Object-Based Architecture
Verari Technologies’ ActiveScale File System is leading a new wave of intelligent storage. The core principle of the object-based architecture is managing data as large virtual objects in contrast with traditional storage systems that manage data in small blocks. Managing data as objects means dividing files into separate virtual data objects that are striped across smart physical storage media. These data objects can be written to smart object storage devices in massively parallel scale to remove the performance bottlenecks of traditional designs. Also, data objects can be resized without limitation and independently from other storage system activity, allowing the management of all data within a single seamless namespace and providing independent and parallel growth properties.

DirectFlow File System
The performance advantage of the Verari Technologies ActiveScale Storage Cluster stems from our out-of band DirectFLOW™ data path. Clients are empowered with a small installable file system driver the DirectFLOW client enabling direct communication between servers and StorageBlades. This concurrency eliminates the bottleneck of traditional, monolithic storage systems and delivers up to 30X performance throughput improvement. The number of data streams is limited only by the number of StorageBlades and the number of client nodes.

NFS/CIFS Virtualization
In addition to the DirectFLOW protocol for scalable bandwidth, the Verari Technologies Storage Cluster supports scalable random I/O application needs through UNIX NFS and Windows CIFS data access protocols. By supporting these standard file access protocols, applications can take full advantage of the Verari Technologies Storage Cluster with no changes required on the client.

Clustering/Load-Balancing
The ActiveScale File System has been designed from the ground up for efficient partitioning of workload and minimal interdependence between clustered elements. Therefore, Verari Technologies DirectorBlades™ can be clustered together for a highly scalable, fault tolerant storage network. By injecting intelligence throughout the object-based architecture, fine grained, dynamic load-balancing is achieved. To remove potential I/O bottlenecks, active “hot spots” are identified quickly and object migration routines are invoked to move existing data objects to less utilized StorageBlades. In addition, DirectorBlade metadata management activity can be dynamically allocated among all DirectorBlades in the cluster.

ActiveRAID
To ensure data protection the ActiveScale File System stripes objects across multiple StorageBlades. Verari Technologies ActiveRAID™ chooses RAID 0 or RAID 5 for each file to best suit that file’s size and type (RAID 0 can be manually selected). Also, the file system employs a unique reconstruction capability, Verari Technologies ActiveSpares™. It distributes spare disk space across all StorageBlades and involves all of those blades in recovering from a StorageBlade failure, improving data reconstruction time by 2X relative to traditional RAID designs. The Verari Technologies ActiveScale File System powers the premier storage system for scalable Linux clusters. Built on an object-based architecture and optimized to meet the unique needs of Linux cluster customers, the Verari Technologies ActiveScale Storage Cluster is designed to fundamentally enhance customer expectations for storage performance and management. It offers breakthrough performance—in throughput and random I/O—exceptional scalability and greatly simplified management. To find out more, contact Verari Technologies at 888-874-3800.