VueStor™ Solid-State Storage Subsystem

One of the many MDX innovations is its VueStor shared-storage solution, a revolutionary solid-state storage subsystem based on Flash Memory technology. Flash Memory offers performance comparable to DRAM with storage capacity on par with hard disk drives. In fact, when compared to traditional "spinning disk" solutions, VueStor dramatically improves streaming performance while reducing overall energy consumption.

VueStor is uniquely engineered for streaming media, eliminating the performance bottleneck of traditional hard disk drives while outperforming even conventional solid-state drives (SSDs). Its many advantages over rotating magnetic media include:

• High performance—No spin-up time, seek time or rotational latency.
• High reliability—No moving parts to fail (i.e. no motor, disks or heads).
• Ultra-low power consumption.
• Low operational cost.

Purpose-Built for Maximum Performance

Storage performance in streaming media applications is directly related to read bandwidth—and delivering more read bandwidth translates into greater media delivery performance. VueStor delivers exceptional read bandwidth performance through design innovations that put it generations ahead of conventional SSDs.

At the heart of the VueStor system is an advanced Flash Memory Controller design featuring 128 parallel NAND flash channels, allowing parallel operations to individual Flash chips in the Flash Memory array. This architecture assures maximum read bandwidth transfer between the Flash Memory array and the switch fabric, crucial to high-performance streaming media applications.

Operators can also build and manage a protected storage environment for media content using a RAID configuration. Individual storage modules can be grouped into logical arrays to safeguard media content and improve system performance. And since VueStor operates as a single store, there is no need to replicate hot content as required with hard disk systems.

Setting a Standard for Data Integrity and Reliability

For Flash storage systems to be accepted in media streaming applications, they must meet or exceed enterprise-class hard disk reliability levels. Verivue has incorporated a variety of design and architectural strategies to create a Flash-based storage system with reliability exceeding that of hard disk based systems, including:

• Wear leveling to improve life expectancy.
• Aggressive error correction code (ECC) techniques to identify and correct faulty data.
• Background monitoring combined with error recovery procedures that refresh or move data from deteriorating blocks.

With Verivue's comprehensive approach to data integrity, the VueStor system exceeds the reliability of hard disk drives while providing an order of magnitude performance improvement.