StorONE recently announced the All-Flash Array.next (AFAn). I had the opportunity to speak to George Crump (StorONE Chief Marketing Officer) about the news, and thought I’d share some brief thoughts here.
What Is It?
It’s a box! (Sorry I’ve been re-watching Silicon Valley with my daughter recently).
[image courtesy of StorONE]
More accurately, it’s an Intel Server with Intel Optane and Intel QLC storage, powered by StorONE’s software.
S1:Tier
S1:Tier is StorONE’s tiering solution. It operates within the parameters of a high and low watermark. Once the Optane tier fills up, the data is written out, sequentially, to QLC. The neat thing is that when you need to recall the data on QLC, you don’t necessarily need to move it all back to the Optane tier. Rather, read requests can be served directly from QLC. StorONE call this a multi-tier capability, because you can then move data to cloud storage for long-term retention if required.
[image courtesy of StorONE]
S1:HA
Crump noted that the Optane drives are single ported, leading some customers to look highly available configurations. These are catered for with a variation of S1:HA, where the HA solution is now a synchronous mirror between 2 stacks.
Thoughts and Further Reading
I’m not just a fan of StorONE because the company occasionally throws me a few dollarydoos to keep the site running. I’m a fan because the folks over there do an awful lot of storage type stuff on what is essentially commodity hardware, and they’re getting results that are worth writing home about, with a minimum of fuss. The AFAn uses Optane as a storage tier, not just read cache, so you get all of the benefit of Optane write performance (many, many IOPS). It has the resilience and data protection features you see in many midrange and enterprise arrays today (namely vRAID, replication, and snapshots). Finally, it has varying support for all three use cases (block, file, and object), so there’s a good chance your workload will fit on the box.
More and more vendors are coming to market with Optane-based storage solutions. It still seems that only a small number of them are taking full advantage of Optane as a write medium, instead focusing on its benefit as a read tier. As I mentioned before, Crump and the team at StorONE have positioned some pretty decent numbers coming out of the AFAn. I think the best thing is that it’s now available as a configuration item on the StorONE TRUprice site as well, so you can see for yourself how much the solution costs. If you’re after a whole lot of performance in a small box, this might be just the thing. You can read more about the solution and check out the lab report here. My friend Max wrote a great article on the solution that you can read here.