VDURA has upgraded its VDURA Data Platform (VDP) storage operating system to provide more performance, scalability, and simpler management – with a twin focus on AI and HPC users.
VDURA was previously known as Panasas, and its flagship product was PanFS (parallel file system software). It claims VDP is a significant modernization on previous releases, with a move to a fully parallel, microservices-based architecture, a new flash-optimized metadata engine, and an enhanced object storage layer.
CEO Ken Claffey stated: “Our latest release simplifies data management while delivering exceptional performance and reliability. By enabling enterprises to scale seamlessly, VDURA accelerates AI initiatives and helps businesses tackle complexity to achieve transformative results.”
The VDP software introduces VeLO (Velocity Layered Operations) and a VPOD (Virtualized Protected Object Device) concept. VDP is deployed as discrete microservices, simplifying deployment across thousands of nodes and helping ensure linear performance scalability with an infinitely expandable global namespace.
It has intelligent data orchestration capabilities that enable optimal data placement across discrete tiers of storage, all sharing a unified data and control plane within a single namespace.
VeLO is a key-value store used within VDP’s Director layer for handling small files and metadata operations, often found in AI workloads. VDP supports an infinitely scalable number of VeLO instances in the same Global Namespace. VeLO is optimized for flash and delivers up to two million IOPS per instance.
VPODs are discrete, virtualized, protected storage units, which provide the foundation of data storage in hybrid nodes. VPOD instances are infinitely scalable, operate within a unified global namespace, and provide high performance and flexible scalability. Data is safeguarded through erasure coding across multiple VPODs in a VDP cluster, with an optional, additional layer of erasure coding within each VPOD for enhanced protection. This multi-layered approach achieves up to 11 nines of durability with minimal overhead. Data reduction services further optimize efficiency, reducing costs and total ownership expenses.
VDURA has also introduced a V5000 Certified Platform – a hardware architecture combining modular storage nodes that can be configured for maximum throughput, capacity, or IOPS, depending on the user’s requirements.
It includes:
- 1RU Director Nodes powered by the latest AMD EPYC 9005 processors, Nvidia ConnectX-7, Broadcom 200Gbit/sec Ethernet, SAS 4 adapters, and Phison PCIe NVMe SSDs, optimized for high IOPS and metadata operations through VeLO.
- Hybrid Storage Nodes incorporating the same 1RU server used with the Director Node and 4RU JBODs running VPODs for cost-effective bulk storage with high performance and reliability.
VDURA tells us that VDP supports a flexible ratio of HDD to flash content, meaning customers can balance capacity and throughput, while maintaining a consistent global namespace, and optimizing VDP configurations for cost, performance, and durability needs. We asked VDURA a few questions about this VDP release to find out more.
Will The VDURA Data Platform (VDP) support GPU Direct?
Yes, VDURA is planning to support GPUDirect Storage (GDS), as well as RDMA and RoCE (v2), summer of 2025. Ultra Ethernet Transport support will follow afterwards.
Do the V5000 Director Nodes support SAS?
The V5000 Director Nodes are all NVMe-based and do not use SAS. The Storage Nodes do support SAS 4 adapters to manage high-density, high-performance JBODs within the platform, enabling scalable and cost-effective bulk storage with optimized performance.
How do V5000 Director nodes communicate with VPODs in hybrid nodes?
V5000 Director Nodes communicate with VPODs over a high-speed network. This can be either Ethernet 100/200/400 or InfiniBand NDR. SAS is not used as a network between Director and Hybrid Nodes.
How does a parallel file system “talk” to a VPOD object storage backend? Do the Director Nodes do file-to-object mapping?
The VDURA Data Platform utilizes a unified namespace where Director Nodes handle metadata and small files via VeLO and larger data through VPODs. The Director Nodes manage file-to-object mapping, allowing seamless integration between the parallel file system and object storage.
What Phison SSDs are used in the V5000 Director Nodes?
The V5000 Director Nodes are equipped with Phison Pascari X200 PCIe NVMe SSDs with various capacity options.
Is VDP with VeLO and VPODs a disaggregated architecture?
Yes, VDP with VeLO and VPODs instances operates as part of a disaggregated, composable architecture.
- The software instances are disaggregated from the physical hardware via the distributed microservices architecture.
- The metadata and data are disaggregated to different logical and physical domains within the same global namespace.
- The hardware platforms are themselves disaggregated and composable with compute-intensive Director Nodes that house the VeLO instances and then the Storage Nodes that house the VPOD instances, with a number of Director Nodes and Storage Nodes supported per cluster/namespace, all connected via a high-speed network.
Will VDP run in the public clouds, considering it is microservices-based and supports storage classes?
Yes, we’re providing early access to the cloud edition of VDP to some of our customers now. General availability is set for the first half of 2025, enabling VDURA to seamlessly support both on-prem and public cloud instances of VDP.
Can VDURA offer thoughts on how VDP compares and contrasts to (1) Storage Scale, (2) DDN’s Lustre, and (3) WEKA’s data platform?
VDURA’s platform combines the high-performance parallel file system capabilities with object storage in a single namespace.
IBM Storage Scale (aka GPFS) has a similar design point origin to Lustre as a “scratch” file system. IBM has developed its data protection capability over time bolting on additional layers into the ever-deeper, more complex stack. However, it does not offer the same level of protection as VDP and the biggest difference we hear from customers that have experience of both is that VDP offers far greater ease of use and reliability.
DDN’s Lustre is a “scratch” file system. It is not designed to protect your data. Nor is it designed for the reliability or the ease of use required by enterprise customers. At the most basic level, it requires a third-party/additional software stack to provide data protection and handle hardware failures. In DDN’s case, they rely on their old RAID stack to provide this data protection. This discrete RAID layer is itself based on the legacy HA pair controller architecture. There are lots of problems with this approach at scale and that is why the availability and durability of these types of systems degrade as the number of storage nodes grows.
This is in stark contrast to VDP, which has advanced data protection built into the file system itself. Indeed, we protect data at multiple layers in the stack, which means that as the number of nodes in the cluster grows, our availability and durability only increases. This single integrated stack approach – and its self-healing capabilities – all help culminate in the superior ease of use and reliability that our customers enjoy.
Compared to WEKA, VDURA offers better scalability and integration for hybrid storage, leveraging both flash and HDD, which allows more flexible tiering with significant cost benefits and ease of use. If we compare V5000 with the latest WekaPOD announcement, we can deliver the same or even better performance for a much lower price.
