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About
Addressing the growing Autonomous Vehicle (AV) market, Cheetah RAID is releasing a ruggedized, compact server designed to sit under a seat or in the trunk. The Cheetah RAID Prowler is powered by a 3.6GHz 8-core or 16-core processor, with up to 128GB memory and four NVMe drive bays housed in hot-swappable canisters supporting up to 120TB.
The solution
Cheetah Raid has partnered with Xinnor to provide high-performance software RAID technology to meet the stringent requirement the Prowler system demands. The Cheetah RAID Prowler is the smallest high-performance data logger built for vehicle and militaryapplications.
The Cheetah RAID PROWLER autonomous server was specifically designed for autonomous vehicles. However, being a high-performance rugged server/JBOF, the Prowler can be used in applications that need to capture a lot of data at a high throughput in a harsh environment, including military, surveillance and media & entertainment. The removable drive canister allows to easily offload data to the ingest system and quickly return to the field with a fresh canister.
One of the significant components, other than the rugged chassis, is the NVMe used for critical data collection. HDDs would not fare well in the conditions described, so flash-based media is the obvious choice. The chassis is mounted in the vehicle in an inconspicuous location, typically under the seat or in the trunk. The SSD canister is placed in the server for data collection.
Partnership with Xinnor
Cheetah RAID collaborates with Xinnor to provide a RAID solution with outstanding performance. Although Prowler will support all RAID levels, applications in this space will typically utilize RAID 0 or 5, as well as 1/10/6/7.3/n+m.
xiRAID a software RAID engine for Linux that can reveal full NVMe performance, and it is very efficient with RAID5/6. With I/O handling parallelization and lockless datapath, xiRAID utilizes maximum hardware performance capabilities to achieve the highest performance rate.
Configuration and maintenance for xiRAID software is performed using the provided CLI utility for Linux.
Test results
For the testing both RAID0 and RAID5 configurations were used. Since the intended application focuses on sequential data transfer, we used a block size of 512KB to measure read and write performance.
Inside the system RAID5 sequential transfer speeds were benchmarked at 14.2GB/s read and 8.6GB/s write. For RAID0, we measured 14.7GB/s read and 12.8GB/s write.
Externally, leveraging a single NVMe-oF client running Ubuntu 20.04 with two 100GbE cables directly attached to the Prowler, the same sequential transfer tests were run.
RAID5 sequential transfer speeds peaked at 13.7GB/s read and 4.6GB/s write. For RAID0 the measured performance was 14GB/s read and 13.1GB/s write.
Details
Don’t let the size fool you; the Prowler is a powerful server for data logging. The server design is ideal for harsh environments that demand a rugged build but still allow components such as the NVMe flash to be quickly swapped when full.
The integrated Xinnor software provides the data reliability needed to meet even the most demanding data protection requirements. XiRAID offers ultra-high performance, with minimal CPU overhead and low DRAM footprint.