Leil from MAID secures €1.5 million for petabyte datasets on SMR disks
In the ever-evolving landscape of data storage, efficient solutions are becoming increasingly critical. As enterprises grapple with the exponential growth of data, innovative technologies are emerging to address their needs. One such development is the recent funding acquisition by Estonia-based Leil Storage, which is set to transform how we manage vast datasets.
Leil Storage has successfully secured €1.5 million (approximately $1.73 million) in seed funding, aimed at advancing its groundbreaking storage system that leverages spun-down shingled magnetic recording (SMR) disk drives. This innovative approach is designed to provide a more efficient and environmentally friendly alternative to traditional storage solutions.
Understanding the Technology Behind Leil Storage
Leil's technology focuses on utilizing SMR drives to archive data on-premises. This method offers advantages over conventional tape libraries, particularly in terms of access speed. When compared to tape storage, spinning up disk drives is considerably quicker, resulting in faster data retrieval. Leil emphasizes that, particularly in the context of artificial intelligence and big data, customers can store vast datasets more cost-effectively and with significantly reduced energy consumption.
Notably, major hyperscalers like Google, Amazon Web Services (AWS), and Meta are already employing SMR drives, which provide approximately 20% more capacity than conventional conventional magnetic recording (CMR) disk drives. These companies have developed proprietary software to tackle the unique challenges posed by SMR drives, specifically the zone-rewrite property that complicates write access.
- Zone-rewrite property: In SMR drives, write tracks partially overlap, requiring entire zones to be rewritten instead of simple sections, which can slow down data writing.
- Proprietary solutions: Hyperscalers have created software solutions to optimize the performance of SMR drives despite their inherent challenges.
- Leil's approach: Leil claims to overcome these limitations with specialized software that enhances the usability of an SMR drive fleet for enterprise applications.
The Infinite Cold Engine: A Game Changer for Data Storage
At the core of Leil's offering is the Infinite Cold Engine (ICE), a technology built on the company's SaunaFS distributed and parallel POSIX file system. This system supports various types of SMR drives, including host-managed SMR (HM-SMR) and drive-managed SMR, allowing for a versatile storage solution that can adapt to different enterprise needs.
Key features of the ICE technology include:
- Advanced data placement: The system optimally stores frequently accessed content on active drives while relegating older data to spun-down drives.
- Power management: ICE effectively manages active, idle, and spun-down states of drives to enhance energy efficiency.
- Erasure coding: This feature protects data integrity, allowing for recovery even if multiple servers fail.
The software utilizes SATA drives, leveraging a SATA Pin 3 disable signal to power down drives that are not in use. When data is needed, the system powers up the corresponding drive swiftly, taking only seconds to access the information. This operational method is reminiscent of the Massive Array of Idle Disks (MAID) concept, providing a practical solution for large-scale data storage needs.
Infrastructure and System Design
ICE operates on clusters of commodity servers configured as Just a Bunch of Disks (JBODs). For instance, it can utilize Western Digital Data60 and Data102 JBODs, typically comprising 8 servers, each housing 60-102 hard drives with substantial capacity, such as 28 TB or 32 TB HM-SMR models.
Data is organized into 64 MB chunks with 64 KB blocks, secured through erasure coding (e.g., 6+2 scheme: 6 data fragments plus 2 parity fragments) across multiple servers. This structure ensures data redundancy and enhances reliability.
Moreover, SaunaFS stores metadata on NVMe/SSDs for rapid access, while the bulk of data is placed on SMR or CMR drives. Configuration files define logical write groups, isolating data operations to specific subsets of drives, which facilitates tiering based on data access patterns.
Energy Efficiency and Environmental Impact
One of the most compelling aspects of Leil's solution is its potential for significant energy savings. By classifying content based on access patterns, the technology allows for:
- Grouping inactive files and powering down the respective drives until needed.
- Enabling energy savings of up to 70% compared to continuously active disk drive systems.
- Maintaining high availability of data, despite reduced power consumption.
This makes the ICE technology particularly appealing for enterprises that require multi-petabyte scale data storage while aiming to reduce their environmental footprint.
Future Prospects and Product Development
The recent seed funding will enable Leil to accelerate its go-to-market strategy, broaden its product roadmap, and expand its commercial team. Future developments may include:
- AI-driven “smart placement” for adaptive tiering of data.
- Enhanced open-source integration of the SAAFS system.
- Community-driven adoption of innovative write-grouping techniques.
Leil's ambition extends to optimizing data delivery speeds to GPUs, further enhancing the performance of data-intensive applications.
Understanding Leil's Vision
Aleksandr Ragel, Co-founder and CEO of Leil, articulates a compelling vision: “The next wave of innovation in AI and science is buckling under the weight and cost of its own data. We founded Leil to change that.” He emphasizes that Leil aims to democratize hyperscale storage solutions, making them accessible to every enterprise while delivering significant cost savings and minimizing environmental impact.
The name "Leil" stands for:
- L: Large scale
- E: Energy-efficient
- I: Infinite
- L: Local
As the demand for efficient data storage continues to rise, innovations like Leil's ICE technology will play a pivotal role in shaping the future of data management.
For more detailed information, you can access the SaunaFS documentation here.
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