FlexSDS Scale-out Storage
Highly performance optimized SDS solution

The All-Flash Scale-out Storage Software
FlexSDS Scale-out storage software is a reliable, high performance and distributed block level storage solution which is true scale out (1-1024) and lowest TCO in the world. The distribute storage solution is designed as Server-SAN which provides full functional in iSCSI , iSER and NVMe over Fabrics transport, fully support for a verity of virtualization platform like VMWare, Hyper-v Citrix XenServer and Openstack-Qemu-KVM based HCI systems.
FlexSDS Scale-out storage software is designed and high performance optimized for all-flash appliance, fully support for NVMe kernel-bypass, RDMA, and traditional hardware (TCP, SATA / SAS disks).
What is FlexSDS product?
- Software Defined Storage solution for All-Flash (NVMe, RDMA) and traditional hardware (TCP, SATA / SAS).
- Single node and multiple nodes scale-out storage software.
- iSCSI, iSER (iSCSI over RDMA) and NVMe over Fabric (NVMe-oF) target software.
- High availability (multi-copies, auto-recovery) storage software.
- NVMe full stack kernel-bypass (end-to-end NVMe) solution.
Key Features
Scale-out and Scale-up
Working as single node mode and 1-1024 nodes scale-out mode, storage and performance linger scale-up by adding more hardware.
Rich Protocols
Provide multiple poplar interfaces in the storage world:
iSCSI, iSER and NVMe-oF
High Performance
Highly optimized storage stack with completely own advanced scheduler for getting high bandwidth, high IOPS (concurrent I/Os) and extreme low latency (less than 80 μs) .
Software Define Storage
Manage disks to be pooled, arbitrary dynamic blocks, export logical volumes with zero-copy snapshots to business server through iSCSI, iSER and NVMe over Fabrics.
High Availibilty
Providing never down (99.999%) reliability high availability solution storage service for business servers by through multi-copies, lock-free-auto-recovery.
WEB Management
Provide easy-to-install package and WEB based centralized management for multiple servers, set up a SDS storage cluster in few minutes.
FlexSDS Scale-out Server-SAN is software only and easy-to-install solution which can be easily installed into any x86 based machines, by providing a full-featured web based management system, user only need a few minutes to build one node or a multi-nodes storage cluster.
FlexSDS is also designed for Hyper-Converged Infrastructure solution, it can be deployed as HCI mode and Server-SAN mode:
For HCI mode, FlexSDS can be installed together with virtualization solution like KVM/Qemu based, one server node can offer both storage and compute service at the same time.
For Server-SAN mode, FlexSDS will work as distributed IP SAN storage and offer data service to other servers via iSCSI, iSER and NVMe-oF.

Using FlexSDS ServerSAN is very easy, user can quickly create a storage cluster in 30 minutes. All management operations can be done in all-in-one WEB management console.

Figure 1.
FlexSDS ServerSAN is designed as true scale-out distributed storage cluster, which is working on x86_64 based Linux platform, but user don’t need spend much time to configure the system, we provide “one key” install scripts will quickly deploy and configure a scale-out storage cluster in minutes.

Figure 2.
Whats need user to do are:
- Install Linux OS as hardware and OS requirements;
- Set up storage node and cluster in WEB Management.
Please see Install and Deploy FlexSDS Scale-out Storage. And for more information about how to using the product, please refer to product user’s manual.
Software requires:
- Linux with kernel >= 3.10
- Recommend OS: CentOS 7.x and Ubuntu Server 18+.
- x64 based system.
- Network Connections: RDMA (InfiniBand, RoCE, iWarp) or Ethernet (TCP/IP).
Hardware requires:
- Intel Xeon class processor or similar.
- 4 cores and more.
- 16 GB of RAM.
- At least one additional disk for storage.
Recommend Configuration (All Flash):
- Intel Xeon 2680 v4 2.4GHZ x 2, 28 cores in total.
- 64 GB DDR4 memory.
- NVMe Disks x 8
- CentOS 7.2, with 3.10 kernel.
- InfiniBand Network.
Current Release: FlexSDS Scale-out Storage V4, Date: 01/20/2022
- Single node with locally redundancy.
- 2 nodes with witness.
- 3 or more nodes true scale-out storage.
- Automatically fault-check and recovery.
- High performance optimized storage for All-flash and Hybrid appliance.
- Storage Network: iSCSI, iSER, NVMe over Fabric and vHost.
- Backends Engine: NVMe user mode, block (aio), remote iSCSI/iSER/NVMe-oF device.
- Server Pool: True user mode polling.
- Storage Pool: Software Defined Storage Pool.
- Snapshots: Unlimited and Zero-Copy Snapshots.
- Replication: Asynchronous Replication over iSCSI and NVMe-oF.
- Web Management: Centralized Manage multiple servers in one platform.
First Release: FlexSDS ServerSAN 2016 V1, Date: 12/03/2016
- 2 nodes High Availability.
- High performance optimized storage for All-flash appliance.
- Storage Network: iSCSI, iSER and NVMe over Fabric
- Server Pool: Polling Mode
- Storage Pool: Software Defined Storage Pool
- Snapshots: Unlimited and Zero-Copy Snapshots
- Replication: High Availability and Replication over RDMA or TCP
- Web Management: Manage multiple servers in one platform
| VMware Ready logo assures that FlexSDS Server is fully compatible with VMware products.
VMware is virtualization leader that produces many virtualization products such as VMware ESX/ESXi, VMware Workstation, VMware vSphere. Recently it is helping build reliable and affordable private and public clouds. |







