Storbyte Solves Garbage Collection, Write-Cliff, Write Amplification, Over Provisioning Solid-State Storage Problem

Storbyte announced it has solved the solid-state storage ‘write cliff’ problem without the overprovisioning or complex workarounds required by flash array vendors.

Write-cliff conditions are all too familiar to flash storage manufacturers, as is the common performance and endurance deficiencies it causes in all SSDs. When the cells/pages within a drive begin to reach 40% to 50% capacity, the users will begin to recognize a decrease in performance. The performance of flash memory will decrease due to an internal process called garbage collection, a direct result of managing partially populated pages within the flash memory blocks, identifying and redistributing data from partially populated pages. To mitigate the problem, AFA manufacturers typically overprovision their products between 30 to 40% or more, incurring additional cost for the end user.

The company has addressed this problem at the source, utilizing patented mathematics and algorithms inside its ECO•FLASH drive. This process referred to as it’s Hydra Distributed Resource Utilization provides the ability to utilize commodity-based flash memory modules and its patented ECO•FLASH technology to distribute the workload at a true cost correct price point. The firm’s integrated circuit solution is combined with parallel write algorithms to distribute the data across 16 independent SSD memory modules. This parallel data striping model provides a 16x performance increase compared to a single target while presenting to the host system a single flash storage device. Based on the Hydra’s performance advantage the ECO•FLASH architecture virtualizes and eliminates the ‘Partial Page File’ problem virtually eliminating the garbage collection condition associated with all conventional flash memory. This greatly reduces the P/E cycles, Program/Erase cycles extending the life of the memory beyond conventional flash memory models.

“In the right use cases solid-state arrays are much more responsive than their spinning disk equivalents. However, in write intensive environments the performance of these system over time can degrade between 20% to 30%.  Most users will validate initial performance of their systems but many users do not audit performance as their systems fill up. In environments that demand performance this is unacceptable,” said Diamond Lauffin, chief evangelist officer, Storbyte. “Systems based on the ECO•FLASH technology will provide a key cost benefit by eliminating the garbage collection condition and overhead with no overprovisioning providing 100% performance at a net 100% capacity. Compared to alternative methods that require out of band, abstracted software layers and their associated additional hardware costs ECO•FLASH users get the benefit of an inline, real-time on board solution and the system/drive performance they see on day one will be the same performance for the life of their system guaranteed.“

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