Seanodes Exanodes Software Tested With SSDs

Seanodes, the developer of Shared Internal Storage solutions, announced successful testing of its Exanodes software with Solid State Disk (SSD). Tests showed how Exanodes maximizes SSD performance and can overcome its known pitfalls such as inadequate capacity and complexity in networked storage. Combining SSD and Exanodes in a single solution results in a high-density, high-performance system suitable for environments and applications where SSDs were inefficient or unaffordable until now.

Exanodes’ Shared Internal Storage design maximizes the investment in SSD by aggregating the performance and capacity of all available disks embedded in Linux-based or ESX application servers, and presenting them as a shared storage pool accessible by any server in the infrastructure.

SSDs are difficult to aggregate and share between several servers, and their low capacity restricts their usage to applications with correspondingly low storage capacity requirements. These technical limitations force users to deploy them as stranded, standalone storage capacity and restrict their usage to only a few types of applications that benefit from their potential.

"’Traditional arrays have been designed to work efficiently with spinning disks and can’t give the promise of SSDs in terms of performance and scalability for example," said Frank Gana, Business Development Director at Seanodes. "This limits the usage and markets and as a consequence most people use them as Direct Attached Storage with all the usual known problems that come with DAS." "Thanks to Exanodes and its innovative design we can aggregate and use SSDs efficiently, opening new markets and applications to this technology."

Tests with Exanodes and entry-level SSDs showed outstanding performance. In an ESX environment of eight servers with one SSD drive per server, IOmeter benchmark results showed 36,000 I/O per second (random read 4K) for a system with an overall cost under $20K (including the cost of SSDs and Exanodes VM Edition).

Exanodes-enabled SSD implementations offer great promise in architectures requiring high levels of power and performance, such as a Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) can achieve unheard-of efficiency and economy. High-performance computing environments such as bioinformatics, which requires robust and sophisticated applications to create, index, organize, search, and analyze data benefit as well.