It is a HDD based product associated with a dedicated data and disk management software layer. The product ALTO stands for Alternative LTO and belongs to the MAID, Massive Array of Idle Disks, category. The main idea is to manage the HDD power level to reduce the energy bill. In fact, storing data 10 or 20 years on tape is one of the option, tape being a passive media, but with HDDs, it would be stupid to let the array up and running over the same period of time. So the team has invented an intelligent data placement logic that manages disk independently and allow spin down based on their consumption level.
MAID was mainly popularized by Copan Systems with their 200T and other models like 220A, T or TX with an VTL option, that couple a modified RAID4 with an energy saving system what they called PM-RAID or Powered-Managed RAID. We also saw Nexsan with AutoMAID, NEC or Fujitsu playing in the area. SGI acquired Copan assets in 2010. We discovered Leil Storage a few months ago, they come from Tallinn, Estonia, and we'll meet them during the April edition of the tour.
The basic node is a 4U chassis running CentOS with 60 HDDs. Currently 24TB HDD is available which means 1440TB raw per chassis and up to 10 expansion chassis can be connected to this controller node. As said, each HDD is managed individually and is formatted with the ext4 disk file system. As no RAID nor volume managers techniques are used, the redundancy is moved to the file level with a multi instance of files with 2 or 3 copies within the same or across chassis. A simple file allocation table (FAT), working in conjunction with the file system but independent, is maintained to make things efficient and keep track where each file is written among potentially an important number of disks. In other words, a file is written entirely to one file system or disk partition, there is no distribution of file segments across disks. This distribution will prevent or delay spin down drives so the idea to isolate files and disks.
Applications and users consume ALTO via a specific API that embeds this FAT model or via a file gateway that exposes the SMB protocol, well adopted in M&E. ALTO Manager and the PCD panel on on the front of the main chassis gives an immediate view of the HDD layout and status. The ALTO product is also validated and certified by lots of partners solutions espeically ones in the M&E domain.
The company is profitable and still is a bit confidential. But references are spectacular with more than 450 installations beyond its confort M&E zone also in Oil and Gas or digital data archiving.
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