The need for quick storage and retrieval of data is something that is critical for businesses to make smarter decisions in today’s data-driven economy. Data is no longer stored in immovable, static areas and is now kept in the cloud for easy retrieval. As the amount of data required for storage grows, so too does the overall cost of maintaining and managing it.

Elastic Storage Solutions Inc. (ESSi) develops software-defined storage arrays that optimizes large, shared, big data storage to reduce the cost and increase the performance of storing data. The Ottawa-based company was founded by Udo Neustadter in 2017 who was also a part of the founding team at Rockport Networks. Later that year Udo was joined by Ed Sokolowski in the position of CTO and Mariana Oprea responsible for expanding the company’s relationships. Udo, Ed, Mariana, and the rest of the team at ESSi are now focused on providing fast, flexible, and scalable accelerated storage solutions through their product, StorePlex eRAID (elastic Redundant Array of Independent Disks)

How eRAID Works

Storage tools such as Ceph, Swift, and Gluster require frequent access to storage media devices such as servers and drives, which often act as independent storage pools. eRAID takes whitebox servers as well as commercial off the shelf Hard Disk Drives (HDD) and Solid-State Drives (SDD) and virtually amalgamates them into a performance-tiered network attached storage array. Basically, eRAID combines the resources of different storage media devices into a unified storage pool and then separates them into performance tiers based on speed of data storage and retrieval. ESSi’s solution uses AI-based algorithms to optimize and unify the arrangement of how data is stored and retrieved across the different servers, RAM, HDDs, and SSDs.

eRAID was built on the Non-Volatile Memory express over Fabric (NVMe-oF) specification, which was designed for fast access of data and storage media between a computer and SSD over a network. ESSi addresses the management of data storage for organizations working with big, shared data and significantly improves storage performance

Validating eRAID for Commercial Success

ESSi is looking to use CENGN’s commercial-grade infrastructure in a data centre project to accelerate the beta release of eRAID as a minimum viable product. They recently signed a Letter of Intent to become a strategic partner with a Canadian Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) firm that is highly interested in using eRAID to extend its storage service offerings. Their CENGN project is an opportunity to validate the functional features of eRAID at a commercial level and demonstrate eRAID’s capabilities to their potential strategic partner.

This is the second CENGN project for ESSi after completing their first project in August 2018 where they tested the stability of eRAID as the number of storage components were increased.

Read more on ESSI’s first project by clicking here!

In this CENGN project, ESSi will aim to validate the behaviour of eRAID when configured with different storage mediums such as NVMe, HDD, and SSD while at commercial scale, which is defined as 100+ TB of raw storage.

Technical due diligence is a key part in acquisitions, partnerships, and procurement. ESSi will need to prove eRAID can meet the needs of their potential strategic partner. We look forward to working closely with ESSi over the next few weeks, providing the infrastructure, technical expertise, and marketing exposure to help them strengthen their technology and grow their business.

ESSi is a growing Canadian business that is using the services at CENGN through the Next Generation Network Program (NGNP). The NGNP is a Government of Ontario program offered through a partnership between CENGN and the Ontario Centres of Excellence (OCE) that is providing small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) across Ontario access to the CENGN Testbed. CENGN’s digital infrastructure is connecting SMEs like ESSi to state-of-the-art equipment and network services, which will allow these companies to test and validate their solutions. Are you interested in completing a CENGN project? Learn more by clicking here.

About the Author

CENGN, Canada’s Centre of Excellence in Next Generation Networks, drives technology innovation and industry growth through our testbed, technical expertise, talent development, and partner ecosystem. Through our projects, CENGN enables small and medium Canadian Enterprises to test and validate promising technologies, removing barriers to product commercialization and accelerating market growth.

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