Simplifying Data Management From Desktop to Datacenter With Graid Technology

As data volumes continue to explode across enterprises, effectively managing that data is becoming increasingly challenging for IT organizations. Developers, engineers, and architects striving to deliver innovative solutions often find themselves spending inordinate amounts of time on tedious data management tasks - time that could be better spent focusing on core development initiatives. 

Graid Technology offers a compelling solution that can liberate IT teams from many of these burdensome data management responsibilities. During the 53rd IT Press Tour, Tom Paquette, SVP and GM Americas & EMEA at Graid Technology walked us through the company’s technology for simplifying data management spanning desktops, data centers, and hybrid cloud environments.

A Sea Change in the Storage Landscape

The velocity of innovation occurring in modern data storage infrastructures based on NVMe and NVMe-over-Fabrics is immense. Performance is doubling with each product generation, while capacities continue to scale massively. However, as Paquette outlined, flash-based storage still has finite endurance, so failures remain a reality. Meanwhile, server and workstation density keeps ramping, which places increased urgency on protecting these more failure-prone high-performance SSDs.  Unfortunately, traditional RAID solutions struggle to keep pace, hampering efforts to maximize ROI on NVMe investments.

Hardware RAID severely constrains performance by throttling SSD throughput down to the speed of the RAID controller interconnect. Software RAID consumes substantial host CPU cycles for parity calculations, which can bring business-critical applications grinding to a halt during failures and rebuilds. 

Delivering GPU-Accelerated Data Protection

Rather than force IT organizations to choose between performance and data protection, Graid Technology eliminates this tradeoff.  The company’s SupremeRAID solution harnesses the massively parallel processing capabilities of GPUs, rather than taxing host CPUs or introducing performance bottlenecks. 

Data passes directly from the host to the SSD without traversing the GPU. This approach facilitates unmatched performance scaling to keep pace with perpetually improving NVMe SSDs, combined with the always-on data protection that eliminates disruptive rebuilds.

Comprehensive Lineup Protecting Desktops to Data Centers

Graid Technology’s SupremeRAID family offers a solution fit for any application environment. The high-end SR-1010 can drive up to 32 NVMe SSDs, making it ideally suited for latency-sensitive workloads including AI/ML training, high-performance computing, and large-scale databases.  The mid-range SR-1000 brings the same technology, supporting up to 24 SSDs typically used for mainstream applications. Rounding out the portfolio, the new entry-level SR-1001 targets professional workstations and edge deployments supporting up to 8 SSDs.

Across the lineup, SupremeRAID enables organizations to maximize NVMe ROI regardless of scale while benefiting from its always-on data protection.

Simplifying Data Management in Multi-Cloud Environments 

As enterprise adoption of hybrid and multi-cloud infrastructure accelerates, the flexibility of Graid Technology’s offerings provides a seamless data management solution. Customers can stand up storage in any environment using SupremeRAID whether on-premise, hyper-scale public cloud, or at the edge while maintaining unified data services. This capability simplifies migration initiatives spanning legacy SAN replacements to born-in-the-cloud next-generation applications.

Strong Partners Delivering Complete Solutions

Graid Technology understands the importance of collaborating across the storage ecosystem to smooth deployment for customers. The company boasts an impressive array of partnerships. This includes joint certification and support with server OEMs such as Supermicro in addition to extensive interoperability validation covering the spectrum of enterprise NVMe SSD vendors. Graid Technology also teams with leading data protection ISVs to enable comprehensive cyber resilience, so organizations can move confidently to NVMe while remaining impervious to outages.

Driving Innovation With AI/ML

Graid enables organizations to accelerate AI and machine learning initiatives by eliminating data management bottlenecks. The extreme performance demands of gathering, cleansing, and preparing massive training data sets mandate the highest IO throughput and lowest latency. Customers rely on SupremeRAID to maximize GPU utilization and complete model development cycles up to 95% faster.  

Securing Sensitive Healthcare Data

Protecting highly confidential medical patient information is non-negotiable. However, rapidly accessing and analyzing this data to drive personalized treatment remains equally vital. Healthcare providers such as St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital leverage SupremeRAID to safeguard databases supporting cutting-edge genomic analysis and imaging workflows without sacrificing speed. Always-on redundancy combined with multiple layers of security ensures no disruption in lifesaving research.

Optimizing Edge Infrastructure 

As interfaces between users and cloud services, edge environments require real-time processing fully isolated from back-end systems. SupremeRAID’s small footprint and low power draw make it ideal for space-constrained deployments. Intelligent parity reduction minimizes CPU impact while accelerating data protection to match edge-specific performance demands. This allows organizations to place more processing at the edge, fully leveraging NVMe speeds.

Liberate Data Management Headaches

Forward-thinking data-intensive applications combined with increasingly distributed business processes are collectively driving data management complexity to new heights. As a result, it has never been more important to simplify these tasks, so innovation can flourish across the enterprise IT landscape.

Tom Paquette sums it up: “We believe the trajectory we’re on right now, we’re going to be a hands-down performance leader. Nobody even comes close”. 

Based on early customer deployments and extensive third-party performance benchmarking, he certainly makes a compelling case. Organizations seeking to accelerate application delivery by eliminating data management bottlenecks would be wise to give Graid Technology’s SupremeRAID solutions a close look.