AmpliStor “Unbreakable” Storage by Start-Up Amplidata

Amplidata, in high available and scalable RAID replacement storage systems for public and private clouds, will demonstrate the latest version of its AmpliStor unbreakable storage system at VMWorld in San Francisco (August 30 – September 2). With live demonstrations, Amplidata will show how its technology provides a reliable storage grid for cloud computing and for VMware virtual infrastructures.

AmpliStor is an alternative to RAID which is designed from the ground up to build large-scale storage infrastructures. Rather than avoiding the weaknesses of RAID through workarounds or small enhancements, Amplidata designed a new concept of storage that guarantees ultimate availability across Zetabyte scale data sets at lower cost.

AmpliStor delivers on the three main requirements for Storage Clouds: availability, efficiency and scalability. The Amplidata BitSpread technology stores data 10,000 times more reliable than alternative RAID and replication based solutions. The BitSpread encoder requires 2-3 times less raw disk capacity while the Amplidata appliance with power management consumes up to 5 times less power than typical storage servers. As a result, AmpliStor reduces overall power cost by a factor 10. The solution scales easily by adding storage nodes without requiring manual reconfiguration.

Kristof De Spiegeleer, Chairman at Amplidata: "Data Center Managers are challenged by the task to build multi-petabyte storage infrastructures that meet the requirements of Cloud Computing. Most of them choose to build a system in-house using open source software components and commodity hardware. They will implement RAID and replication to protect against data loss, but due to growing disk sizes and the associated rebuild time and bit error issues, these technologies cannot guarantee data availability at all times. Amplidata took a different approach: by encoding and spreading the data over the disks as redundant blocks, AmpliStor does provide extremely high availability, while it saves a lot on power and disk space as well."

Spreading the Data
The Amplidata bitspread codec stores the data across a selection of different disks that are widely distributed across multiple storage nodes and locations to minimize the impact of a component failure. The bitlog client presents the AmpliStor system as a standard disk device, replacing your logical RAID device. Bitlog features thin provisioning, unlimited snapshots and zero-copy clones to optimize capacity usage. A bitdynamic client on each storage node automatically configures, verifies, optimizes and heals data in case of node additions or component failures without requiring operator intervention.

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