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45Drives adds to high-performance portfolio to embrace AI
High performance is just one characteristic needed for AI storage; another is bulk storage for data not currently in use. 45Drives is offering customized offerings for both.
Open source storage vendor 45Drives is expanding its high-performance storage to its portfolio, enabling customers to run more workload types, including artificial intelligence and machine learning.
The Stornado F16 is a new NVMe storage server with sequential read speeds of 56.5 GBps and sequential write speeds of 55 GBps, along with random reads of 8.7 million IOPS and random writes of 10.2 million IOPS. The server is aimed at AI and machine learning workloads, as well as high-frequency trading. The new server allows customers to choose either AMD EPYC 8004 or fourth-generation Intel Xeon CPUs, up to 4 TB memory, up to 100 GbE for networking and all NVMe SSDs for storage.
High performance is the language of managed service providers, and 45Drives is speaking that language with its new release, said Tom Lawrence, an analyst at Lawrence Systems.
"Storage is a big pain point as it does not lend itself easily to any cloud platform without a huge price tag," Lawrence said. "The traditional on-prem offerings from the usual names we see in certain quadrants are also very expensive, while actually not being better."
Performance on-prem
This isn't 45Drives' first foray into high-performance or all-flash servers. The company released its first iteration of the Stornado in 2019. Earlier this year, 45Drives unveiled the Stornado F2, its first all-NVMe storage server offering. The Stornado F16, which begins shipping in a couple of weeks, expands the line and utilizes 16 PCIe 4.0 U.3 SSDs for higher storage performance and up to 480 TB raw capacity.
The vendor primarily supplies bulk hybrid storage in Ceph, unified open source storage software clusters, but the addition of the F16 shouldn't be seen as a directional change for the company, according to Brett Kelly, technical director of 45Drives. AI workloads will need both cost-effective storage and high-performant storage.
"With [AI workloads], there is a scary amount of data … that can't all live on flash; it's just not economical," he said.
If a customer is unsure of its performance and storage needs, using the cloud makes sense, Lawrence said. But as the customer's storage and compute increase, so will cloud costs.
"Running AI systems on-prem can be much more cost-effective, while also being much faster," he said.
Still open and customizable
While 45Drives pushes deeper into higher-performance storage, the vendor remains committed to its open source and customization roots, according to Doug Milburn, president and co-founder of 45Drives. The vendor offers customers a choice when putting hardware and software together based on needs. In contrast, he said other companies, such as Super Micro and Dell Technologies, tend to offer choice in hardware only.
"Our extension is a full enterprise solution, open source software and clustering," Milburn said. "And the software is matched with the hardware for a given service."
This software-hardware customization helps set 45Drives apart from other legacy vendors, Lawrence said.
"45Drives showcases a lot of innovation by being not only the leaders in high capacity and high-performance storage equipment, but with their commitment to the open source community," he said.
Adam Armstrong is a TechTarget Editorial news writer covering file and block storage hardware and private clouds. He previously worked at StorageReview.
