SanDisk Contributes to Open Source Community

SanDisk Corporation announced contributions to the open source Ceph object, block, and file storage platform that empower customers to take advantage of the benefits of flash.

Announcement follows the introduction of company’s new storage system InfiniFlash system, which is powered by Ceph open source software (OSS). With these contributions, SanDisk solidifies its commitment to being an open source contributor in order to deliver more open, easy-to-integrate and cost-effective solutions to customers.

According to Gartner, the open source storage market has matured substantially, making it more viable for an increasingly wider range of enterprise use cases (1). In fact, the research firm expects that by 2018 open source storage will gain 20% of overall storage market share, up from less than 1% in 2013 (2). SanDisk is helping drive that adoption by collaborating with other companies and the broader Linux community to move forward projects that are important to SanDisk and its customers.

“Open source software is a critical building block for many of the key markets in which we operate-from mobile and embedded, to enterprise, hyperscale and cloud,” said Nithya Ruff, director, SanDisk open source strategy office. “Since joining the Linux Foundation, SanDisk has built a sizable development team to enhance and optimize open source platforms to be ‘flash-intelligent,’ resulting in better performance, efficiencies, capacities and overall TCO for customers. SanDisk is one of the largest contributors to the Ceph software platform and will continue to work on further OSS innovations in partnership with the community.“

Over the last year, SanDisk has developed performance enhancements to the core Ceph software-defined storage solution, which is designed to present object, block, and file storage from a single distributed computer cluster. Ceph’s main goals are to be completely distributed without a single point of failure, scalable to the exabyte level, and highly available. SanDisk’s efforts have resulted in a 10x improvement for block reads and a 2x improvement in object read flows when Ceph is deployed on a flash storage system. (3) Additionally, SanDisk has helped optimize the Ceph client to make performance more consistent overall.

“SanDisk continues to be one of the many great examples of active participation within the Ceph community. It is exciting to watch their contributions grow and how they have inspired others to do the same,” said Patrick McGarry, Ceph community lead, Red Hat, Inc.

SanDisk’s InfiniFlash system is another example of the company’s OSS-based innovation. It is a dense, efficient flash storage system built on OSS standards, enabling open source stacks and custom-built software to integrate with the platform at the infrastructure and/or application layers. It also includes support for OpenStack cloud access protocols, which customers can utilize to deploy InfiniFlash as an infrastructure as a service platform-which users manage through a RESTful API, Swift, and the S3 API. InfiniFlash also utilizes a flash-intelligent Ceph platform to deliver enterprise data services, and includes development libraries and a software development kit that allow customers to optimize applications for use with the system in order to obtain better performance, efficiency and TCO.

In addition to OSS offerings, SanDisk contributes to several open source technology projects on the flash device side, hosted infrastructure side, and application side through various communities:

• The Android OS stack for mobile devices;
• The Linux kernel for memory management and file system to enable better performance with flash;
• The Android Real Path Storage library, an Apache licensed project maintained by SanDisk, that enables application developers to use external memory like SD cards in their Android applications;
• SCST, a GPL-licensed SCSI target software stack that is maintained by SanDisk developers; and
• Enterprise applications like Cassandra, MySQL, Hadoop and others to optimize them for use with SanDisk flash technology

1 – Market Guide for Open Source Storage, Gartner # G00271159, November 2014.
2 – 2014 Strategic Roadmap for Storage, Gartner #G00262455, March 2014
3 – Based on internal testing comparing Emperor to Hammer releases using vdbench and fio on a two node cluster (Dell R720 2.8GHz, 2xE5-2680, 64GB DRAM), krbd client systems on Dell R620 (2x E5-2680, 32GB DRAM), 40GbE interconnect