Xinnor Releases xiRAID Classic v4.4

Xinnor, developer of high-performance software RAID technology, announced the release of xiRAID Classic v4.4.1, introducing discard support designed to help NVMe SSDs maintain more consistent write performance over time.The new capability is particularly relevant for modern storage systems, where maintaining the right balance between efficient use of available flash capacity and stable long-term performance is increasingly important.

This balance is especially important with read-optimized NVMe SSDs, which have become increasingly attractive for enterprise and HPC storage thanks to their combination of high read performance, large capacities and more favorable cost per terabyte than write-intensive drives. Their architecture is optimized to maximize usable capacity, typically leaving less internal drive spare capacity than mixed-use or write-intensive drives. As data is repeatedly updated and deleted, this leaves less headroom for the drive to absorb the internal work associated with garbage collection, which can affect write performance and latency over time.

Inside an SSD drive, rewritten data is placed into new flash locations, while obsolete data must later be reclaimed through the drive garbage collection. The more efficiently the drive can identify space that is no longer in use, the more effectively it can manage this process and avoid unnecessary internal work. Modern file systems can issue discard requests to identify blocks that no longer contain useful data; at the NVMe level, the corresponding operation is commonly referred to as deallocate or UNMAP. This gives SSDs more accurate information about available space, helping them reclaim and reuse flash more efficiently and reducing unnecessary garbage collection overhead.

xiRAID Classic v4.4.1 extends this capability across the RAID layer, enabling discard information to flow from the file system through the RAID to the underlying compatible NVMe drives. As a result, the drives can manage available flash more efficiently, helping the RAID maintain more stable write performance over time.

“Read-intensive NVMe drives have become a very compelling foundation for high-capacity storage, but getting the economics right is not only about how many terabytes you can install,” said Dmitry Livshits, CEO, Xinnor. “The storage stack also needs to help those drives operate efficiently throughout their service life. With discard support in xiRAID Classic v4.4.1, customers can take fuller advantage of capacity-oriented NVMe while maintaining more predictable performance over time.”

This technology is particularly useful for workloads that combine large read volumes with recurring data updates or deletions, including HPC file systems, virtualized and containerized environments, databases, and rotating data or backup repositories. Administrators can also invoke discard in a controlled manner using standard file-system tools such as fstrim.

The benefits of xiRAID Classic new release were also demonstrated in a Lustre environment at the Lustre Administrators and Developers Workshop (LAD’26) in Paris on September 30. In the presentation “Maintaining Lustre Write Performance on NVMe RAID with TRIM” delivered by Xinnor senior solution architect Daniel Landau, Xinnor showed how regular fstrim can help Lustre systems reclaim unused NVMe capacity and sustain write performance as drives are repeatedly written and freed. The tests used Lustre 2.15.8 as a latest Long Term Stability (LTS) release and an IO500-based workload to examine the effect under realistic filesystem activity.

In a focused sequential-write test, throughput was improved more than twice on the overall filesystem/application level when xiRAID 4.4.1 was used together with proper fstrim usage on Lustre OST devices.

xiRAID Classic v4.4.1 also expands deployment and operational flexibility with support for multipath devices in RAID configurations and new xicli commands for synchronizing cluster configurations and displaying detailed information about cluster RAIDs.

With v4.4.1, Xinnor continues to evolve xiRAID Classic around the requirements of modern high-capacity NVMe infrastructure, helping customers combine software-defined RAID performance with more efficient use of the underlying flash media.