MaxiScale Establishes New File Performance Benchmark for Cloud Applications

File Reads Per-Disk Per-Second Expected to Become Critical Measure to Drive down Infrastructure Costs

SUNNYVALE, Calif.—February 10, 2010—MaxiScale, Inc., a technology leader in cloud-scale file serving and storage, today established file reads per-disk per-second as the most accurate measurement of file delivery cost-effectiveness for cloud applications. MaxiScale already achieves more than 90 file reads per-disk per-second in large random workloads common to cloud-based applications—a record-breaking industry feat. By setting file reads per-disk per-second as a standard measure, MaxiScale provides cloud and Web application architects with a clear, unambiguous way to understand file delivery costs to end users. Leveraging this metric with the MaxiScale FLEX Software Platform enables IT architects to build a scalable infrastructure with dramatically lower file serving costs, achieving better file system performance and a faster user experience using inexpensive servers and SATA drives.

The surge of cloud-based applications like social networks, photo-sharing sites and online advertising are creating a fundamental shift in file serving requirements. In the past, conventional storage and file serving systems relied on capacity and throughput as benchmarks for performance; however, the landscape for file serving and storage has changed. The unpredictable data demand for small files requires a new delivery-based performance benchmark. Delivery performance is specifically important for Web-facing cloud applications that need to provide a rich, seamless user experience with fast download times, and file reads per-disk per-second is the most accurate measure of a file system’s economic benefit for read intensive, scale-out applications. Other measures like I/O operations per second can falsely exaggerate system capabilities as IOPS do not directly equate to full file reads.

Today, modern cloud-based applications need to handle billions of random small file operations, such as thumbnail and photo retrieval. The MaxiScale FLEX Software Platform delivers the lowest cost per file retrieval with single disk I/O operation reads for files up to 1 MB. MaxiScale can easily deliver 100 million daily file retrievals with high availability, running as few as five inexpensive, standard commodity server nodes. The FLEX Software Platform runs entirely with standard servers, high-capacity SATA disks, and Ethernet, dramatically lowering the cost of file serving at Internet scale and cutting hardware budgets.

“File reads per-disk per-second is a benchmark measurement that allows application architects to stay ahead of the file-serving demand of cloud applications without costly infrastructure overhauls,” said Francesco Lacapra, chief technology officer at MaxiScale. “With MaxiScale’s FLEX Software Platform, cloud application architects and IT managers can store billions of objects in a single namespace while serving any object directly from a disk within a few milliseconds. Our single disk I/O capability is essential in creating a seamless user experience without costly lag time.”

About MaxiScale
MaxiScale’s cloud-scale file serving and storage platform is a breakthrough for Internet data centers and storage infrastructure that fundamentally changes the economics of deploying Web-scale applications. The FLEX Software Platform addresses the unpredictable and expanding data requirements facing companies that deliver Internet applications via public and private clouds. It enables customers to reduce capital and operational costs while improving performance by an order of magnitude over competing solutions. MaxiScale’s innovative Peer Set™ architecture and single disk I/O small file operations allow data centers to linearly scale a single namespace to hundreds of petabytes, eliminate forklift upgrades and reduce disk counts by a factor of 10. This results in the ability to scale to 100 times the capacity of current solutions. For more information, please visit: www.MaxiScale.com.

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