By using the latest, most advanced generation of 19/20 nanometer multi-level cell NAND flash, Skyera skyHawk is the only viable all-flash array alternative to break the price barrier for mainstream enterprise storage adoption. Limitations in flash controller and system design have forced every other all-flash enterprise storage array vendor to use eMLC or SLC flash – except Skyera.

In fact, Skyera has been able to take advantage of the latest generation, and consequently lowest cost, MLC Flash without sacrificing performance, reliability or durability.

Skyera: Delivering 100x Life Amplification
In order to yield the 100x Life Amplification™ required to achieve enterprise reliability from the latest generation flash, we embraced a full system-wide approach. This meant designing, developing and integrating all of the components in the technology stack – including the flash controller, RAID controller and storage nodes. Our solution incorporates proprietary solid-state storage modules, not the familiar SSDs that have been in use for years.

Our custom designed controller employs advanced flash management algorithms to reduce P/E cycles on the NAND flash and the resulting impact of those cycles. In addition, our unique implementation of RAID-SE, in conjunction with its controller, results in 10x fewer writes to the Flash modules.

Winning the Lottery is More Likely than Data Loss
Enterprise storage administrators purchase systems to store data. What you care about are non-repairable failures – the ones that can cause data loss in the array. A properly designed storage array will protect you from any failure of an individual component, such as a flash cell, block or blade. As a storage administrator, your primary measurement should be the probability of data loss. This is sometimes calculated using a time component and would yield the Mean Time to Data Loss (MTTDL), but is always based off of the probability of data loss calculation.

So, the true comparison for reliability is the probability of data loss and not the unrecoverable error rate of an individual blade. For the moment, let’s ignore all of Skyera’s Solid-State Enterprise Operating System (SEOS) 100x Life Amplification benefits, assume that the next-generation, most advanced flash failure rate is 10x worse than the competition (due to its 19/20 nm MLC usage versus the eMLC usage).

Skyera RAID-SE uses a 22+2 custom implementation, with two blocks for parity protection for each 22 blocks of data in one RAID group, rotating across 24 blades. As a more powerful RAID implementation, Skyera RAID-SE can recover data even if two blades in a RAID group fail.

The probability of an unrecoverable data error with Skyera RAID-SE is 2×10-27 – orders of magnitude less than the typical RAID-4 or RAID-5 implementation. In fact, the RAID-4 implementation is a million times more likely to fail with eMLC than the Skyera implementation; though probabilities for both solutions are very small.

So how unlikely? Let’s compare it to winning a lottery in which you choose 6 unique and different numbers from 1 to 50. You win the jackpot if all 6 of your numbers match all 6 of their numbers – in any order. The odds are 1 / 0.0000000629 or 1 chance in 15,890,700.

Meanwhile, the odds for data loss due to a Skyera RAID-SE failure are 1 / 2×1027 or 1 chance in 5×1026. In other words, you are 750 billion times more likely to win the lottery than to experience data loss due to a RAID hardware failure. Even if you consider multiple I/O events over the 5-year lifespan of a storage device, the odds of data loss remain miniscule.

Hand Them a Lottery Ticket
If someone from a competing storage company tells you that 19/20nm flash is not reliable for enterprise applications, then hand them a lottery ticket and tell them good luck since they have better odds of winning the lottery than losing data with the latest generation flash.

The real proof of Skyera’s success will be in how and where organizations actually deploy solid-state storage to improve the performance of their applications and the agility of their businesses. The defining applications of the era – such as cloud computing, Big Data, virtualization, mobility and increased collaboration – will all benefit tremendously from improved speed and performance of their storage infrastructures. If you think about cloud services, for example, solid-state storage will empower providers to more efficiently support the storage requirements of multi-tenant environments. In Big Data, faster, high-capacity storage will mean quicker analytics and more agility in responding to the needs of customers, employees and other users.

The reality is that every enterprise application will benefit from the more efficient, more highly reliable and higher performing storage infrastructure enabled by solid-state technology. With data storage requirements growing at an unprecedented rate, enterprise decision-makers will find the need to shift to solutions that are more scalable, flexible and don’t impose performance limitations on their enterprise-wide applications. While traditional storage will remain useful for backup, archiving, disaster recovery and similar applications, the potential availability of solid-state technology could really shift the paradigm in the way that enterprises view their primary Tier-One storage requirements.

Enterprise decision-makers are readying themselves for this new era in computing. They are adopting virtualization, utilizing clouds, reining in Big Data, supporting mobility and enabling new levels of collaboration through social media and the bring-your-own-device phenomenon. Now, with the potential for a corresponding new era in storage enabled by the innovations created by Skyera, the new era in enterprise computing will be moving one step closer to reality.

At Skyera, we don’t ask, “Why Flash Storage?” We ask, “Why Not?” I invite you to check out our blog regularly to hear more.