Company:AccelStor, Inc.

}} AccelStor Ltd. (formerly AccelStor, Inc.) Chinese: 英屬開曼群島商捷鼎創新股份有限公司 (formerly 捷鼎國際股份有限公司). AccelStor is an All Flash Storage OEM founded on November 27, 2014 in Taipei, Taiwan. In addition to providing Storage Appliance products, AccelStor also offers exclusive flash memory and storage acceleration software technology.

History

AccelStor was founded by veterans of the storage, networking and IT markets in Taiwan in November 2014. The company's product lineup consists of NVMe JBOF storage arrays (P310/P810), SATA JBOF All Flash Storage arrays (P710/P710-E/P710-SLED) and HA series Dual controller All Flash arrays (H510 & H710).

J series extension shelves are also available for P710 & HA models which can extend usable capacity to 1.1 PetaByte effective storage using Data Deduplication techniques and compression algorithms.

The distinguishing characteristic and feature of AccelStor AFA systems is their FlexiSuite™ software which includes an FMS 2016 award-winning RAID replacement technology called FlexiRemap™ which won the best of show award at the 2016 FMS show in Santa Clara, California and which delivers stunning levels of sustained random WRITE IOPS performance (732,000 write IOPS @ 4K) with random reads delivering over 1.1 million IOPS @ 4K on their P710 SATA platforms.

FlexiRemap™ was designed to solve the problems that traditional RAID brings to NAND Flash memory used in SSD disk which causes hotspots in the SSD used for parity and uneven load in remaining data carrying SSD's in a traditional RAID grouping. FlexiRemap™ uses two parity drives, two hot spares and evenly loads the remaining data SSD's by using an award-winning algorithm that delivers stunning performance at a 28% Data Protection and serial write packing overhead, which when compared to RAID 5 (27% overhead) is a very reasonable overhead considering that it is delivering 3x extended SSD durability, 13x Performance boost over RAID 5 and very attractive latency features to boot.

FlexiRemap™ outperforms Pure Storage RAID 3D by a wide margin and delivers maximum performance offered by current PCIe 3.0 server technology.

AccelStor use three different hardware providers for their base systems, featuring SuperMicro platforms for the P710 and H series systems, AIC for the P310 NVMe platform and Dell for the new P810 NVMe AFA platform.

The P710-SLED (US) & P710-E (EU) was recently launched under pressure from their USA based Chief Solutions Architect to address the Education market gap for an AFA solution serving VMware VDI virtual machines for students at a price point lower than high end spinning Disk based storage arrays from EMC, Pure Storage and HPe.

The US arm of the company is called AccelStor Solutions and operates out of Fremont California.

All AccelStor SATA and SAS platforms have shelf extension capability and the latest code revision with all the bells and whistle features in code release 4.0. 6U for 1.1 PB storage is an attractive option for customers who require high IOPS storage platforms at pricing lower than spinning disk solutions from EMC and HPe.

AccelStor FlexiSuite™ software offers full storage Data Services features such as FlexiDedupe™, FlexiSnap™, FlexiClone™ and FlexiRemap™ with Replication capability as well..

AccelStor are also about to release NeoTopaz™ technology at the 2018 Flash memory Summit in Santa Clara, California which is an NVMe storage technology that utilizes RDMA over 100GB Ethernet (RoCE) and offers up virtual storage controllers in a virtual all flash array format called vFlexiArray™.

vFlexiArrays™ can use the unique AccelStor share-nothing architecture for HA, or the more traditional two controllers with one set of storage HA solution. The Share nothing architecture has two separate and unique storage sets with synchronization taking place between the two virtual controllers over RoCE on 100GbE.

This architecture allows the virtual storage arrays to use the exact SSD type required for each storage use case and compute power can be scaled with memory and storage in separate silos. All data is isolated and fully protected and the virtual storage arrays use the full AccelStor award-winning FlexiSuite™ technology pack on each vFlexiArray™ that includes the RAID free technology called FlexiRemap™.

FlexiRemap™ Technology

Specifically designed for NAND flash memory operations, AccelStor's FlexiRemap™ technology features a unique architectural re-design of RAID operation that considerably speeds up random I/O requests, a major cause of storage-access slowdowns. Unlike traditional RAID algorithms, FlexiRemap™ remaps data before passing it to the underlying flash memory layer, avoiding unnecessary processing overhead and extending the lifespan of SSDs by a large margin.

FlexiRemap™ harnesses the power of processor architecture by managing the underlying flash memory directly from the kernel level of the operating system. This technology packs data intelligently during random writes, accelerating access and improving performance. Data is written onto each data carrying SSD evenly to prevent any section from wearing out prematurely as seen with RAID 5 and RAID 6. FlexiRemap™ also simplifies SSD management by integrating all the SSDs into a single store, combining capacity with data-access performance.

