Say good-bye to snapshots, Reduxio is telling data storage administrators today with the launch of its first hybrid flash array, the HX 550.
The San Bruno, Calif.-based storage systems startup claims that its dual-controller, 2U storage systems can streamline data and application recovery tasks by doing away with snapshots. As the term suggests, snapshots are point-in-time backup copies of data, allowing organizations to roll back their application servers to a previous state if problems arise.
Reduxio was founded in 2012. Last year, on Oct. 6, the company announced it had raised $15 million in a Series B round funding lead by hard drive maker Seagate. “Reduxio has built an architecture that can truly leverage the capabilities of hard disk drives, solid state storage, and future non-volatile technologies together in a single system,” said Rocky Pimentel, president of Global Markets and Customers at Seagate, in a statement at the time.
Reduxio’s new HX 550 array provides 38.4 terabytes (TB) of raw capacity or over 120 TB of effective capacity when the company’s Nodup data reduction features are factored in. Part of the system’s underlying TimeOS storage software foundation, Nodup technology supports always-on deduplication and compression.
The system is outfitted with eight 800 gigabyte (GB) eMLC SSDs, sixteen 2 TB SAS hard disk drives (HDDs) spinning at 7,200 RPM and 256 GB of cache courtesy of DDR3 SDRAM, enabling brisk data access and movement via Tier-X technology. The automatic block-level tiering software stores data first on flash and then transfers cold data to HDDs.
But the company’s claim to fame is BackDating, a result of the company’s work on metadata representation for flash and other high-speed storage technologies. BackDating essentially makes obsolete a core component of modern enterprise backup and application recovery strategies: the snapshot.
In a company blog post by Nir Peleg, founder and CTO of Reduxio, he described BackDating as “a reliable and foolproof way to reduce customers’ recovery time by being able to get back to any point-in-time in the past. A customer can recover any volume in one-second increments with no impact to performance.”
Gone is much of the work associated with maintaining backups, freeing up IT personnel for other tasks.
“BackDating eliminates the management and scheduling complexity associated with traditional snapshots,” claimed Peleg. “Our flash hybrid storage systems with BackDating, supports in-line in-memory dedupe and compression, and a fine-grained, highly reactive data tiering engine that continuously and autonomously moves data between multiple tiers such that application data is always optimally placed.”
ESG analyst Scott Sinclair said in prepared remarks that the technology “helps raise the bar for application recovery in terms of granularity and ease of management.” Given its always-on and automated attributes, BackDating “will simplify user processes and workflows,” he added.