Amplidata Delivers Top Throughput, Says Independent Test

FRANKFURT--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Amplidata, an innovator in object storage technology, today unveiled the results of an independent performance test that shows that its scalable AmpliStor® system delivers industry-leading file throughput and maintains this performance even under severe loads. These results were measured on a standard AmpliStor system with power efficient Intel® XEON processors and SATA disk drives, and will be welcomed by IT administrators who are struggling to manage petabytes of unstructured data such as videos and images with traditional storage, and who are striving to meet demanding service level agreements.

“We were quite impressed with Amplidata’s systems. The BitSpread advanced erasure coding technology allowed us to read data even in the event of four complete node failures, while performing better than other object storage systems that use object replication for data protection”

According to the report by Howard Marks, analyst at DeepStorage.net, Amplidata’s scale out storage platform AmpliStor delivered up to 3 GByte/s of read and write throughput in a single rack system – a real-world configuration that can be deployed by many customers at an affordable price point. The system delivered nearly linear scaling as resources are added and maintained performance throughout the test.

Such results clearly negate the traditional belief that object storage systems fail to provide high performance, the report continues. Although such a stance might have been warranted with first generation of object storage systems on the market, today’s object storage systems have evolved to address the storage of large volumes of objects (files), where throughput and large scale durability are most important, rather than small sub-file updates which have been the performance characteristic of traditional NAS and SAN systems.

Importantly, the AmpliStor test system was configured as it is delivered to customers: with standard 3TB SATA disk drives, in an affordable, real world big data configuration. While Amplidata supports optional SSD caching to significantly enhance the performance for repeatedly read content and in WAN environments, it has chosen to perform the tests without caching to demonstrate the marketed leading performance of its erasure coding BitSpread technology and its performance optimised BitDynamics disk pool that provides on-line verification, repair and maintenance with minimal overall system performance impact.

The report, available online, details that AmpliStor delivers:

• Blazingly Fast Performance over 2.9GB/second. The test system include 24 Amplidata AS36 storage nodes and three AmpliStor controllers, each configured with dual Intel® E5-2650 processors, 64GB RAM and dual 10Gb Ethernet network interfaces. During the test, even with one single controller, the system would routinely deliver performance of over 950MB/s (nearly 1 GB per second) across a wide range of object sizes when multiple streams of data were running in parallel. In addition, performance scaled near linearly until the network connecting the controllers to the storage nodes was saturated.
• Rock-Solid Throughput as capacity grows. Performance was also tested when the platform was loaded with large volumes of data: this demonstrated results different from many other storage systems which become slower as they start to fill up in capacity, AmpliStor maintained its throughput even with over 85% of its capacity filled and with the team writing new data 95% as fast as when the system was first configured.
• Performance Even Under Continued Load. Even when the system was 85% full and was repairing after shutting down over 20% of the storage, it retained over 90% of its performance. AmpliStor ultra high-durability comes from the product’s BitSpread patent-pending erasure coding technology that shrinks the occurrence of data loss to less than one in 15 nines or 99.9999999999999% data durability, the highest on the market today.

“We were quite impressed with Amplidata’s systems. The BitSpread advanced erasure coding technology allowed us to read data even in the event of four complete node failures, while performing better than other object storage systems that use object replication for data protection,” said Howard Marks, founder and chief scientist at DeepStorage.net. “We saw over 320MB/s single stream throughput when reading a single 1GB object which is more than twice what such a system could deliver reading the object from a single SATA drive. This is genuinely remarkable performance.”

“This new result certainly will be significant to any IT manager charged with managing growing volumes of data without a linearly growing budget,” said independent blogger Hans De Leenheer who is familiar with AmpliStor. “Every IT manager always is looking for increased performance. The main difference between Amplidata and other object storage providers is that Amplidata objects are not replicated but rather split into many small chunks with an advanced security algorithm on top and then spread across multiple disks and nodes. Besides a huge difference in overhead, the main advantage of Amplidata’s approach is the dramatic increase in throughput – as apparently was quite in evidence.”

“We are thrilled with these results because they support what we already knew: that object storage doesn’t have to come with a compromise on performance but that it can actually help organisations meet their business objectives,” said Tom Leyden, director of alliances and marketing at Amplidata. “Our AmpliStor platform can help organisations from early on as it can easily and quickly scale to meet growing needs. This enables them to focus on designing the most effective data strategy rather that spend time trying to cope with the ever-expanding amount of unstructured data.”

About Amplidata

Founded in 2008, Amplidata provides AmpliStor® optimised object storage solutions for Big Unstructured Data. Its patent-pending BitSpread® erasure coding technology provides the highest storage reliability and performance at the lowest possible cost - scaling beyond petabytes and requiring 50-70% less storage capacity to protect data compared to traditional solutions.

The Amplidata team consists of storage experts behind the success of DataCenter Technologies, Dedigate and Q-layer. Named a “Cool Storage Company” in 2012, Amplidata is privately funded by Intel Capital, Quantum, Swisscom Ventures, Endeavour Vision and Hummingbird Ventures. Operational headquarters are in Lochristi, Belgium with US headquarters in Redwood City and sales and support worldwide. www.amplidata.com.

AmpliStor is a registered trademark of Amplidata. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.