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Nexgen’s QoS AFA has flash players in tiers

NAND replaces rotating rust in 3-tier box

Nexgen has stripped out the 7.2K disks from its hybrid flash/disk N5 hardware box and replaced them with dual-port SSDs to create a 3-tier, all flash array with quality of service features driving data movement across the tiers.

The Quality of Service features were introduced in July. The dual-active-active controller N5 system has three tiers, which were DRAM, PCIe flash cards and the hard disk drives.

In the all-flash Nexgen N5-i500 array they are DRAM, PCIe flash, and commercial SSDs.

Nexgen’s QoS has a 3-priority level structure, with mission-critical, business-critical and not-critical data classifications, and data moved dynamically between them and the corresponding array media types. The company has been awarded a US patent for this QoS technology.

The DRAM is a very fast read cache, with the PCIe flash cards being read and write stores with slower latency, and the SSDs, Toshiba 960GB, 6Gbit/s SAS ones, having longer latency and being used here as a high-performance capacity store.

SanDisk Fusion-io 1.3TB PCIe flash cards are used and these don’t yet support NVMe. Nexgen could use a different supplier in the future if it needed to.

Nexgen AFA

Nexgen all-flash array

The first or head unit in the N5-1500 has 2.6TB of PCIe flash and 15 TBG of SSDs. Up to three 15TB SSD capacity packs (expansion units) can be added with a total of 60TB capacity. All these are raw capacities by the way.

The head unit has 4 x 6-core Xeon E5645 2.4GHz processors and 96GB of RAM. There are redundant fans, hot-swap power supplies, redundant network connections (4 x 1/10GbitE), RAID 6 and hot-swap SSDs. It delivers 300,000 random read 4K IOPS and 3GB/sec throughput (256K random reads).

The feature set includes data reduction, with 50 per cent average reduction, snapshots and replication.

Nexgen has an N5-300 unit which is a single SKU for a head unit and one expansion box, a 30TB system.

It would use hybrid N5s for situations where you have less than 10TB of active data, and AFA N5s when you have more. The AFA N5s can deliver 2.5x faster performance with 50 per cent lower data access latency than hybrid N5s.

VMware’s VVOLS are supported.

The N5-1500 (N5-3000) are the flagship models and top the Nexgen range which starts at the entry-level N5, passes through the N5–300 and N5-500, to the N5-1000.

Nexgen_range

Nexgen product range

Tegile will have a multi-tier, all-flash array in 2016, the Intelliflash HD. Other single-tier, all-flash array vendors will need to make substantial SW changes to retrofit data tiering to their operating systems.

The one other known AFAs with deliverable QoS are SolidFire, with its scale-out design for cloud service providers and CSP use cases in enterprises, and X-IO with its ISE-800. Nexgen said it’s the first multi-tier AFA with QoS.

Next year it will probably be joined by Tegile, and then we shall see if the other AFA vendors jump on the magic, multi-flash tier roundabout – Dell, EMC, HDS, HPE, IBM, Kaminario, Mangstor, NetApp, SolidFire, Tintri, Violin Memory and X-IO. Nimble Storage should have an AFA out soon as well.

We can expect the next iteration of Nexgen's hardware to raise capacities.

Pick up an N5 all-flash array data sheet (PDF) here. There are more product range details here. ®

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