StorPool adds fast erasure coding to block storage

 StorPool Storage v21, available today, supports high-performance erasure coding capabilities for scale-out block storage used by mission-critical applications on commodity flash storage among other new capabilities including new integrations with technology partners.

Erasure coding is a form of data protection which breaks data into fragments which are spread across redundant storage locations to enable recovery. Block storage demands performance from hardware, said Ray Lucchesi, founder and president of Silverton Consulting.

However, it’s difficult to support the performance requirements that erasure coding requires alongside block storage without impacting application performance, he said. Other vendors have tried in the past with the use of custom hardware.

“Not a lot [of vendors] have done what they’re doing,” Lucchesi said. “If you want to do erasure coding, you’d got to have some way of maintaining performance parity.”