Stellus Technologies launched a network-attached storage (NAS) system capable of processing unstructured data at 10 times the speed of existing systems.
Based on a software-defined file system written on top of a key-value store, the Stellus Data Platform can be acquired either as an appliance or in the form of a virtual image that IT teams can deploy themselves on-premises, in the cloud or at the network edge.
Ken Grohe, senior vice president and chief revenue officer for Stellus, said the operating system created for the Stellus Data Platform has been under development for the past five years thanks mainly to $70 million in funding from Samsung. As a provider of memory technologies widely used in storage systems, Samsung has a vested interest in advancing the adoption of next-generation storage systems capable of supporting a wide array of emerging applications, he said.
The appliance Stellus provides is built around 8TB hot-swappable, non-volatile memory express (NVMe) solid-state drives (SSDs). The base configuration is delivered in a 5RU2 rack that comes with 184TB of storage. The largest configuration comes in a 17RU rack to provide access to 1.475PB of storage capacity. The Stellus Data Platform can deliver throughput rates of 20 to 80+ GB/s reads and 19-70+ GB/s write throughput, according to the company.
The Stellus Data Platform is designed specifically to address the needs of emerging applications in, for example, the medical and life sciences sector accessing massive amounts of data that existing NAS systems are either too slow or costly to address. The adoption of most of those applications are now being driven by DevOps teams rather than traditional storage administrators, Grohe said.
Just as significantly, he said, the Stellus Data Platform is designed from the ground up to allow IT organizations to scale-up performance and capacity independently. That “Scale Through” architecture means IT teams don’t have to add additional “dead wood” to scale performance in the form of additional storage units that end up having only a small amount of data loaded on to them, said Grohe.
In addition, the key-value store at the core of the platform enables searching and identifying unstructured data using metadata to eliminate the need for data caches and global data maps.
Most big data analytics and artificial intelligence (AI) applications are deployed in the cloud today in part because legacy storage systems in on-premises environments can’t support them economically. The limiting factor, however, has not necessarily been the underlying technology, but rather the need to be backward-compatible with existing storage systems. As a startup, Grohe said Stellus enjoys the luxury of not being encumbered by a classic case of the innovator’s dilemma.
It’s too early to say to what degree Stellus might supplant rivals such as Dell Technologies, NetApp and Hewlett-Packard Enterprise. Grohe said Stellus has signed up more than 500 customers to participate in its beta program. The challenge going forward will be determining to what degree Stellus will be employed to support a growing niche of emerging applications versus becoming a new foundation on which a next-generation NAS platform will be used to also support mainstream applications.
