Silicon Valley-based enterprise storage startup, SoftIron, announced the release of their newest Ceph-optimized storage appliance, HyperDrive Density+, at the Open Infrastructure Summit today. HyperDrive is a software-defined storage appliance built on Ceph, custom designed and purpose-built for scale-out enterprise storage.

SoftIron's HyperDrive platform is a portfolio of dedicated Ceph appliances and management software, purpose-built for software-defined storage (SDS). HyperDrive Density+ harnesses their unique, embedded multi-processor technology to compactly combine performance and internal flash tiering into a single, 1U Ceph appliance. The result is the ideal solution for those looking to balance performance and price point in their data centers.

SDS is a popular enterprise storage solution due to its' flexibility and ability to scale as an organization grows, and Ceph is the leading open-source software for SDS. In the past, users looking to solve the conflicting needs for high-performance and cost-efficiencies would have been limited to complicated Ceph cluster arrangements. Now, HyperDrive Density+ effortlessly solves the problem by providing the performance of an all-flash SSD tier with the added benefit of an efficient HDD tier.

Tim Massey, SoftIron's CEO explains: "Currently if you have a situation where you need high-performance drives for one data set and cost-effective storage for another set of data, you're pretty restricted and really only have two available options. You either deploy two different Ceph clusters, one for each data set or, you deploy one Ceph cluster with enough of each drive type to be able to handle redundancy, which is typically triple replicated. As you can imagine, these are very complicated and expensive solutions that are not serving the enterprise in the least. HyperDrive Density+ solves this problem by combining performance and internal flash tiering into a single, 1U Ceph appliance."

By combining HDD and SSD into one high-performance, internally tiered storage node, cost efficiency objectives can be met without having to sacrifice performance. This reduces the total cost of ownership by saving time and money over the lifetime of the estate, as well as the upfront cost of the appliance. HyperDrive Density+ Storage provides the performance of all flash with the benefit of only paying for HDD level storage.

Coupled with the HyperDrive Storage Manager, all of this can be managed via a unified and intuitive online system, vastly reducing the management complexity and overhead of your storage.