A WildFire Technology Overview
 WildFire
Storage Technologies are based on WildFire's
patented Enterprise Storage Stack (ESS), first developed in
2006. The stack is a software layer designed to create a
perfect storage stream. With our storage stack, storage
devices such as SSDs see perfectly aligned, long, linear writes,
directly memory mapped,
regardless of whether the source data is linear or random.
These linear writes are immensely faster than scattered
random writes. They also radically reduce wear amplification
in flash media.
Perfect Flash Performance: the WildFire
all-Flash stack writes at the linear speed of the device or
array. This involves keeping the block IO patterns
"perfectly aligned" at all stages. An 8 drive RAID-5 array
with SSDs that linear write at 500MB/sec, can write random
data at 3.5GB/sec or 850K 4K random write IOPS. Larger
arrays have been benchmarked at over 2.5M IOPS. More
importantly, the reduced wear amplification of our design
preserves performance in a way that other solutions can't.
Minimal Flash Wear: our stack reduces the
wear amplification of Flash SSDs, as well as RAID
amplification and data amplification. ESS can improve
system-wide flash wear, for a given workload, by as much as
40:1. This lets you use less durable and less expensive
flash in storage devices while still achieving durability
goals. For instance, consumer (1,000 to 3,000 erase cycle endurance) flash
can achieve data center performance expectations. With
consumer flash, you can expect 5 year life even with an
overwrite per day and minimal over-provisioning.
Higher Data Integrity: a number of features
are designed into our storage stack to increase data
integrity beyond levels normally available in source media.
High Speed BonFire SAN: Our
BonFire SAN software is designed to make SAN
configuration and management a pleasant and easy experience. Most
BonFire management sequences occur in sub-second real time.
BonFire supports both ZFS for hard disk management as well
as ESS arrays for Flash SSDs.
ESS-2, Coming Soon:
Our next generation storage engine, ESS-2, is in
development. ESS-2 will support a new form of cached
memory, high speed deduplication, erasure codes, and dual
controller high availability. Availability is expected
in the first half of 2021.
File Systems and Other
Opportunities: Recent testing of our data
structures together with various directory structures has
demonstrated that small reads and writes can be executed
20-fold to 30-fold faster than than was possible with xfs or
ext4. This leads to the conclusion that with a mix of
data sizes, the ESS-based file system would run
approximately 3x faster than widely used File Systems such
as xfs and ext4.
Unmatched value: Wildfire Servers are far
and away the value leader in Flash storage appliances, both
in terms of $/GB and $/IOPS. No one else is even close.
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