Start-Up’s Profile: MaxiScale

Born in 2007 and based in Sunnyvale, CA, MaxiScale, Inc.,  emerged from stealth mode to launch its first product, the FLEX Software Platform.

Funding
The company has raised $17.25 million from New Enterprise Associates, El Dorado Ventures, and Silicon Valley Bank.

Executives

• Gianluca Rattazzi, co-founder and CEO, was also at the origin of several firms including Meridian Data, Parallan and BlueArc.
• Francisco Lacrapa, CTO and other founder, served in engineering team at Attune Systems (he is member of its advisory board), Sanera Systems, Quantum’s Snap division, as well as BlueArc.
• Gary Orenstein, VP of marketing, is well known in the storage industry, as he worked formerly for Gear6, Compellent, and co-founded Nishan Systems, acquired by McData/Brocade. He is the author of IP Storage Networking: Straight in the Core.

Technology: Peer Set

The patent-pending technology delivers linearly scaling performance with each additional cluster node. A Peer Set instance  – a group of several HDDs – contains multiple members, the number of which is user-selectable based on desired bandwidth and replication characteristics. Each member consists of a low-cost SATA hard drive on a separate physical server node. All file data and metadata within a Peer Set is replicated to, and load balanced across, all members. It’s not RAID, but another way to protect data. The MaxiScale Flex platform can aggregate up to 65,000 Peer Set instances into a single namespace, representing hundreds of petabytes. The MaxiScale Small File Repository optimizes web content file serving with low latency access directly from disk. The company said that this platform serves files directly from disk up to ten times faster than traditional systems. It runs on cheap X86 servers with Windows, Linux and Unix. Pricing begin at $6,000 for four nodes storing 32TB.

Applications

• Serving billions of thumbnails and photos
• Single namespace storage consolidation
• Origin serving direct from disk
• Web logging and analytics
• Migrating database to key value store

Markets

• Mobile and online advertising (AdMob is a customer)
• Social networks
• Content delivery networks
• Streaming media services
• Hosted services

Our opinion
Some other storage companies had recently this type of idea that can help to deal with millions of small files for Web applications. This advanced technology for specific huge Internet applications can be compared to Google File System and IBM General Parallel File System, or to methods of storing used for NAS by NetApp (Data Ontap GX), PolyServe, Ibrix/HP and Isilon.