The storage space is ripe with innovations of late with a slew of startups popping up looking to offer solutions to meet the demands of webscale computing while aiming to deliver power and sizing benefits in the data center. A company we have had an eye on for a while is MaxiScale and today they are coming out of stealth mode.
The FLEX storage platform they have been developing since the company was founded back in 2007 is one of the most exciting products to come on the market in a while. Why am I so bullish on FLEX? Its a software storage solution that delivers 10x the performance at 1/10th the traditional costs and can scale to ridiculously large capacities in a plug and play manner.
Looking at a few of the top players in webscale storage Amazon has S3, Google has their GFS, and Yahoo! has PNuts research project as well as Mobstor. For these web giants as well as firms like Facebook and Microsoft developing proprietary webscale storage solutions in-house is a tough but doable feat. For the rest of the organizations out there the the act of architecting, developing and managing their own storage platform is a losing proposition. Enter MaxiScale.
With its ability to run on commodity gear the FLEX Platform allows organizations to get the cost benefits vs. the NetApp’s and IBRIX’s of the world while delivering the flexibility needed for the various storage needed in web computing environments where workloads can be distributed and do not have the luxury of extended downtime.
Running on standard web servers with 2TB SATA drives MaxiScale’s solution allows you to scale up to 50,000 nodes using a single namespace with distributed metadata masters similar to the concepts in Googles second gen GFS2 setup they have been working on.
The distributed metadata and auto replication allows for an extremely self-healing system that allows for quick expansion as well as "real-time upgrades" of hardware. For example, you could take a machine with older or worn out drives and swap in new ones that are 2x the size effectively doubling that machines storage w/0 junking the server or taking your SAN completely down.
Besides the huge value prop another interesting and unique feature of the FLEX Platform is the notion of different storage types. MaxiScale allows you to break things up into small file storage which is for files less then 1MB, normal file storage (large images,video, etc) are stored separate repository AND they also have their own key/value store which has rapidly been becoming a favorite topic of conversation/implementation amongst web/cloud developers.
By breaking storage out in this manner it allows them to manage disk usage and i/0 in as an efficient manner as possible, for example they guarantee single i/o file retrieval for the small file repository allowing a high throughput volume without the need for expensive networking such as inifiband or 10 gig.
The SA Labs team hasn’t gotten their hands on the solution yet to check it out in more detail, when the time comes we will try to publish thing here, in the meantime check MaxiScale’s site for more info about their storage solution. Keep an eye on these guys as I am sure ALL the storage incumbents will be looking over their shoulder as they start to compete head to head on deals. AdMob is one such early adopter that looked at incumbent solutions and at building their own before the MaxiScale value prop won out.
