SmartX has released the newest version of SMTX ZBS (version 5.0), an upgrade of its leading distributed block storage product specifically designed and developed for production environments.

Based on a stable storage core, SMTX ZBS 5.0 utilizes advanced hardware technologies and fully-optimized software, providing industry-leading high performance and low latency. With only a 3-node cluster, it can achieve performance of 770K IOPS for 4K random read. 

Equipped with rich enterprise features and intelligent management functionalities, it helps customers build distributed resource pools for large scale virtualization, private cloud, containers, etc.

As a core component of IT infrastructure, SMTX ZBS was born to meet customers’ increasing demand of creating distributed storage resource pools to support existing compute platforms, especially when the expensive and complex legacy storage falls behind the quick pace of digital transformation, and current Ceph-based products are unable to provide high performance and low latency support for mission-critical applications.

Today, based on production-readiness and flexibility of version 4.0, SMTX ZBS 5.0 continues to adapt advanced software and hardware technologies such as Intel® Optane™ Persistent Memory, NVMe-oF, 25GbE/100GbE and RDMA, achieving industry-leading performance and low latency.

  • SMTX ZBS 5.0 introduces RoCE v2 (RDMA over Converged Ethernet) to the storage network to achieve direct communication among the nodes, avoiding OS buffer overhead, which reduces the write latency of remote nodes and improves cluster overall performance.
  • Besides standard iSCSI protocol, SMTX ZBS 5.0 supports NVMe-oF, which ensures high concurrency and low latency from PCIe devices to the access network, to meet the requirements of high-performance and low-latency applications.
  • SMTX ZBS 5.0 supports an enhanced all-flash solution with Intel PMem as cache and NVMe SSD as storage medium. Leveraging PMem’s high-performance, low-latency, and non-volatile features, it can lower the latency of business-critical applications.

With above technologies, a 3-node storage cluster of SMTX ZBS 5.0 can achieve 770K IOPS for 4K random read; bandwidth can reach 8 GiBps for 256K sequential read (close to physical limit with a 25GbE network card.)

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Based on existing enterprise-level features such as snapshot protection and data protection of the product, new features have been added to ensure its intelligent management for version 5.0:

  • Automatic detection and isolation of abnormal disks: This includes unhealthy disks, sub-healthy disks, and disks with insufficient lifetime, etc., to reduce the impact on system performance and reduce the burden of operation & maintenance.
  • Recovery QoS: This business-first recovery strategy adaptively adjusts the speed of recovery or migration according to the system load on the premise of ensuring business I/O.
  • Snapshot consistency groups: It supports creating a consistency group with a group of related volumes, achieving consistent data protection by taking snapshots of the consistency group.Customers can create different types of storage resource pools according to different scenarios, and choose from flexible delivery forms.

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Create multiple types of storage resource pools:

  • Hybrid-flash resource pool: using hybrid flash such as SATA/SAS SSD + HDD.
  • All-flash storage resource pool: using all flash such as SATA/NVMe SSD.
  • Enhanced all-flash resource pool: using enhanced all flash with Intel® Optane™ Persistent Memory + NVMe SSD.

Choose from flexible delivery forms:

  • Software-only: Customers can select any mainstream server brands according to the hardware compatibility list, making full use of existing resources.
  • Halo Storage Appliance 7200: An out-of-the-box appliance to significantly save rack space.

Any inquiry about SMTX ZBS 5.0, please contact info@smartx.com.

About SmartX
SmartX is an industry leader in HCI and SDS products, building a solid IT foundation to empower enterprise digital transformation. Inspired by our purpose “Make IT Simple”, we are continuously innovating our products for scenarios of virtualization, private cloud as well as cloud-native in enterprise cloud, serving industry leaders across finance, healthcare, manufacturing, retail and real estate. Learn more about SmartX at smartx.com/global/.

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