Modern IT has a need for speed. In the digital era, data fuels decision making, enhances how businesses interact with their customers, and determines operational efficiency, plus in a growing number of cases, data is the product.
According to ESG research, 71% of IT organizations report that data storage technology is strategic to their organization’s IT and business operations. Additionally, nearly half (49%) of these organizations state that data is their business, with another 31% expecting to offer data-centric products and services within the next 24 months.
For these digital organizations, access latencies and bandwidth limitations have a direct cost to the business.
Traditionally for unstructured, or file, storage, there was an old saying (Yes, I said old) that only a small percentage of your data was going ever to be used at any given time, and the bulk of data was cold, something to be stored and not access, ideal for archiving. This idea was the basis behind many storage system designs.
Today, given the importance of analytics and the massive investment in machine learning, high performance access to large volumes of unstructured data is essential to business operations. In an ESG study of storage decision makers, 37% identified big data repositories for unstructured data as part of an AI or analytics initiative as a top growth area for on-premises data storage. This old idea of storing files but not needing to access them has quickly become irrelevant.
One storage innovator, Stellus, is helping to change things. Its Stellus Data Platform leverages an innovative Key-Value over Fabrics implementation to deliver high-performance and highly scalable storage for unstructured data.
And just last week, Stellus announced a record-breaking performance as the Stellus Data Platform was able to achieve a combined performance of up to 80GB/s aggregate bandwidth, and to a single Linux client Stellus achieved 33.2GB/s of sustained write throughput. I expect this level of performance to quickly become the expectation for digital businesses, especially in industries such as life sciences and media & entertainment.
If those record setting numbers aren’t enough to pique your interest, the ESG technical validation team was recently given the opportunity to take a look at the Stellus Data Platform. Needless to say, they too were impressed with what they saw. Some high-level takeaways include:
- The “read and write performance was particularly impressive, with the Stellus Data Platform exceeding the Stellus performance claims for the model under test, delivering 41.3 GB/sec write and 45.1 GB/sec read throughput, the fastest we have ever seen for a file storage system.”
- “The platform rebalanced data after loss of a 7.68TB drive in a 92TB data space in less than nine minutes with minimal impact to system performance.”
- “System upgrades were fast and simple to execute, enabling ESG to double storage capacity with a couple of clicks and less than 45 minutes processing time.”
- “The system also offers impressive density, scaling to 1.475 PB in just 17 RU.”
The way that businesses leverage data has changed. Now, the way that storage technology is architected must change with it. Stellus is helping lead the way.
