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May 18, 2015

Toshiba Demonstrates High Performance Object Storage Technologies at OpenStack Summit 2015

May 18 — The Storage Products Business Unit of Toshiba America Electronic Components, Inc., a committed technology leader, announces new key value-based technologies for scale-out object storage, big data analytics, virtualization and for active archival. With these technologies, Toshiba customers can reap the benefits of large capacity and high performance scale-out object storage while maximizing the uptime and reducing the overall mean time to repair (MTTR1).

“As the storage industry evolves beyond storage management to data management, it is important to expand our storage solutions offering to include key value object-based data access methods.”

One of Toshiba’s key value technologies is a multi-device storage solution that integrates Ethernet, solid state drive (SSD) for low latency, large capacity hard disk drive (HDD) for higher throughput, 64-bit compute, and an open source Linux platform for running next generation software-defined storage applications on an industry standard 3.5-inch form factor. This new key value technology is intended to help the enterprise meet its growing data storage needs by enabling a rich set of scale-out object storage features2 that deliver on both capital expenditures and operating expenses reductions, while providing performance on par with HDD-based primary storage.

The other key value-based technology solution Toshiba announced today is an Ethernet based HDD-only version primarily optimized for the emerging shingled magnetic recording (SMR) media interface. This large capacity key value technology is optimized for archival and cold storage applications.

As scale-out object storage deployments in enterprises increase, key value technologies have the potential to be part of mainstream performance as well as capacity-oriented business applications. Enabled with scale-out storage software such as Ceph, Toshiba’s high performance and capacity-optimized key value-based object storage drives are well suited for enterprise primary storage, unstructured data, information governance, analytical data, and for archival and cold storage. Toshiba key value technologies provide a homogenous building block that allows enterprise customers to buy a single class of product and provision them differently for disparate and demanding workloads, thereby delivering a true software-defined storage infrastructure.

“These new technologies demonstrate Toshiba’s commitment and leadership in emerging key value-based object storage drive markets. By approaching this market holistically with two different technologies, Toshiba is addressing both the high performance workloads and large capacity workloads,” said Tar Thirumalai, director of market development at Toshiba Storage Products Business Unit. “As the storage industry evolves beyond storage management to data management, it is important to expand our storage solutions offering to include key value object-based data access methods.”

“When we were first designing Ceph ten years ago, the key idea was that a loosely-coordinated collection of smart devices may scale and perform better than a traditional array of disks. It is exciting to see that vision shared by leading component manufacturers like Toshiba and translated into a technology that can make its way into users’ hands,” said Sage Weil, leader of the Ceph project and manager of software engineering and consulting engineer, Red Hat.

“As the leading developer of object based filesystems, Exablox is excited to see this next generation of key value store technology from Toshiba. We feel that Toshiba’s approach will enable new classes of revolutionary storage solutions for customers of all types,” said Douglas Brockett, CEO of Exablox.

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