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FlashGrid's VVOL-like VSAN will have Oracle trembling

Upstart punts competing flash accelerator software

FlashGrid provides open storage software for Oracle clusters, using standard NVMe PCIe SSDs inside the database servers, and turning it into scalable shared storage, a virtual flash SAN for the database. There can be 0.4TB to 50 TB per node, and between two and 100 clustered nodes.

The firm introduced itself to an IT Press Tour in Silicon Valley in early December. It uses Oracle ASM for high availability and data mirroring, ASM being Automatic Storage Management. This is Oracle software, included in its database, to manage file systems and volumes.

Data Base Admins can use it to control volumes and drives via standard SQL commands. In a way it is roughly equivalent to VVOL-like functionality but dedicated to Oracle’s DBMS.

Oracle ASM talks to storage which either be local to the database nodes or accessed as an external SAN, such as a Fibre Channel-connected XtremIO array.

FlashGrid was founded in 2015 by CEO Alex Miroshnichenko and CTO Artem Danielov, who have Veritas, Intel, EMC, HGST, VMware, and IBM experience between them. Their software targets Oracle ASM and RAC, supporting RHEL v7 and Oracle VM. It also runs in the VMware environment.

FlashGrid CEO Alex Miroshnichenko

FlashGrid CEO and co-founder Alex Miroshnichenko

It provides free-to-use basic software with paid support, and paid-for software with large enterprise functionality. Miroshnichenko said: “Our goal is to make open storage software available to all Oracle database customers for free. Why buy a storage array when you can download the FlashGrid software?”

FlashGrid_architecture

Miroshnichenko says his firm’s software maximizes database performance with FlashGrid Read-Local technology, based on ASM’s Preferred Reads. There is a choice of 10/40/100 GbitE or InfiniBand/RDMA for network connectivity. The design is fully distributed with no single point of failure.

He cites an EMC XtremIO array supporting a three node ASM deployment, and providing 250,000 IOPS and 3GB/sec of bandwidth. In contrast the same deployment using in-node NVMe SSDs and FlashGrid software provides 4.4 million IOPS and 36GB/sec.

FlashGrid_Performance

In addition, the CEO tells us that FlashGrid technology can be used to provide hyper-converged, high-availability storage for Docker containers. Also an NFS filer cluster can be built on ACFS (Oracle ASM Cluster File System) and FlashGrid software.

FlashGrid claims its ASM storage system has up to 10x lower cost than third-party SANs or Oracle’s own Exadata.

Flashgrid_config_Pricing

We understand there are five or six FlashGrid POCs in progress, some outside the USA. If you want to have a look then a beta version of FlashGrid’s software, v15.12, is now available. ®

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