Latest Posts
Using Excelero and Red Hat OpenShift for Agile Container-Native Storage
This is a guest post by Kirill Shoikhet is CTO of Excelero Storage Enterprise storage caters to a wide variety of application stacks, and as digital transformation efforts add new platforms and paradigms to the infrastructure, maintaining storage flexibility is critical. As a result, storage architects are keen ...
Developer Velocity with Solid-State Container-Native CI/CD
What COVID-19 Taught a Tier-1 Web Firm With COVID-19 the efficiency of remote work became a high priority task for many organizations. Along with it came the challenges of making sure that continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD) deployments perform at the highest levels. The experience ...
Azure HBv3 VMs and Excelero NVMesh Performance Results: 100+ GB/s, 23+ million IOPS, 100 µs latency
Get more info Originally posted on: https://bit.ly/3h9GmiF Article contributed by Kirill Shoikhet, Chief Technical Officer at Excelero Azure offers Virtual Machines (VMs) with local NVMe drives that deliver a tremendous amount of performance. These local NVMe drives are ephemeral, so if the VM fails or ...
Direct GPU-to-Drive Paths for Latency-Sensitive Applications with NVIDIA Magnum IO GPUDirect Storage and Excelero
If you're gonna bypass - then do it all the way! The artificial intelligence, machine learning and deep learning (AI/ML/DL) domain is undergoing a profound transformation. A transformation that may not be evident at first glance, but like the iceberg, what’s beneath the surface requires ...
A Breakthrough Technology Helps AI, ML and Database Storage
Data center technology, whether for public clouds, private clouds or enterprise data centers, has just taken a tremendous step forward with significant impact for AI, ML and database storage thanks to new technology in Excelero’s NVMesh software. With the debut of Intel’s new P5800X SSD, ...
The Innovation Milestones Keep on Coming
Innovation happens in big and small ways. Big ways, like award-winning products that enable AI/ML/deep learning storage for some of the biggest brands on the planet – delivering results that other solutions just could not. Small ways, like patents that demonstrate our DNA lies in ...
Accelerating Deep Learning with Storage for GPU Computing
The explosive growth in GPU computing for AI, machine learning and deep learning has rewritten storage requirements in today’s data center. Last month, Excelero was honored to host a webinar featuring experts from NVIDIA, Barclays and Excelero on accelerating deep learning with storage for GPU ...
Is AI the New HPC? Part 3
Part 3 of 3 In the first part of this series, we discussed the similarities and differences between HPC and AI with a special focus on the storage aspects. In the second part, a closer look at the 3 Phases of Deep Learning provided us ...
Excelero Brings Elastic NVMe to the Edge on NVIDIA EGX
The recently announced NVIDIA EGX A allows AI applications to automate the critical infrastructure of the future. NVIDIA EGX is a cloud-native NVIDIA edge AI platform that brings GPU-accelerated AI to everything from traditional, commercial dual-socket x86 servers to Jetson Xavier NX micro-edge servers. The ...
Is AI the New HPC? Part 2
Part 2 of 3 In the first part of this series, we discussed the similarities and differences between HPC and AI storage solutions with a special focus on the storage aspects. In this second part, a closer look at the 3 Phases of Deep Learning ...
Excelero “Five Questions” Production NVMe Customer Blog Series Bezeq’s Igal Muginstein
Five Questions with Bezeq’s Igal Muginstein Agility is vital to enterprise data centers as the rate of new technologies means rapid and constant change to revenue-critical architectures. Organizations continually are deploying new infrastructures or scaling existing ones – expecting these architectures to meet or exceed ...
Is AI the New HPC? Part 1
Part 1 of 3 A Storage-Centric View on AI and Deep Learning Similarities and Differences Between AI and HPC Nowadays, solution providers tend to manage High Performance Computing (HPC) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) projects through the same divisions and the same people, by making their ...
The State of the Storage Union
Two Focuses, One Commitment to Transforming Storage I delivered a Q1 2020 State of the Storage Union webinar a few weeks ago as the global coronavirus pandemic set a new normal in both personal and business worlds. Given the very high level of interest, I ...
Five Questions with SciNet’s CTO Danny Gruner
Five Questions with SciNet’s CTO Danny Gruner High-performance computing is one of the most exciting application categories for production NVMe deployments. In this second of a series of blog posts, in which we revisit customer successes that have been in production over a longer period ...
Three Innovations to Watch in Scale-Out Flash Storage
Whether you call it the scale-out flash storage market, or software-defined storage, organizations are rapidly embracing new storage options driven by a smart software layer that are vastly more scalable, flexible, performant and lower cost. Excelero highlighted three innovations in the scale-out flash storage (SOFS) ...
Eliminating the GPU Storage Bottleneck in AI and ML
NVIDIA GPU systems have become the go-to resource behind AI and ML workloads, with NVIDIA DGX-1 and DGX-2 systems practically synonymous with GPU computing. Likewise many data center administrators prefer the performance density achieved by adding local SSDs to their compute servers. However the storage ...
