SNIA SDC 24: Leil Storage Unveils Infinite Cold Engine (ICE), Melting Energy Costs, Unfreezing Performance Limits

Leil Storage OÜ introduces its Infinite Cold Engine (ICE) feature to address the significant energy inefficiencies in traditional storage systems.

These systems often keep numerous drives powered on to ensure data redundancy, leading to substantial energy waste and increased operational costs.

Legacy MAID (Massive Array of Idle Disks) technology aimed to reduce energy usage by powering down inactive drives. However, it struggled due to the lack of a distributed file system, which made it difficult to keep drives off when data needed frequent access for redundancy. Unlike MAID, ICE leverages SaunaFS, a distributed file system, allowing it to concentrate data access on a small group of drives at any time. This approach enables the majority of drives to remain powered off for extended periods, significantly cutting energy use while maintaining high performance.

Key technical details:

• Installation: 8 servers with 60 or 102 HDDs each.
• Energy efficiency: ICE uses the SATA power pin 3 feature to power off inactive drives completely.
• Data redundancy: ICE employs Erasure Coding (6+2) for full data recovery even if 2 servers fail.

Disks are organized into Write Groups, with one designated as the ‘Active Write Group’ for current operations.

This phase of ICE is part of a larger strategy to enhance storage efficiency. The 1st phase involved supporting HM-SMR drives. Together with ICE, these innovations enable businesses to save up to 43% in energy consumption.

Target market:
The company targets enterprises and service providers needing long-term, high-capacity storage solutions that are both cost-effective and environmentally friendly. This includes industries such as healthcare and finance, as well as media companies, archives, research laboratories, and data center providers where large volumes of data must be stored securely and accessed efficiently.

The official announcement of ICE took place on September 18th at SNIA’s Storage Developer Conference in Santa Clara, CA.

The firm’s ICE feature empowers data-intensive businesses to significantly reduce energy use and costs without sacrificing performance. By optimizing power usage, ICE helps lower operational expenses and minimize environmental impact.