The mission of the company is pretty clear wishing to revolutionize the foundation of storage. The team had designed, developed and built a new block storage array named UltraIO. In fact, Nyriad sells a finished array but in fact they resell the Western Digital Ultrastar Data102 coupled with their advanced controller, the final product is that UltraIO.

The value proposition is really to deliver a very efficient, cost effective and fast block storage for essentially secondary storage universal usage and for some specific primary storage use cases. The company targets HPC, M&E, Backup & Recovery and Active Archive. These all associate UltraIO with file system such as ThinkParQ BeeGFS or just disk file system exposed via NFS or SMB.

UltraIO is an active/passive dual HA controllers approach delivering 20GB/s of read and write at the same time with 1 controller. The x86 CPU is used for read and Nvidia GPU for write as the GPU processed the intensive erasure coding code after data lands on the NVDIMM. The performance is measured when the write touches this persistent memory and thus acks the client application.

Supporting 102 or 204 HDDs in a full configuration, the stripe unit is 2MB and thus the full write size, I should say the stripe width, equals 2 x 102 or 2 x 204 respectively 204MB or 408MB in these full configurations. When this full stripe is reached on the persistent layer, the NVDIMM mentioned above, GPU processes the EC and then distributes individual chunks, data and parities, to HDDs. The product supports from 3 to 20 parity drives for a maximum 92% efficient usage or 10 among 204 HDDs. The controllers offer 4 x 100Gbps ports exposing iSCSI, RoCE or InfiniBand. The max. raw capacity is 3.6PB and exists with 12 and 18TB.

We’ll see if the team will couple its controller with JBOF as their approach makes really sense. Now on the flash side, the competition is tough, which i snot the case with HDDs, still a key media to deliver a very low TCO.

The company sells UltraIO exclusively via the channel and hope to extend is European presence.