Start-Up Amplidata in Object Storage for Massive Unstructured Data

Amplidata unveiled the AmpliStor Optimized Object Storage (OOS) system at Storage Networking World in Santa Clara, California. AmpliStor is built to address the demand for petabyte- to exabyte-scale unstructured data storage for applications such as active archives, online media applications and storage clouds.

AmpliStor solves reliability and data integrity problems for high-density disk drives to enable unbreakable storage of large-scale data with new levels of storage efficiency and low-cost. The system enables a scalable, self-healing solution with virtually no limit on object sizes or on the number of objects that can be managed and stored. AmpliStor can incorporate today and tomorrow’s disk densities to enable low cost of ownership while future-proofing storage, thereby allowing businesses to address current storage needs while preparing for future requirements.

The growth of digital media assets in a range of industries, including entertainment, manufacturing, finance, retail and e-commerce, has created a need to store tens of petabytes of data and beyond on a storage medium with much lower cost than traditional storage systems, but with more convenience and better access characteristics than magnetic tape. According to industry analysts, the need for large-scale storage and archiving solutions has never been greater, with the Internet alone expected to grow 35-fold to tens of zettabytes in the next decade, while the number of skilled people available to manage this will remain largely flat. This will require scalable and reliable storage systems that also provide high levels of automation in storage management with low cost.

AmpliStor solves the high-reliability issues common with RAID on multi-terabyte disk drives by utilizing Amplidata’s BitSpread technology to increase reliability by factors of 100,000 or more and nearly eliminate the chance of data loss. The system provides policy-driven reliability that enables tolerance against any number of faults, while protecting data integrity and enabling access and availability to data even during multiple simultaneous disk or storage node failures or data center outages. Additionally, AmpliStor requires 50-70 percent less underlying storage capacity to deliver this reliability, resulting in a cost savings of up to 90 percent over existing competing solutions.

"Our new AS20 ‘green’ storage node provides an industry-leading storage density of 20TB per 1U at a new level of power-efficiency for disk-based storage," said Wim De Wispelaere, CEO of Amplidata. "With power consumption well under 7 Watts per terabyte, the AS20 will enable customers to build massive-scale archive storage systems with the access performance and convenience of disk, but with very low operational power, cooling and rack space costs closer to those of tape."

"The rapidly accelerating demand for data storage has surpassed the capabilities of RAID; its high usability cost has made it increasingly less affordable even as its data protection becomes less reliable, " said Marc Staimer, president and CDS of Dragon Slayer Consulting. "For IT organizations to stay ahead of their data storage demands, they will require an ultra-reliable, high-performance storage solution that self-manages, self-heals and scales for the billions of files or objects that need to be stored securely. Amplidata’s AmpliStor fills this void today."

AmpliStor provides native object interfaces to provide simple access to storage services, with a choice of http/REST, Python or C language APIs. This allows AmpliStor services to be used natively from web-based online applications, through a scriptable command line interface (CLI) or embedded in VAR and OEM applications.

AmpliStor provides plug-and-play storage node scalability, self-monitoring and healing technology on every storage node, through BitDynamics software. The BitDynamics agent executes out-of-band to perform continuous data integrity verification checks on the stored data, optimize stored data and automatically self-heal the system in background and in parallel to minimize impact on system performance while these tasks are running.

"Data storage challenges are increasing dramatically through the need to manage mountains of data, and to deliver it effectively to massive numbers of users," said Akash Zaraf, managing director and CEO of Zenith Infotech, Ltd. "AmpliStor provides us with the highest-levels of storage reliability, at a new level of efficiency that enables Zenith Infotech to deliver cost-effective solutions to our customers."

Features of AmpliStor

Unbreakable Storage

• System is nearly impervious to data loss, with reliability levels 100,000+ times higher than RAID
• Data integrity is continuously verified and assured through BitDynamics
• Supports any level of fault-tolerance through user-driven reliability policies
• Data is always protected and can be accessed even during multiple disk failures

Massively Scalable with Minimal Intervention

• Ability to scale seamlessly to support hundreds of petabytes of storage
• Supports billions of objects regardless of size
• Scales out performance to gigabytes-per-second
• Nearly zero human intervention required due to automated management and self-healing

Simple Object Access

• Easy-to-use native object interfaces,  including http/REST and Python
• Simple PUT,  GET,  DELETE style access to storage services

Cost-effective

• Does not require multiple data copies or replication for reliability,  reduces storage overhead and capex up to 70 percent
• Less than 7 Watts per terabyte enables 90 percent less power consumption than traditional disk storage systems
• Dense AS20 storage nodes with 20TB capacity in 1U rack-mount module

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