Cloud inspires new storage approach

It is a rare week when there is not some news somewhere related to the never-ending, explosive growth in data storage requirements. It is an even rarer week when there is a story about a new technology that claims to provide a new and different solution to the problem.

Here is just such a story, and one that shows how public cloud models can be re-applied to on-premise storage solutions. A start company, Coho Data, has emerged from what US businesses love to refer to as `stealth mode’ to unveil what it claims is a completely re-imagined storage model.

Called Coho DataStream the new approach packages the value of public cloud into an on-premise solution for datacentres of all sizes, using a software-defined approach to combine commodity hardware with software tuned for the latest PCIe flash technologies. It is reckoned to deliver twice the price/performance of all-flash arrays. The architecture offers a level of scale and predictable performance that enables businesses to focus on their data instead of managing storage hardware and performance issues.

“We deliver services to a range of internal customers and require a storage solution that can provide cloud-level scale to help us manage the 12PBs of data and 4K VMs we currently have”

While cloud computing has given companies more options for easily storing and managing data in hosted environments, these cloud generation services have opted to use new approaches leveraging commodity hardware and smart software instead of buying traditional storage products.

Inspired by this cloud approach and using their experience in building the virtualisation layers of Amazon’s EC2 service, Coho Data’s founders built the DataStream to address underlying scale and performance limitations in traditional storage architectures. The DataStream brings a fundamentally new storage building block to the datacentre that delivers the modularity and economics needed to enable businesses to rapidly scale data capacity and performance on demand to any application.

“Even as new advancements in flash memory have come on the scene, the storage industry has remained stagnant, relying on a 30-year-old architecture to deliver performance and accessibility,” said Ramana Jonnala, CEO, Coho Data. “By redesigning the storage stack itself, we have taken the best ideas from public cloud-based architectures and improved them for demanding on-premise datacentres.

“DataStream uses sophisticated software to take advantage of flash in such a way that it can be used for all applications, not just the top tier ones. Whether data is in the public or private cloud, it should be on a storage architecture that can meet the scalability and performance today’s cloud generation companies need, at the pricing they demand.”

Coho Data starts with a cloud-inspired storage model that combines the use of open commodity hardware and breakthrough innovations including a storage stack optimised for PCIe flash and the use of software-defined networking (SDN) to embed storage intelligence in the network.  

It provides up to 180K IOPS in every 2U Coho DataStream appliance. This can be scaled linearly for 2x the price/performance of all-flash arrays.  The use of open, commodity hardware and standards like OpenFlow for software-defined networking delivers hardware flexibility that rides the commoditisation curve and offers multi-generation hardware compatibility to protect investments.

Starting at $2.50/GB, before de-duplication and compression, businesses can start with a single Coho DataStream chassis of 40TB and grow incrementally as needed without the upfront expenditure of traditional arrays. With 10-minute plug and play installation times, single system management, and automated performance tuning and load balancing, businesses can eliminate the time spent molding traditional storage to fit their varying applications and instead focus on more important business priorities.