13 March 2010
Saturday
Pivot3, Seanodes improve on iSCSI offerings
By Beth Pariseau and Dave Raffo | Jun 24, 2009
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PrintStartups Pivot3 Inc. and Seanodes are taking steps to increase the performance and scalability of their iSCSI offerings. Pivot3 is increasing the RAID protection for its Pivot3 Serverless Computing to RAID 6e, while Seanodes Inc., whose Exanodes software can turn commodity servers' internal storage into scale-out shared storage, is adding support for solid-state drives (SSDs).
Pivot3 adds RAID protection to serverless systems
Pivot3 is upgrading the Pivot3 Serverless Computing platform it launched last August. Pivot3's Serverless Computing eliminates physical application servers by moving them onto its x86-based storage nodes running an open-source Xen hypervisor. Now Pivot3 is adding what it calls RAID 6e – which allows three simultaneous drive failures or one appliance and one drive failure – while bumping up maximum capacity from eight appliances (96 drives) to 12 appliances (144 drives). It's also adding network-attached storage (NAS) capability through Microsoft Windows Storage Server. Each array now scales to 48 server cores for 24 Gbps of iSCSI bandwidth.
"They're striping data across multiple nodes together in a complete system in such a way that you can sustain a whole node failure before it becomes an issue," said Noemi Greyzdorf, research manager, storage software at Framingham, Mass.-based IDC, of Pivot3.
RAID 6 allows a system to recover from two simultaneous drive failures. The ability to lose an extra drive is key for Pivot3, which plays mostly in the video surveillance space and has customers with many high-capacity SATA drives. Lee Caswell, Pivot3's chief marketing officer, said RAID 6e requires no more drives or capacity than RAID 6.
Jason Pritchard, integration manager for the Choctaw Nation, estimates he saved approximately $300,000 by getting rid of around 90 application servers after installing Pivot3 systems in three Choctaw casinos across Oklahoma. Pritchard said he's installing one of the new systems this week in a new casino in Grant, Okla. Choctaw casinos have more than 2 PB overall on Pivot3 Serverless Computing systems, which store data from the casinos' video surveillance cameras.
"I'm looking forward to RAID 6e and to not having to worry so much about drive failure," Pritchard said. "With RAID 5, if we lost two drives we were in a hole. With our old [Adaptec Inc.] DAS [direct-attached storage] storage banks, it took 24 to 36 hours to rebuild and re-initialize a drive. With Pivot3, the rebuild is a whole lot faster. It takes an hour or so to rebuild, and we can lose multiple drives across a cluster and keep recording."
Because the casinos are scattered throughout the state, Pritchard said any downtime can result in lost video.
"Sometimes we lost a day's amount of video with our old storage because it takes three hours to get somebody up there to the casino," Pritchard said. "Some of that stuff comes back to bite you on the butt later on. It's Murphy's Law that if something happens and you need to look at a video, it will be on that server that was down."
