SanDisk InfiniFlash storage targets Big Data workloads
SanDisk unveiled an all-flash storage platform that creates a new category for the IT industry, termed by IDC as Big Data Flash. Built using open source software, SanDisk’s InfiniFlash storage system delivers massive capacity, extreme performance, and superior reliability to big data and hyperscale workloads.
According to IDC, the market for flash-based arrays—both All Flash Arrays (AFA) and Hybrid Flash Arrays (HFA)—exhibited strong double digit growth over the past five years for a combined market that in 2014 was over $11.3B in size. This growth is largely being driven by rapid migration to 3rd platform computing infrastructure, resulting from the massive storage, compute power and scalability requirements of an increasingly mobile workforce, social media, big data analytics, and cloud computing.
InfiniFlash is the next generation storage platform. Available in three different configurations (IF100, IF500 and IF700), this offering provides 5x the density, 50x the performance and 4x the reliability, while consuming 80 percent less power – as compared to traditional HDD arrays.
Through the disaggregation of compute, switching and storage capabilities, InfiniFlash enables the use of flash for primary and secondary storage with new benchmarks in low total acquisition costs and extremely compelling total cost of ownership (TCO). The InfiniFlash system is configured with up to 64 specially-designed, hot-swappable cards, each providing an unprecedented 8TB of flash capacity. Together, the cards deliver half a petabyte (PB) (512 terabytes (TB)) of raw flash storage in a 3-rack-unit (3U) enclosure, which is able to connect with up to eight off-the-shelf servers.
The InfiniFlash system’s modular storage design supports various operating system and storage stack offerings. It includes the award-winning, performance-optimized SanDisk ION Accelerator software stack, from Fusion-io, for block storage applications. For scale-out block and object storage workloads, InfiniFlash utilizes the “flash-intelligent’, open source CEPH platform to deliver data services. These offerings include development libraries and a SDK that allow customers to optimize applications for use with the system in order to obtain even better performance, efficiency and TCO.
InfiniFlash is designed to address diverse enterprise and hyperscale workloads including:
Big Data Analytics—InfiniFlash delivers both the capacity and performance needed to mine information stores for patterns that translate into business insights for workloads such as Hadoop, Cassandra and MongoDB, as well as delivers timely analysis of in-memory databases.
Content Repositories—High-definition content repositories, such as social media sites, require blazingly fast read capabilities in order to deliver a delightful user experience. InfiniFlash provides quick and easy access to high-definition content 24×7.
Media Streaming—InfiniFlash supports the high data transfer rates needed for capturing and delivering rich media content such as movies, music, and video surveillance, that it can then rapidly analyze and deliver for viewing.