The power of AccelStor FlexiRemap™ technology is best demonstrated in AccelStor NeoSapphire all-flash arrays, which can deliver more than 732,000 sustained WRITE IOPS @ 4KB random writes in standalone rack-mount form factors, reaching the highest performance tier for enterprise and datacenter storage systems.

Products

NeoSapphire™ All-Flash Array Series

AccelStor's NeoSapphire™ series of all-flash array storage appliances come in NVMe or SATA based SSD formats and are powered by AccelStor FlexiRemap™ technology which delivers sustained high levels of performance. With up to 732K WRITE IOPS @ 4K, NeoSapphire™ arrays significantly speed up data access and processing performance while reducing power consumption and increasing available space utilization making them suitable for real world random read/write mixed load operations that traditional storage systems have difficulty processing and also for huge volumes of data that need to be processed very rapidly by AI or similar technology. NeoSapphire™ arrays come in standard 1U or 2U rack-mount form factors and feature web-based GUI management, multi-protocol support, front-accessible hot-swappable SSDs, and redundancy through virtual data groups.

AccelStor spend a great deal of effort ensuring VMware, Openstack & Windows Server compatibility at extreme levels of performance as well as being one of the few storage devices that offer parallel cluster file system support such as BeeGFS as well as other HPC enhancements related to performance levels on a host of other file systems including standard CIFS and NFS support.

AI platforms in particular see huge benefits from utilizing AccelStor AFA series appliances in their solution architecture as it offers the performance levels AI needs for real time problem solving using rapid data search capabilities. Genomic Sequencing operations also require ultra fast and low latency characteristics and NeoSapphire™ arrays are working globally with DNA sequencers successfully in this role.

NVMe Flash Arrays

• NeoSapphire™ P310
• NeoSapphire™ P810

The P310 is available with either four Fiber Channel or six 10 GbE SFP+ interfaces, 8 SSD drive capability and is usually armed with 4TB SSD drives. The P310 is typically used for HPC, AI and tasks such as DNA sequencing and facial recognition applications requiring low latency and high sustained IOPS.

The P810 is a new 24 SSD capable platform based on Dell hardware. Details and spec forthcoming as of June 2018. It was seen at Computex Taipei 2018 where the H710 was also showcased.

AccelStor is also busy developing its NeoTopaz™ successor to NeoSapphire™, though they will realistically be complementary but separate products and architectures which both use the FlexiSuite™. NeoTopaz™ focuses on NVMe-oF which uses RDMA over Converged Ethernet (RoCE) to overcome the data challenges design architects face with shared NVMe-oF access.

NeoTopaz™ is expected Q3/Q4 2018.

SATA & SAS All Flash Arrays

These come in JBOF (P710 series) and HA (H510 & H710 Series)

Transport connectivity is either via 6 x Fiber Channel or 6 x 10 GbE SFP+ ports.

Fibre Channel options are 8,16 or 32GB

• NeoSapphire™ P710 (24 SSD)
• NeoSapphire™ P710-SLED or P710-E (24 SSD)
• H510 (12 SSD per Controller) with infiniband 56G controller interconnects
• H710 (24 SSD per Controller) with infiniband 56G controller interconnects

100GbE Mellanox transport is currently pending release to market and will be generally available Q1 2019.

Shelf Extensions

These are available on the P710 and all H series platforms and are 12G SAS based using 2 Ports, with 8 lanes per port.

• J212 - 24 SSD disk expansion Unit
• J214 - 72 SSD Disk expansion Unit

Achievements

In July 2015, AccelStor was named among the Top 10 Coolest Storage Startups.
In June 2016, AccelStor was named one of the 20 Most Promising High-Performance Computing (HPC) Solution Providers of 2016 by CIOReview magazine, noting AccelStor's commitment to unlocking the true performance of flash-based storage solutions with a software-defined approach.
In August 2016, the AccelStor NeoSapphire 3400 series was awarded the Storage Hardware Certification for VMware vSphere® as an Elite member of the VMware Technology Alliance Partner Program. This certification allows AccelStor's customers to use 10GbE models of the NeoSapphire 3400 series with their VMware virtualized environment. Now, AccelStor's complete NeoSapphire 3400 series of all-flash arrays (the NS3401, NS3405, NS3411 and NS3413) have all been awarded VMware's Storage Hardware Certifications for vSphere status and are officially VMware Ready Storage.
Also in August 2016, AccelStor won both the Most Innovative Flash Memory Technology and the Best-of-Show Technology Innovation Award for its FlexiRemap software at Flash Memory Summit 2016 in Santa Clara, California. The Summit's Best-of-Show awards reflect the highest honors in the flash memory and solid-state storage industry. The Most Innovative Flash Memory Technology award recognizes patented technologies that move flash technology forward, even becoming new industry standards.
The Silicon Review selected AccelStor as among the 50 Smartest Companies of the Year in September 2016.
In November 2016, AccelStor's NeoSapphire 3605 and 3611 Fibre Channel all-flash arrays were officially certified by Tiger Technology, making AccelStor a partner for Fibre Channel storage and connectivity.