Why data accuracy and consistency matters
What is Critical?
The core functionality of a storage solution can be boiled down to one simple statement. The solution must efficiently and effectively store and fetch data upon request. How the solution does this—how it chunks up and treats the data through this input/output pipeline—makes or breaks the overall utility and viability of the solution. For performance-intensive work flows such as those carried out in post-production shops, data treatment and integrity are vital to achieving the speed necessary to support client workstation requests.
Our Unique Data Treatment for NAS
At its simplest and highest level, a storage solution has a few key tasks it must accomplish. It must take data generated by client workstations and store that data on disk until requested. Upon request, it must then fetch the data and provide it to any requesting client workstation. These input/ output operations, or IOPs, are the core functions of any storage system. If it can carry these tasks out efficiently and effectively, then the storage solution probably has a certain amount of market viability. What separates most viable storage solutions from each other is the way it carries out these IOP activities. The most attractive solutions for high-performance environments are those which are optimized at the operating-system level to treat that data—segmenting it, writing it to disk, and reading it from disk to render to requesting workstations—with the least amount of transactional latency and the maximum amount of data integrity. Storage is inherently transactional, and the faster and more accurately it can carry out transactions, the more the solution can be differentiated from the pack. OpenDrives was created with the singular goal of creating the fastest and most efficient NAS storage solutions on the market. The base functionality within the proprietary operating system has been intentionally designed to transact data in ways that other solutions simply can’t accomplish. Along the way, we have overcome a lot of the obstacles from which other solutions still suffer, things like static and inefficient block sizes, ineffective caching and fetching, and inadequate data integrity and compression. Let’s take a look at how OpenDrives carries out these functions and brings new value to high-performance environments.