Excelero showcases Elastic NVMe for AI and HPC workloads at SC19
As the Excelero team is on its way to Denver for SuperComputing 2019 (SC19), I thought it would be a good idea to provide an overview of all the exciting stuff we’ll have going on at the event. Once again, we chose to leverage our ...
How-To: Run NVMesh Management in a Container
Why Containers Containers let us pack software components with their dependencies and run them with some level of isolation from other containers and the host itself. This can help us start our software quickly with one command on different operating systems without the need to ...
Five Questions with Technicolor’s IT Lead Amir Bemanian
Success is not a freebie for tech startups: entrepreneurs have to work hard every day to earn it. What helps is to have a great team, fantastic partners and awesome customers. Innovating customers are the most valuable assets for any startup and we at Excelero ...
Excelero and partners showcase scale-out HPC storage innovations at ISC
ISC 2019 is the highlight event of the year for Europe’s high-performance computing (HPC) community as it gathers over 3,500 researchers. Excelero and its partners are using ISC to spotlight new solutions and innovative scale-out HPC storage deployments at leading research and scientific institutions in ...
Improving kernel uptime via hot upgrade of modules (part II)
In the previous post, I discussed the benefits of hot upgrades and elaborated on two methods to hot upgrades. In this article I will discuss how we apply all this wisdom to our own software and conclude with some of the key challenges of hot-upgrading ...
Improving kernel uptime via hot upgrade of modules (part I)
What is a hot upgrade? Upgrades are generally a big pain for developers. Yes, it is satisfying to keep improving the code - deep down we all dig that. But when backwards compatibility is broken by the introduction of a cool new feature or optimization, ...
Feeding the AI Beast – Training on NVMesh
Introduction At Excelero, we’re obsessed with making high performance, scalable distributed storage where all the NVMe bandwidth is available to applications at ultra low and consistent latency. We’ve been learning a lot from actual customer deployments like InstaDeep and we know that while one can ...
MeshProtect™
MeshProtect™ Introduction Data redundancy is a core functionality of every storage solution and NVMesh is no different. However, as a solution designed for web-scale applications, there are major differentiation points between NVMesh’s data protection technology called MeshProtect and other approaches available on the market. In ...
Announcing NVMesh 2
Announcing NVMesh 2 Introduction This week we announced the availability of NVMesh 2. This release and its underlying technologies have been in the works in our labs for quite some time, so it’s a very exciting moment for both myself and the development team to ...
NVMe In the Studio: For 8K and Beyond
We're pleased to have a guest post from Maz Lopez and Michael Li of Boston Limited The broadcast industry is evolving at a staggering rate, and it is up to technology providers to keep up with the demand for fast, reliable and scalable technology. Last week, the ...
Excelero and Partners Make a Splash at IBC 2018
Live Any-K Video Demos, New Solutions Showcase NVMe in Media & Entertainment IBC calls itself the world’s most influential media, entertainment and technology show for good reason: with over 57,000 visitors and over 1,700 exhibitors from over 170 countries, there’s a broad range of exciting ...
Surfing. Storage. The Lessons of One for the Other
Ah, summer – the time we let our other passions fuel our work. For me summer is about beaches, more family time, a few summer movies, and surfing. So how is that related to storage, and what’s it mean for you? I have been surfing ...
Network vs. Storage Challenges
I highly recommend reading my previous posts (Excelero for non storage folks, and Excelero for storage folks) before proceeding to this post. In those posts, I described how we designed a storage architecture that avoids the storage controller bottleneck problem by using distributed algorithms. Excelero’s ...
NVMe Is Just an Enabler!
The much respected Dave Raffo wrote a very interesting opinion piece for SearchStorage titled “NVMe technology is but a first step toward bigger things”. Dave’s article starts by praising NVMe technology but then takes an interesting turn as he states: ”NVMe technology is part of ...
Excelero and partners to steal the show at NAB with Any-k video playback demo
Motion pictures viewing experiences improve at rapid pace. Film crews are using more and better cameras. Films feature more visual effects, have more and richer colors. HDR technology has disrupted the industry. This evolution has a massive impact on video post-production infrastructure requirements. 4K video ...
Excelero for storage folks
My previous post was an attempt to explain to non-techies why the Excelero vision is so ground-breaking. I described how we designed a storage architecture that avoids the storage controller bottleneck problem by using distributed algorithms. It was an interesting exercise albeit one of the most ...
Five reasons to meet with Axel at CloudFest
Hello, my name is Axel, and I’ll be at CloudFest with our Partners Boston and Mellanox to teach you all about NVMe. Here are five good reasons to hang out with me at CloudFest: 1. I can tell you how to leverage NVMe to make ...
