Company's Profile: SANS Digital Technology

Company
SANS Digital Technology, Inc.

HQs
City of Industry, CA

Date founded
2005

Financial funding
Privately funded

Revenue
As a private company, financial numbers are not available, but estimated deal impact over $100 million.

Main executives
Grandy Chen president since 2007, is a computer hardware industry veteran, holding sales VP, GM and president for US branch office for various hardware manufacturers, such as FIC (First International Computer, Inc.), VIA Technologies Inc., Gigabyte Technology Co., Ltd, and Albatron Technology.

Stanley Chan serves as product development, responsible for product expansion and long-term technical direction for storage product. He first joins the company after earning BS in Computer Science in 2005. With more than 20 years of information technology and hardware experience, he helped to develop and implement storage solutions for a range of industries.

Bo Zhang co-founder for SCALA, has been working in storage solutions since 2008, helping company to develop proprietary file system and raising capital investments. He worked as VP of business development at IDG China between 2006 and June 2008. Prior to that, he worked at Sina.com and was tGM for Sina.com North America.

Number of employees
100

Technology
High performance scale-out storage solution with proprietary file system and software suite.

Products description
SCALA Storage, a product line of SANS Digital, is designed for massively parallel high-performance IO workloads. This storage solution eliminates controllers in legacy SAN or NAS solutions. Without throughput bottleneck and always saturate hardware performance, it allows simultaneous ingest and egress of high-rate HPC data. Reliable file-based network RAID (N+M erasure coding), data re-build time is 1/5 vs. traditional RAID, using two storage nodes.

By adding storage nodes, the system can expand to hundreds of petabytes without any interruption of work operations. Aggregated throughput increases linearly when adding storage nodes, with system speeds up to TB/s, capable to provide each front-end computing node with sustainable speeds from megabytes to tens of gigabytes per second.

Automatic system detection and self-healing making data highly available and protected in every component of the storage cluster. Fault-tolerant solution that shields applications and users from failed hardware, network partitions and disk corruptions. Worry-free and low-touch operations, it system can handle most hardware failures automatically and enable maintenance or updates without downtime nor the need to re-boot.

MetaData Controller(MDS) Hardware Spec

Scala solutions use a minimum of 2 (up to 128) MDS depending on the number of files in the storage system. It stores critical information about the data store in iStore. Metadata is distributed across multiple metadata servers to provide high redundancy.

iStore Node Hardware Spec

iStore stores data and provides I/O services directly to application servers. Data is replicated and distributed across multiple iStores to maintain high availability and performance. There is a minimum of 3 iStores with no limit on the maximum amount.

Data Network Switches Hardare Spec

Network Switch provides interconnections between MDS iStore. This network switch also connects to application servers performing MetaData updates and actual data transfers. It uses an industry standard 10GbE interconnection, in either 10G Base-T Ethernet or SFP+ in 24 ports or 48 ports. Infiniband is also available.

Key functions of the file system are:

Virtualizes storage resources across all available servers into a unified storage pool and provides a single global namespace
Controls metadata servers to provide support on data dispatch, including metadata-intensive applications and a large amount of concurrent file access
Manages the system’s automated self-monitoring mechanism, consistently checking system condition and performance level
Provides system maintenance and upgrade

Client-side software offers compact/MB-sizes drivers supporting various Windows, Linux, Unix and Mac systems, including:

Linux: Redhat, CentOS, Suse, Opensuse, Ubuntu, Gentoo, Fedora Core
Windows: Server 2000, Server 2003, XP, 2008, Win7, Win8, Server 2012, Win10, Server 2016
macOS X: 10.6 and up, included 10.14

Management-side software provides a centralized management GUI to configure, manage and monitor the storage systems with a single-page log-on. One part-time technical staff can manage petabytes of storage. The web-based GUI interface provides a dashboard for cluster monitoring and a smart alert system. Daily performance and statistics are recorded and monitored in the dashboard. Information about the system health can be exported to different formats for review.

When a failure occurs, the systems will go into a self-healing process automatically and send an alert to administrators at the same time. Usually the failed hardware does not need to be replaced immediately, but can be deferred to a later time which is more convenient to the administrators.

Released date
July, 2007

Distributors and OEMs
Synnex, Ingram Micros, ASI, MaLabs, Atipa, OEMs under NDA

Number of customers
200

Main customers
Dante Security, Genetron Health, University of Florida, PetroChina, China Network Television, Renren.com, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Xi’an Jiaotong University, Peking University, and Qsinghua University

Applications
Data-intensive and high-performance computing applications for both structured data and unstructured data management. On-premise high throughput required and secondary large capacity archive or backup.

Target market
HPC, AI/big data, life science, oil and gas, media and entertainment, higher education, video surveillance and government.

Competitors
Include Dell EMC, NetApp, IBM GPFS, Lustre, Gluster FS, Quobyte and BeeGFS