Skyera Solid-State OS

Skyera, Inc. introduced its SEOS solid-state OS that optimizes the hardware, storage and data management capabilities of its Skyhawk enterprise storage system.

Unlike other flash storage software offerings, many of the SEOS performance features are integrated into the system hardware, eliminating overhead and increasing overall performance. Skyera’s vertically integrated hardware/software stack minimizes communication and workflow between the system, RAID and flash controllers, and eliminates the unnecessary APIs found between typical off the shelf storage OS layers.

"Skyera’s innovation – and thus the source of its differentiation – is that it is able to tightly integrate up and down the technology stack, which is different to typical flash implementations and results in improved overall system performance," said Mark Peters, senior analyst at Enterprise Storage Group. "The combination of hardware, storage and data management through an OS that is designed to bring out the best in each truly does make the sum greater than its parts."

SEOS comprises three distinct stack-aware technology management layers: solid-state hardware, storage, and data.

Solid-state hardware management
The SEOS solid-state hardware management layer is more than the typical flash translation layer. Features like hardware compression and de-duplication provide performance-critical functionality, while the proprietary RAID-SE offers better reliability than RAID-6 with three times less writes to the flash storage to minimize wear. Additional hardware management features include AES encryption, adaptive reads/writes, and flash physics manipulation.

Storage Management
Skyera has simplified storage management QoS administration, set up and maintenance with the introduction of three storage pools, each offering different SLAs. LUNs created in the Gold pool will support capacity ‘reserved’ for each LUN and I/O bandwidth up to Skyhawk’s physical capacity. Silver pool LUNs will support ‘reserved’ capacity with a ‘best-effort’ per-LUN I/O bandwidth. Bronze pool storage capacity and I/O bandwidth is provisioned on a ‘best-effort’ basis. Additionally, thin provisioning allows sufficient capacity for servers while reducing file system management on the host side. SEOS also supports dynamic LUN resizing, flash data recovery, wear-leveling, as well as performance and usage statistics.

Data Management
SEOS provides data management capabilities to satisfy the requirements of next-generation enterprise computing. By integrating data management tools into the stack, it ensures business-critical information remains as accessible and secure while maximizing application response times. SEOS data management features include no overhead instant snapshots, consistency groups, writeable clones, and data encryption at rest. In addition, a GUI and CLI interfaces are provided for both storage and data management.

"We meant it when we said that we were developing a mainstream enterprise solid-state storage solution from the ground up," said Radoslav Danilak, CEO and co-founder of Skyera. "A true solid-stage storage solution must be more than simply sticking Flash media and controllers in a box. We understand the expectations that companies today have for their storage systems and we plan on exceeding those expectations with Skyhawk. With the announcement of our SEOS solid-state OS, we have combined hardware, storage and data management into a truly revolutionary solution that provides the best performance, cost and power consumption attributes."

Skyera demonstrated Skyhawk and the SEOS solid-state OS at Storage Network World on October 17th and 18th in Santa Clara, CA.