May the Forth Be With You Always
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A bit late bringing this one to you, but here we go.
On May 4th, we celebrated the culturally iconic Star Wars universe. While the story of Star Wars takes place a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, the technology is futuristic even by our present standards, 40 years after the first movie premiered. Star Wars has captured the imaginations of billions of people over the years who have dreamed of living in such a technology-rich world of droids, lightsabers, speeder bikes, and more.
Perhaps the most important technology featured in Star Wars is faster than light (FTL) travel. The ability to travel through hyperspace not only allowed for the galactic empire to exist but also made for exciting chase scenes and iconic special effects.
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While we don’t seem to be close to developing FTL travel today, the technology to go faster in everything we do is all around us. At Scale Computing, not only are we a bunch of Star Wars geeks, we are innovators working to make your IT infrastructure faster. That is nowhere more apparent than in our storage architecture.
While our competitors are still using storage architectures based on SAN and NAS technologies that have been around over 20 years. We knew there was a better way and faster way to deliver storage. Instead of virtualizing technologies that were never built for virtualization in the first place, we are starting from the ground up, ditching multiple layers of storage controllers, file systems, and protocols that are causing inefficiencies in data centers around the world.
You see, many virtualization solutions start with a SAN or NAS technology onto which another virtual storage layer is applied, mimicking SAN, often referred to as vSAN. Then finally, the actual file system for the virtual machine is added. These technologies deploy a variety of both physical controllers and virtual storage appliances (VSAs) to make it all work. Not with Scale Computing.
The HC3 virtualization platform doesn’t use any extra storage controllers or VSAs, no extra file systems, and no extra protocols. The only file system in play with HC3 is the one used by the guest OS installed in the virtual machine you create for your applications. This makes our storage extremely efficient and that was even before we decided to add solid state flash drives into the architecture. Our architecture has allowed us to implement flash a little differently than the competition and we have a sense of humor about it too.
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Other storage technologies desperately needed flash storage as a cache to overcome the inefficiencies they had already built into their architectures. With HC3, we didn’t need a flash storage cache so we just implemented flash as a storage tier to actually store your data. Then, where your data is stored, you get to control how much flash you use on a per virtual disk basis as illustrated above. Again, there are no controllers or VSAs needed for our tiered flash storage or all flash storage architecture.
Non-volatile memory express (NVMe) technologies like 3D XPoint are designed for speeds 1000x faster than NAND (the current primary flash architecture). In order to achieve these 1000x speeds, NVMe must bypass traditional storage controllers and protocols that would only serve as a bottleneck because they were never designed for the speeds capable with this new flash storage. So these existing storage architectures designed around old SAN and NAS technologies are going to have to change completely for NVMe. HC3 doesn’t have all of these old controllers, VSAs, or protocols to shed to implement NVMe.
Speed matters. Architecture matters. The future matters and your systems need to be ready for the future. Don’t go with an architecture that is going to need to scrapped when you need NVMe speeds in a couple years. Future proof your data center with technology designed to eliminate complexity and inefficiency: HC3.
