UPDATED 09:00 EDT / MARCH 08 2017

INFRA

Excelero launches technology to pool captive server SAN storage

Storage software startup Excelero Inc. is coming out of stealth today with $17.5 million in funding and a patent pending technology that it claims bridges the gap between captive flash storage on Linux servers and storage area networks.

The company calls its NVMesh technology “software defined block storage.” It’s addressing the problem of how to give scale-out applications – which grow and shrink  linearly with demand – flexible access to flash storage over networks.

The company is betting on the rising popularity of “server SANs,” which are devices built on commodity hardware that use internal storage to bring data as close as possible to the processor. Research firm Wikibon forecasts the server SAN market will grow 22 percent annually from $2.5 billion in 2015 to $15 billion to $22 billion in 2026.

Server SAN has performance advantages over networked all-flash arrays, which are subject to slowdowns caused by network latency and input/output bottlenecks. However, server SANs are limited in their ability to share storage across the network. Also, because the storage is specific to the server, utilization rates tend to be low.

Excelero claims it can bring the best of both worlds to large data centers by using a layer of software to permit applications on any Linux server or cluster to tap into server SAN resources across the network. In effect, this permits all of an organizations server-based storage to be treated as a giant pool. “You can now share storage between machines based on the applications that need it,” said Yaniv Romem, co-founder and chief technology officer. “We’re able to provide local performance across a SAN.”

Just like the cloud giants

Web-scale giants like Amazon Web Services Inc. and Google have solved this problem with their own proprietary software, but Excelero believes those companies’ inventions are too strategic to be released as open source. It’s proposing to give very large data centers the same scale-out capabilities as the cloud giants with predictable performance and centralized management.

By opening up storage in captive servers, the company also claims it can increase utilization rates from as little as 25 percent to as much as 85 percent while cutting storage costs by greater than 90 percent. The company has been granted one patent for its technology and says it has 10 more applications pending.

Excelero is betting that the growing popularity of the high-performance NVM Express flash storage standard, combined with next-generation networks capable of 100 gigabit-per-second speeds, will drive demand for data center architectures that combine the performance of server SANs with the flexibility of flash arrays. “Large data centers are bringing in standardized hardware en masse,” Romen said. “Scale-out applications need to run from anywhere. If you have data pinned down to certain machines, then you’ve lost a lot of flexibility.”

Excelero has built an extension of the Remote Direct Memory Access Standard it calls Remote Direct Drive Access. “RDDA lets us send out a single RDMA message and interact with a remote drive without interacting with a CPU,” Romem said. “That keeps latency minimal.” In fact, the company claims its technology adds only five microseconds (millionths of a second) of latency to a read or write operation, mostly because of network overhead. “Because RDDA doesn’t require any CPU cycles, I can run an application unhindered and still serve data to another application,” Romem said. Details are contained in the company’s patent.

The company is limiting its direct sales universe to the world’s 200 largest data center operators, and will serve smaller customers through channel partners, Romem said. Version 1.0 of the software has been in use since last summer by customers that include the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, PayPal Holdings Inc., General Electric Co. Predix and Hulu LLC. “We gained confidence from those initial customers,” Romem said.

Investors include Fusion-io Inc. co-founder David Flynn and Battery Ventures. The company declined to discuss pricing.

Image via Wikimedia Commons

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