Excelero for non-storage folks
My friends and family often ask me what it is we do at Excelero. Most of them are completely unfamiliar with storage. Therefore, I decided to write a blog post that explains the magic of Excelero in simple terminology. Seasoned storage professionals may find this ...
Happy N(VM)e(w) Year, happy 2018
2017 was a milestone year for Excelero: it was the year we officially launched the company, but there was so much more! Here are the highlights: Partners Partners Partners! Soon after we launch NVMesh in March, our Partners Micron, Mellanox and Supermicro launched the SolidScale ...
The Advantage of Simple Replication with NVMe Disks
Any IT data professional knows what causes them the greatest grief. It’s the loss of customer data. The customer is mad, your management is mad, and it’s “your” fault. The first-level solution to protect against data loss is replication. This doesn’t solve the problem - ...
Excelero Showcases Ultra-Scalable, Cost-Effective Storage for Demanding High-Performance Computing at SC17
As the Excelero team is packing to fly out to Denver for SuperComputing 2017 (SC17), I thought it would be a good idea to provide an overview of all the exciting stuff we’ll have going on at the event. We chose to leverage our strong ...
Ensuring High-Availability for NVMesh Management
In the last few technical posts, we concentrated mostly on client and target components, I/O initiators and storage servers. I think the time has come to introduce the management component and describe it in depth. The management component’s roles comprise collecting system inventory, managing volume ...
How to detect and fix data corruption bugs in a decentralized I/O model
A typical I/O model is one in which clients, a.k.a hosts and initiators, issue I/O and targets (servers with the physical disks) implement the data services. If you read our previous blog posts, you already know that Excelero uses a different approach. The full load ...
European ESG study predicts bright future for storage startups that offer NVMe-based Software-defined Storage
Earlier this week I was (gently) slapped on the wrist by Mr. Chris Mellor when he pointed out that we were using the term NVMe a bit too loosely: “[…] NVMe is an interface and not a storage medium. […] NVMe could replace the SATA ...
SAN is Dead, Long Live SAN
What is SAN? In the age of standard servers and software defined “everything”, is there still room for SAN? There is - and appropriately enough it’s called “Server SAN”. I just joined a company called Excelero and I think our take on Server SAN, called ...
NVMesh Topology Management Challenges
Excelero's NVMesh is a distributed, software-based data storage system. What is unique about NVMesh is that the architecture is 100% converged: the data-path runs exclusively on the client side, involving no CPU cycles on the server side. This is particularly interesting for hyperscale applications as ...
Developing High quality Data Services in Kernel
In the above image you see 3 iterations of full a unitests suite of data services. Each iteration takes about 4-5 seconds to complete. The simulated environment had 64 cpu's on client and 24 targets, each having 1 disk. All the block devices used 4K ...
Excelero joins Open19 Foundation – Lior Gal named Board Advisor
This week, the Open19 Foundation was officially launched in San Jose. The Open19 Foundation is an initiative that was started by LinkedIn and focuses on creating a new standard for data center infrastructure. Excelero has been a supporter of the initiative from day one and is now an ...
An introduction to Excelero’s Engineering Headquarters in Tel Aviv
My name is Daniel and I am heir to a long dynasty of geeks. I also like to write so I have volunteered to provide engineering-sourced content for the Excelero blog. I will be keeping you up to date with news from Excelero’s engineering HQ ...
We’ve launched!
Wednesday 8 March was one of the biggest milestones in Excelero’s history. It was the day we officially launched our company and version 1.1 of NVMesh, with lots of support from partners and early customers. We would no longer hide "under the radar”, but would now ...
Rethinking Data Center Architectures
Yesterday I read a blog post by one of my Excelero co-workers about why he joined Excelero. I thought it was a great idea to share with others why we believe Excelero is such a great company, while shedding light on how we are helping ...
Why I Joined Excelero
Last September, I decided to leave Rubrik, one of the fastest growing software companies, to join Excelero, an early stage storage startup. It was the biggest bet I have ever taken in my career: I traded a successful company with a hot product that solves ...
The Future of Storage
Excelero was inspired by how Tech Giants like Amazon, Facebook and Google have redefined IT for web-scale applications, leveraging standard servers and shared-nothing architectures to ensure maximum operational efficiency and flexibility, and to provide the highest reliability. Their approach is referred to as the Software-defined Data Center (SDDC). Based on the same ...
Nobody Likes Noisy Neighbors
Converged storage - sometimes called hyperconverged infrastructure - is a concept that leverages standard servers to provide both compute power for applications and storage services from locally attached drives. For these configurations, it is highly desirable to minimize the use of CPU cycles for the ...
Designing Server SAN infrastructures with NVMesh & OCP
Ever since its inception, Excelero has been a big supporter of the Open Compute Project, an initiative that was conceptualized to design the world’s most energy efficient data center. Today, the Open Compute Project Foundation is a rapidly growing, global community whose mission is to ...
