Enterprise Storage Stack (ESS)
WildFire's Enterprise
Storage Stack (ESS) is software which lets integrators and
skilled users build
extremely fast Enterprise grade, all-Flash storage
appliances and local storage at costs vastly below a dollar a
gigabyte.
WildFire ESS achieves its
tremendous speed through conversion of clusters of random
writes into a memory mapped continuous linear stream.
Writing all data linearly results in random write speeds that are
typically ten times faster than standard Raid-10 and eighty times faster than Raid-5 or Raid-6.
When computational resources are sufficient, ESS write rates
typically match the composite linear write rate of the SSD
pool.
Superior IOPS speed:
ESS can internally generate as much as 2,000,000 4KB
random write IOPS with 24 SSDs. Externally, ESS will deliver 300,000 4KB random reads or
writes over a 10gigE connection from an array of 8 or
more SSDs configured RAID-5 or RAID-6. Greater
external levels are possible with more SSDs, network
connections, and targets. Most all-flash RAID-5 solutions will only deliver 20,000 to
30,000 write IOPS. RAID-10 solutions typically deliver
only 100,000 to 150,000 write IOPS with 24 SSDs.
Low write IOPS will radically slow down the total
throughput of the system because time consumed by writes
is not available for reads.
Superior large record
transfers. ESS will also deliver large
amounts of data. For instance, a 24 SSD system
managed by ESS will deliver almost 6GB a second through
a single 40gigE port read or write, and can deliver a
lot more with multiple ports and cards. With multiple
interfaces, write speeds will approach 11GB/sec.
NVMe can also be used to increase write speeds.
Superior single-job speed.
While ESS cannot increase the random read speed of SSDs,
it random writes single thread at very high random write
speeds. Tests show that with 24 SSDs, ESS based
systems will internally single-thread random write 4KB
blocks at 250,000 IOPS (1GB/sec) and will write 1MB
blocks at 4.8GB/sec. Single thread throughput
greatly affects the time needed to perform all manner of
big jobs, be these report generation or 4KB video
rendering. Few all-Flash storage appliances can
demonstrate such performance. This performance gain is true no
matter the grade of SSD you are running: Consumer,
Read Intensive, Data Center, and Enterprise grades of
SSDs will all read and write faster when managed by ESS.
Profound write reduction and
life enhancement. ESS
dramatically reduces write amplification.
Accordingly, less expensive Consumer or Read
Intensive SSDs managed by ESS will typically last ten to
forty times longer, and will be capable of a daily
overwrite of all data. But even Data Center and
Enterprise SSDs will see significant life extension with
ESS because many of the techniques used by ESS to reduce
write amplification, such as RAID stripe alignment and
compression increase the useful life of all SSDs.
Profound cost reduction.
ESS lets you use less expensive Consumer and Read
Intensive SSDs while achieving or exceeding the effective
data updates of Data Center media. Because it
performs best in a RAID-5 or RAID-6 environment, ESS
also lets you use fewer SSDs. The combination of
these can reduce the SSD cost per usable gigabyte by as
much as 75%.
Larger systems.
Because ESS requires fewer SSDs for a given unit of usable
storage, and because ESS will make inherently-more-dense
Consumer and Read Intensive SSDs work with higher
durability, ESS-based systems can be much larger than
traditional RAID-10 systems. ESS based systems can
employ up to 48 7.68TB SSDs, and can address up to 256TB of
usable space.
Affordable software cost.
ESS costs a small fraction of the SSD costs it reduces.
When significant cost reduction is combined with superior
speed, durability, scale, and reliability, ESS generates
exceptional value.
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