ATTO Technology ExpressNVMTM NVMe Smart Switch Host Adapters and Xinnor Software RAID (xiRAID)
Data integrity, system design flexibility, and storage resource management are key requirements when designing a scalable, high-performance storage solution.
Description of the problem
RAID is commonly used in compute-intensive and high-performance environments. It provides protection against disk failures, enabling data redundancy and fault tolerance. NVMe SSDs are now widely used for ultra-low latency and high-performance storage in enterprise systems.
For mission-critical applications, low latency is essential. Enterprises require reliable NVMe connectivity for high-IOPS workloads and minimal downtime.
Challenges
NVMe devices introduce challenges in data integrity, management, and scalability. Traditional software RAID solutions are not fully optimized for NVMe performance.
Software RAID is typically designed for slower SATA/SAS drives. With NVMe, CPU usage, memory load, and rebuild performance become major issues.
This often leads to mirrored or RAID 1+0 setups for reliability, which increases storage cost due to duplication.
Modern servers provide NVMe connectivity via PCIe, but still lack advanced storage management features found in SAS expanders or enterprise RAID systems.
Solution
Xinnor xiRAID is a software RAID solution designed specifically for NVMe performance. It minimizes host resource usage while maintaining high flexibility.
Traditional RAID becomes inefficient at millions of IOPS, but xiRAID optimizes parity calculations using modern CPU vector instructions for high performance.
xiRAID uses AVX-based processing and a lockless architecture for efficient RAID computation across CPU cores.
This allows fast RAID rebuilds and reduces risk during disk failure scenarios.
ATTO ExpressNVMTM is a PCIe Gen4 NVMe smart switch adapter designed for scalable storage systems. It supports up to 16 NVMe SSDs and provides advanced monitoring and management features.
It enables enterprise systems to monitor disk health, firmware status, temperature, and performance metrics through dedicated management software.
xiRAID and ExpressNVM together provide a high-performance, scalable NVMe storage ecosystem.
Testing
Testing was performed on a Dell PowerEdge server using 8 NVMe SSDs in RAID5 configuration. Sequential I/O benchmarking showed high throughput with optimized performance.
Test Configuration
- Server: Dell PowerEdge R750
- CPU: Intel Xeon Gold 6330 @ 2.00GHz
- Memory: 128 GB DRAM
- OS: Oracle Linux 8.7
- Kernel: Linux 5.4.17
- NVMe Card: ExpressNVM PCIe Gen4 x16
- Storage: 8x NVMe SSD (RAID5)
- Benchmark Tool: FIO
Conclusion
Xinnor xiRAID and ATTO ExpressNVM combine advanced NVMe RAID management with high performance, scalability, and efficient resource usage, making them ideal for enterprise storage systems.
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