The long-awaited version 7 of
ESS is fast approaching.
ESS v7 will integrate several
technologies into the existing ESS product to
further reduce costs and support a range of
technologies. Some of the newly supported
technologies include:
Even faster performance.
ESS v7 has new tuning logic to further exploit systems
with many cores. This is primarily aimed at NVMe servers that
with to push more than 10 GB/sec of data on and off of the
array.
Support for data
deduplication. ESS v7 will support
deduplication of all 4KB blocks.
This feature combined with block-level
compression can dramatically lower storage
requirements for some customers.
This feature will be particularly
useful for customer supporting multiple similar tenants.
Obvious examples include virtual desktop hosting and virtual
server hosting. Note that applications that encrypt
their data or have data that is inherently random
wont see any benefit with de-dupe.
New memory cache with
memory reduction: Our new version
of memory management permits reduction of RAM
requirements. This reduction is tunable and can
lower RAM requirements as much as 100:1. A side
effect of the lower RAM requirements is that volumes
can also mount much more quickly.
Optional dual
ported media HA: this feature is
desired by some customers , even though it
often involves higher costs than simply mirroring
servers. In the past, this usually involved SAS SSDs.
Current hardware options tend to involve NVMe SSDs.
Note that these hardware platforms are complicated
and are far from a "white box" solutions.
New Floating Array:
We are optionally supporting a pool of SSDs that is
much more dynamic than traditional arrays. This lets
you add and remove drive live, as well as use drives
of different sizes concurrently. This is all implemented
with "erasure codes" enabling one to eight "parity drives"
so that you can dial the level of redundancy desired.
This new logic also support much larger arrays in terms
of drive counts.
