ST Mar-Apr 2021

TECHNOLOGY: ALL-FLASH NAS
LOW LATENCY, FAST ACCESS, HIGH
PERFORMANCE
FRANK LEE, SENIOR DIRECTOR OF PRODUCT PLANNING AT INFORTREND, EXPLAINS HOW TO GET THE
ULTIMATE PERFORMANCE GAINS FOR YOUR APPLICATIONS WITH ALL-FLASH NVME SCALE-OUT NAS
Increasing IT infrastructure performance is
one of the top benefits that every business
aims to obtain in order to eventually
receive higher ROI. Not only that, but also
given phenomenal growth rate of data,
sufficient capacity for its storage is extremely
important. To achieve these objectives,
enterprises increasingly prefer all-flash array
scale-out file NAS cluster systems, which
increase performance, capacity, and
throughput with the number of connected
nodes.
Today, for applications that are slowed
down by storage nodes' read/write speed,
you can gain both lightning-speed
performance and expandable capacity by
deploying Infortrend's EonStor CS scale-out
NAS cluster, including our new all-flash
array model EonStor CS 4014N which
supports the newest generation of NVMe
U.2 SSD and, thus, provides better
performance/price ratio than SAS/SATA
SSD. CS 4014N is a worthwhile investment:
its performance is impressive, and end users
will notice the difference immediately.
EonStor CS (CS) is a scale-out NAS
storage system that can expand capacity
and linearly increase performance by
adding more nodes. To satisfy extremely
high IOPS and throughput requirements,
Infortrend has developed this brand-new
model, the all-flash NVMe storage system
CS 4014N. We upgraded software to
extend SSD lifespan and notify users about
timely SSD replacement. To prevent systems
from data loss and ensure high availability
on node and disk levels, CS offers various
data protection mechanisms, such as RAID,
Erasure Code, and Replica. CS comes with
intuitive EonOne management software for
centralised management of multiple
systems, monitoring of performance and
capacity usage, and completion of all
related system configurations. Efficiently
storing and managing data, CS is suitable
for various enterprise applications. It can
flexibly increase the number of nodes as an
enterprise grows to meet higher demands.
Moreover, CS 4014N supports hybrid
configuration with HDD JBOD for deploying
a more cost-effective solution.
HIGHER PERFORMANCE
Each node CS 4014N is loaded with 14
SSDs (2U 14-bay form factor), so users do
not need as many SSDs to build a highperformance
cluster. Also, unlike HDD, SSD
storage has no moving parts, so it consumes
less power and does not encounter vibration
and thermal issues. SSDs are characterised
by low latency; CS 4014N provides 40%
performance improvement in comparison
with traditional HDD models. CS 4014N
supports the newest generation of NVMe
U.2 SSD, providing better performance/price
ratio than SAS/SATA SSD.
Since NVMe uses the PCIe interface to
directly communicate with the CPU without
an additional controller, instructions to
process I/O requests are faster, the I/O
latency is lower and IOPS higher than those
of SAS/SATA SSD. And because the PCIe
interface can provide higher bandwidth,
throughput is also higher. Each node can
reach up to 210K IOPS and Read/Write
speed of about 4.1GBps/3.1GBps. This
ensures much faster storage response time,
and users can immediately notice when
opening and browsing files, which now
happens more smoothly, without any lag.
BETTER SSD LIFETIME
Due to the nature of SSD operation, data
cannot be directly overwritten as it can in
hard drives: old data must be erased before
the location it occupied can be written
again, which increases Write Amplification
32 STORAGE Mar/Apr 2021
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