Provisioning, Snapshots, Replication | ICOS Features

Start serving data in minutes, while directing powerful features like thin provisioning, snapshots, replication, and caching—all from a highly intuitive interface.

Scale-Out Architecture

Spanning a single storage pool across multiple storage devices is only the beginning of what “scale-out” means to Scale Computing. Our architecture stripes and mirrors all data on the cluster across every node in the cluster. Evenly distributing the data allows the cluster to fully utilize the disk spindles, caching, and network ports in the cluster.

This architecture provides a simple solution to the challenge of increasing overall storage throughput: Simply add a new storage node. Adding a node increases both capacity and performance of the system without the need to manually arrange data to take advantage of the added resources.

Unified Storage

The Protocol Abstraction Layer (PAL) feature within ICOS allows simultaneous SAN and NAS support in the same storage cluster without any need or cost of additional protocol licenses or gateway devices. Unified storage enables the elimination of disparate storage systems for block and file level storage needs.

Intelligent Rebalance

Many traditional RAID configurations require a replacement disk drive to be on hand and a lengthy process to rebuild the data from parity blocks. If a drive fails within the Scale storage cluster, ICOS quickly and automatically isolates the failed drive and rebalances its data elsewhere in the cluster from the mirrored copy. The system can continue operating without service downtime, and the failed drive can be replaced later to add lost capacity back to the cluster.

No Single Point Of Failure

Each ICOS cluster node contains the information necessary to access all data blocks simultaneously and can assume responsibility for any other node in the entire cluster. If a drive or node fails, services can continue without interruption. That’s not the case with controller-based or scale-up architectures. Controllers hold the metadata for the filers below. If they fail, access to data stored on the drives is interrupted.

Intelligent Density Adjustment

With ICOS’s Intelligent Density Adjustment technology, drives and nodes of various capacities can be added to a cluster. Supporting nodes of any capacity within the same cluster allows storage spending to be made incrementally, as needed.

Intelligent Pre-fetch technology

Rather than waiting for you to request data, the cluster anticipates what you may need, based on other data recently accessed, and then pre-fetches data into the cache. The result: significant performance gains in real-world usage.