Cleversafe: New Tiered Storage and Caching Capabilities

Cleversafe Inc. expanded its capabilities for a range of storage applications and workloads by introducing two new Slicestor models and a Cache Vault feature based on the company’s dispersed object-storage technology.

The storage of objects – which are data but not organized in a hierarchy as are files – helps automate and streamline storage.

With the new capabilities, customers can store huge amounts of data, such as an exabyte, cost-effectively, while delivering more objects per second, or OPS, a key element of performance.

Such capabilities are used, for instance, by photo sharing web sites that store millions of new customer photos each day and healthcare systems that store billions of images and video records nationwide, among others.

Customers with mixed workloads, where some data is accessed much more frequently and higher performance is critical, will be able to realize up to a 10-fold increase in objects/second performance with the new Slicestor 4100 and 2440 models. In addition, the new Cache Vault feature delivers even higher OPS for smaller objects in order to access information derived from original source material more quickly.

“Our mission always has been to solve the most challenging problems in today’s enterprise environment surrounding storage,” said Russ Kennedy, Cleversafe SVP of product strategy and customer solutions.

“When we consider the full scope of data challenges, we address what our customers do every day with their information, which is to access, analyze, and share it, as well as securely and reliably archive and backup data,” said Kennedy. “Our fresh advances in software along with our new hardware offerings meet many more application requirements for scale along with the performance that our customers require.”

Here is further information about Cleversafe’s newest hardware products and the release of ClevOS software with added support for a Cache Vault feature:

• The Slicestor 4100 model delivers 10 times the OPS of the existing Slicestor 1440 model using SSD technology in a 1U form factor. Complementing the 1440 model, it allows customers with mixed workloads to extend the benefits of Cleversafe’s Dispersed Storage Network (dsNet) technology to that workload that requires very high OPS on smaller objects. A single dsNet now can deliver high OPS for smaller objects efficiently along with high throughput for larger objects.
• The Slicestor 2440 model delivers five times the throughput and four times the OPS performance of the Slicestor 1440 with the same storage density (48 times 4TB drives in 4U). The 2440’s higher performance expands the sweet spot of dsNet solution beyond applications like active archive and backup where data is written once and read infrequently to applications that require more frequent access to or analysis of stored data.
• The Cache Vault‘s introduction is part of the company’s latest software release, ClevOS 3.1. It enables customers to deploy higher OPS Cache Vaults alongside standard storage vaults in the same physical storage pool. This generates faster access to certain objects, such as thumbnail images associated with full-resolution pictures. Larger-size original source objects are stored in a standard vault elsewhere on the dsNet system. In comparison, a Cache Vault enables roughly 10 times the objects/second performance on the same hardware compared to a standard dsNet vault.

“Object storage platforms of today need to prove they can meet the performance requirements of a variety of workloads and applications in order to appeal to a more diverse set of use cases beyond archiving,” said Ashish Nadkarni, research director at IDC. “With the introduction of its new Slicestor models and Cache Vault feature, Cleversafe has greatly expanded its ability to deliver the scalability and efficiency benefits of object storage across a wide range of customer use cases.”