Nyriad Brings GPU-Powered Storage for Efficient Data Access, Performance, and Capacity to Active Archives

Active archives provide an important, modern strategy to manage the massive, strong double-digit data growth prevalent today. With a solid foundation that includes technologies from HDD to tape and optical, in the data center and in the cloud, active archives are clearly here to stay. They not only offer large capacity points at low prices but provide businesses with faster access to archived data, which they increasingly require. The analytical value of data has grown immensely and in some cases that value is even more critical than the data itself, which means archiving is no longer just about cold storage. Organizations require the ability to actively and cost-effectively access, manage, and mine their massively growing archived data to derive value.

Nyriad is excited to have recently joined the Active Archive Alliance. Active archives are an important and rapidly evolving must-have ability for many organizations across the globe, and the Alliance provides a common forum where challenges and best practices can be shared to ensure that we continue to provide the best solutions to our customers.

As artificial intelligence (AI), edge computing and other applications utilize massive data pools to drive analytic workloads for business insights,  stored data volumes continue to grow at a rapid pace. Additionally, many organizations need to comply with regulatory requirements for long term storage and rely on archival data. In many cases, sensitive archival data is the only copy of that data, leaving it unprotected.

Furthermore, storing petabytes of data for legal purposes or other compliance requirements, combined with the need for fast retrieval of data for research and business analytics, can become a significant challenge due to the huge scale of data involved. The need for active access to data creates a significant performance and efficiency problem for many companies.

A significant amount of data is accessed or used again after it is stored. Retrieving it is a slow process and waiting for the data to be transferred on to SSD can be very expensive as well. With Nyriad, organizations can choose to store their data on HDD that acts as a warm archive tier allowing users to access their data both quickly and efficiently.

Nyriad® offers the world’s first GPU-accelerated storage system, unleashing the power and speed of GPUs to accelerate business outcomes with a unique combination of high performance, resilience, and simplicity.

The Nyriad UltraIO™ storage system delivers flash-level performance at the TCO of hard drives, protects business-critical workloads with fail-safe data availability, and provides true operational simplicity to organizations that rely on applications such as media and imaging, backup and recovery, high performance computing (HPC), and active archiving.  The UltraIO storage system supports sustainability initiatives by reducing energy costs and consumption up to 60% annually and releasing ⅓ the carbon emissions compared to similarly-sized alternatives.

Nyriad delivers storage that is simple to understand, buy, deploy, use and manage, giving organizations the agility to accelerate the innovations needed to solve the world’s most critical challenges.

The image below illustrates 200 drives used in RAID 6 configurations versus wide stripe erasure codes.  The Nyriad solution actually extends the efficiency to as high as 92% with 204 drives total with 5% capacity set aside for garbage collection and another ~3% set aside for parity and checksum.

The typical scenario offers 75% capacity efficiency, 2.7 PB usable capacity, 50 drives consumed for redundancy, and local protection supplied by two drives per array. If the wrong three drives fail, data is lost even with having 50 drives worth of redundancy.

In contrast, Nyriad delivers 90% capacity efficiency, 3.24 PB usable capacity (over 1/2 PB more capacity than the typical scenario), 20 drives consumed for redundancy, and global protection supplied by 20 drives – any 20 drives can fail with no data loss.

We look forward to working with the Active Archive Alliance and collaborating as a group to advance the many opportunities for technology innovation and development in this exciting space.