Amplidata AmpliStor Tested by DeepStorage.net

Amplidata unveiled the results of an independent performance test that shows that its scalable AmpliStor system delivers leading file throughput and maintains this performance even under severe loads.

These results were measured on a standard AmpliStor system with Intel
Xeon processors and SATA disk drives, for IT administrators who are
struggling to manage petabytes of unstructured data such as videos and
images with traditional storage, and who are striving to meet demanding
SLAs.

According to the report by Howard Marks, analyst, founder and chief scientist at DeepStorage.net,
scale out storage platform AmpliStor delivered up to 3GB/s of read and
write throughput in a single rack system a real-world configuration that
can be deployed by many customers at an affordable price point. The
system delivered nearly linear scaling as resources are added and
maintained performance throughout the test.

Such results clearly negate the traditional belief that object storage
systems fail to provide high performance, the report continues. Although
such a stance might have been warranted with first generation of object
storage systems on the market, today’s object storage systems have
evolved to address the storage of large volumes of objects (files),
where throughput and large scale durability are most important, rather
than small sub-file updates which have been the performance
characteristic of traditional NAS and SAN systems.

The AmpliStor test system was configured as it is delivered to
customers: with standard 3TB SATA disk drives, in a real world big data
configuration. While Amplidata supports optional SSD caching to enhance
the performance for repeatedly read content and in WAN environments, it
has chosen to perform the tests without caching to demonstrate the
marketed performance of its erasure coding BitSpread technology and its
performance optimised BitDynamics disk pool that provides on-line
verification, repair and maintenance with minimal overall system
performance impact.

The report details that AmpliStor delivers:

Performance Over 2.9GB/second
The test system include 24 Amplidata AS36
storage nodes and three AmpliStor controllers, each configured with
dual Intel E5-2650 processors, 64GB RAM and dual 10GbE network
interfaces. During the test, even with one single controller, the system
would routinely deliver performance of over 950MB/s across a range of
object sizes when multiple streams of data were running in parallel. In
addition, performance scaled near linearly until the network connecting
the controllers to the storage nodes was saturated.

Solid Throughput as Capacity Grows
Performance was also tested when the platform was loaded with large
volumes of data: this demonstrated results different from many other
storage systems which become slower as they start to fill up in
capacity, AmpliStor maintained its throughput even with over 85% of its
capacity filled and with the team writing new data 95% as fast as when
the system was first configured.

Performance Under Continued Load
Even when the system was 85% full and was repairing after shutting down
over 20% of the storage, it retained over 90% of its performance.
AmpliStor durability comes from the product’s BitSpread
patent-pending erasure coding technology that shrinks the occurrence of
data loss to less than one in 15 nines or 99.9999999999999% data
durability.

"We were quite impressed with Amplidata’s systems. The BitSpread
advanced erasure coding technology allowed us to read data even in the
event of four complete node failures, while performing better than other
object storage systems that use object replication for data protection," said Marks. "We
saw over 320MB/s single stream throughput when reading a single 1GB
object which is more than twice what such a system could deliver reading
the object from a single SATA drive. This is genuinely remarkable
performance."

"This new result certainly will be significant to any IT manager
charged with managing growing volumes of data without a linearly growing
budget," said independent blogger Hans De Leenheer who is familiar with AmpliStor. "Every
IT manager always is looking for increased performance. The main
difference between Amplidata and other object storage providers is that
Amplidata objects are not replicated but rather split into many small
chunks with an advanced security algorithm on top and then spread across
multiple disks and nodes. Besides a huge difference in overhead, the
main advantage of Amplidata’s approach is the dramatic increase in
throughput as apparently was quite in evidence."

"We are thrilled with these results because they support what we
already knew: that object storage doesn’t have to come with a compromise
on performance but that it can actually help organisations meet their
business objectives," said Tom Leyden, director of alliances and marketing at Amplidata. "Our
AmpliStor platform can help organisations from early on as it can
easily and quickly scale to meet growing needs. This enables them to
focus on designing the most effective data strategy rather that spend
time trying to cope with the ever-expanding amount of unstructured data."