IT Press Tour 67: Leil

We had the opportunity to meet Leil for the second time during the recent 67th edition of The IT Press Tour held last week in Sofia, Bulgaria. The first meeting was in April 2024 in Roma, Italy, during the similar event when we unveiled Leil to the world.Leil is an Estonian startup founded in 2022 and headquartered in Tallinn. Currently seed-funded, the company was built by engineers with deep expertise in parallel file systems and distributed storage. Its core mission is to bridge the growing gap between the economic potential of high-capacity hard disk drives (HDDs) and legacy software architectures that were originally designed for flash/SSD storage. In short, Leil builds software that makes HDDs perform the way they were physically designed to, something no mainstream storage platform currently does. The presentation was driven by Alexander Ragel, CEO and co-founder.

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The storage industry faces what Leil calls the “SMR Paradox.” Shingled Magnetic Recording (SMR) drives offer significantly more capacity per disk, and hyperscalers (like Google, Meta, and AWS), representing just 10% of the market, have already adopted SMR at 100% across their infrastructure using custom-built software stacks. However, the remaining 90% of the enterprise market still runs on standard Linux operating systems and has achieved 0% SMR adoption, simply because no accessible, enterprise-grade software exists to manage SMR drives properly.

Legacy architectures treat modern high-capacity HDDs like slow SSDs, generating small random I/O patterns that are deeply inefficient for spinning media. The consequences are severe: stacks running on HDD hardware waste 30–60% of potential capacity economics without SMR support, adding petabytes requires months of tuning, and managing legacy parallel file systems demands PhD-level specialist staff.

Leil’s approach rests on four pillars:

• Extra Capacity (unlocking exabyte-scale density via Host-Managed SMR)
• Extra Performance (intelligent zone management and Command Duration Limits)
• Extra Longevity (Autonomous Drive Regeneration through head depopulation), and
• Sustainability (extreme power efficiency via the Infinite Cold Engine, or ICE)

The product stack has two main layers. Leil FS is an open-source, open-core parallel file system strictly optimized for high-capacity HDDs, it drives community adoption and serves as the baseline innovation engine. Leil OS is the commercial enterprise distribution built on top of Leil FS, offering hyperscale-grade efficiency, seamless deployment, a management UI, and 24/7 SLA support. Both are underpinned by the proprietary SMRT Engine, Leil’s core intellectual property.

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Leil claims several hard numbers to back its value proposition. It delivers a +25% usable capacity gain versus generic software-defined storage on identical hardware, by controlling overlapping tracks through Host-Managed SMR. It achieves tape-level cost per TB (from €0.99/TB/month) without the 45-minute retrieval penalty associated with tape. Deployment takes 10 minutes via standard repository commands (sudo apt install leil-storage), compared to 6–12 months for traditional SMR integration projects.

On the performance side, Leil OS serializes writes into sequential streams, claiming to unlock 99.7% of theoretical maximum HDD throughput. It also implements SNIA Command Duration Limits (CDL), passing strict deadline hints to HDD firmware to prevent tail latency spikes, critical for AI training workloads where a single stuck drive can ruin an entire run.
For resilience, configurable erasure coding profiles balance capacity overhead against failure tolerance, background rebuilds are optimized to avoid saturating HDD bandwidth, and Head Depopulation technology allows Leil to retire only the failing platter surface of a 32TB drive (~5% capacity loss) rather than triggering a full 24-hour rebuild, achieving zero-downtime recovery.

Leil targets six primary use cases: AI/HPC warm-tier storage (bridging exabyte training libraries to NVMe), active archives (millisecond retrieval vs. hours/days for tape), enterprise backup (qualified with Veeam/Acronis), media post-production (optimized for 4K/8K sequential streams), on-premises Kubernetes (native CSI driver), and CCTV storage. Real production deployments include a national broadcaster using Leil OS for multi-petabyte video-on-demand origin storage, a regional hosting leader replacing legacy NAS at scale, supercomputing centers running national archive projects, and autonomous driving research programs staging telemetry datasets for ML pipelines.

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Leil goes to market through a channel-first model with 100% channel commitment, white-label/OEM options for hardware manufacturers, and technology alliance partnerships with WD, Seagate, Nvidia, ATTO, Broadcom, Intel, and AMD. Leil FS remains free for university environments. Commercially, pricing scales predictably from €0.99/TB/month, with tiers covering up to 1.5PB (Standard), 11.5PB (Advanced Green), and 19.5PB+ (Enterprise Green). Because Leil OS is built atop the GPL-3.0 open-source Leil FS, there is a guaranteed vendor lock-in exit path, the data always belongs to the customer.

The full presentation is available here.