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Privacy policyWHAT IS xiRAID
xiRAID is the world’s first and fastest software RAID for the new generation of storage, that not only protects your directly attached flash drives, but also those connected via NVMe-oF™. Learn more why xiRAID performance is superior to any hardware RAID controller, and the level of reliability is even greater.
High-performance software RAID
Software raid instead of hardware controller
Using xiRAID instead of a traditional hardware RAID controller gives our customers additional storage performance, better TCO and simpler system maintenance.
- 1Much faster than hardware RAID controllers
- 2Independent from hardware upgrades and modifications
- 3Simple migration between storage systems
- 4Saves one PCIe slot (for even more NVMe drives or extra connectivity)
- 5Unlimited product lifetime
- 6Immune to physical damage
- 7Works with NVMe-oF™ devices
Our features
High Performance
- 150 GB/s and 30 000 000 IO/s
- Latency below 0.5ms
- No performance penalty in mixed I/O workloads
- Low performance hit in degraded RAID state
Usability and compatibility
- Wide range of RAID levels:
0/1/10/5/6/7.3/50/60/70 - Works with local and remote (NVMe-oF™) drives
- Clients access RAID array as a local block device
- POSIX API support: no need to change applications or file systems
Lightweight
- Less than 10% CPU usage under maximum workload
- Low system memory footprint: less than 4 GB of DRAM required for optimal performance
The challenge
New storage technologies pose a challenge to data protection
NVMe can no longer be considered a new technology – it’s been here for almost a decade and the past few years saw an ever-increasing adoption rate for NVMe storage devices both in the consumer and enterprise markets. Legacy SAS and especially SATA protocols are becoming bottlenecks for SSDs, and a transition to a faster, more efficient storage technology has very compelling TCO and performance benefits.
Composable Disaggregated Infrastructure (CDI) approach is also rapidly emerging, bringing the abstraction of compute, storage, and networking resources from their physical locations. All of these lead us to a new world where we need new approaches for performance and data protection.
However, moving from such a well-known technology and ecosystem like SATA and SAS that have been with us since 1970’s, is not easy. Some market research states “…performance problems associated with storage software inhibit the growth of the market. Furthermore, issues related to data integrity and data protection act as challenges for the growth of the market.”
The solution
Xinnor is positioning the innovative xiRAID as the only software solution on the market today that effectively works with local and networked NVMe devices. With I/O handling parallelization and lockless datapath, xiRAID arrays have very small RAID penalties and perform very close to the raw hardware capabilities. xiRAID is purpose-built for new types of flash drives, with a strong attention to their architecture and datapath features. It is a lightweight software module with low CPU and RAM usage.
xiRAID works with block devices – local or remote, using any transport – PCIe, NVMe-oF or SPDK target, by Fibre channel or InfiniBand. And it provides a local block device to the system.
Performance comparison
| Workload on RAID5 | xiRAID | GPU Hardware RAID | High-end Hardware RAID |
|---|---|---|---|
| 4k Random Read | 30M IOps | 19M IOps | 3.5M IOps |
| 4k Random Write | 11M IOps | 1.5M IOps | 180K IOps |
| 512k Sequential Read | 260 GB/s | 110 GB/s | 13.5 GB/s |
| 512k Sequential Write | 62 GB/s | 22 GB/s | 4 GB/s |
| 4k Random Read in Rebuild | 27M IOps | 5.5M IOps | 36K IOps |
| 4k Random Write in Rebuild | 8M IOps | 1.1M IOps | 18K IOps |
Raid options for NVMe
Compared to the rich ecosystem of SATA and SAS RAID options, working with NVMe is not so straightforward. First, there are hardware RAID adapters that can RAID NVMe devices as well as SAS/SATA. These cards are fast enough for 4 drives directly attached, but for more they have to rely on PCIe switches with added performance hit due to PCIe lane oversubscription. They add hardware cost, another layer of complexity between the CPU and drives, and have performance limitations due to SoC capabilities (1.8M IOPS per card).
Software RAID offers high flexibility, zero associated hardware costs and vendor-agnosticism in terms of compatibility. It’s worth noticing that software RAID is currently the only option to support the new class of NVMe-oF JBOF (EBOF) devices for disaggregated storage in the CDI world.
Our product based on several performance principles:
- 1We have our own patented RAID calculation engine, based on a decade of math research and in-depth knowledge of CPU operation.
- 2Lockless datapath, no spinlocks, no scheduling, no memory copy.
- 3For fastest RAID we designed a new calculation engine, which is fast and simple. It uses only one simple vector operation and has less data move operations.