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January 13, 2017

Apeiron Gains Partner For its Net Storage Platform

(sdecoret/Shutterstock)

Looking to unclog big data network and storage bottlenecks, a Non-Volatile Memory Express (NVMe) vendor and technology integrator have launched a partnership designed to deliver a NVMe over Ethernet platform that targets the analytics and Internet of Things processing sectors.

Apeiron Data Systems of Folsom, Calif., and St. Louis-based World Wide Technology (WWT) announced the partnership this week in which the technology integrator will market and sell Apeiron’s ADS1000. The platform is touted as a native NVMe storage platform running on Ethernet.

Based on a “non-blocking” storage switching infrastructure, the Apeiron platform leverage NVMe performance to provide analytics and other applications with linear scaling. The result, the partners said, are real-time queries of historical data that previously required months to crunch.

The company’s storage architecture combines NVMe solid-state drives (SSDs) with its storage network to outperform NVMe SSDs installed in servers. WWT said it validated ADS1000 performance over the course of a month, conducting side-by-side storage testing running the enterprise version of the Splunk big data analytics platform. The company reported a seven-fold advantage in queries over bare metal Splunk environments and a 10-fold boost in data ingestion rates compared to traditional architectures.

Apeiron “shipped us a system containing multiple NVMe SSD suppliers to prove their ability to interoperate across suppliers,” Scott Miller, WWT’s senior director for datacenters, noted in a statement announcing the partnership. “Once the testing began our security and analytics architectures teams were seeing ingestion and query results simply not possible with traditional architectures.”

The Apeiron storage network targets growing demand for real-time analytics on huge data sets. The platform leverages commercial NVMe SSDs to boost bandwidth and performance. The company maintains its approach helps overcome network bottlenecks surfacing in traditional storage architectures.

The company claims its platform scales linearly to thousands NVMe SSDs. It also said it plans to integrated Intel Corp.’s 3-D Xpoint memory technology. Intel (NASDAQ: INTC) said last summer its Optane SSDs based on 3-D XPoint memory technology would hit the market by the end of 2016.

Observers have noted that networks have emerged as a major storage bottleneck, especially as data volumes soar on analytics platforms such as Splunk. Hence, the steady shift from hard disk drives to faster SSDs. Vendors like Apeiron are leveraging the bandwidth capacity of Ethernet networks since, as one storage expert put it, “faster storage needs faster networks.”

The partnership is significant for Apeiron since WWT works with large corporations and enterprises ranging from Boeing Co. (NYSE: BA) and AT&T (NYSE: ATT) to the U.S. Air Force.

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