LucidFlash Accelerates NAS And Slashes Costs
LucidFlash Accelerates NAS And Slashes Costs
Largo, FL – October 27, 2014 – Lucid Technology, Inc., a leading provider of NAS/SAN unified storage solutions, introduced an all-flash storage array to enable cost effective application performance acceleration.
LucidFlash, a 100% solid state expandable NAS designed to accelerate and simplify storage infrastructure, delivers enterprise grade performance for latency-sensitive applications responsible for driving revenue and productivity.
Powered by LucidNAS storage software, LucidFlash is a unified all-flash array that supports both block and file protocols including iSCSI, NFS, and CIFS, ensuring future-proof flexibility in meeting changing business and technology requirements.
It offers simple management, allowing IT departments to focus on delivering business value instead of managing storage, and delivers consistent sub-millisecond response times to accelerate business critical applications on a day-in, day-out basis.
Packed in a tiny 1U footprint, LucidFlash NAS is optimized for the native capabilities of flash and yields significant performance improvements over legacy storage especially in handling write traffic and data protection, accelerating I/O-intensive workloads and delivering high IOPS at sub-millisecond latency.
To maximize the longevity of the installed flash memory and extend its endurance, LucidFlash utilizes system tools to achieve even wear throughout the drive, improving performance and reducing premature media fatigue resulting from high concentration of P/E cycles. Intelligent wear-leveling ensures that the lifespan of flash can be extended to its maximum endurance limit.
“In order to keep up with evolving business needs, organizations are increasingly turning to all-flash storage for their primary storage needs,” said Vadim Carter, Lucid Technology’s President. “LucidFlash combines affordability and performance to make all-flash storage a viable option for a variety of applications and for companies of all sizes. It is a full-featured, unified storage solution engineered for applications that demand low latency and fast storage performance, which delivers a compelling balance of good economics, rapid time to deployment, and flexible scalability, allowing our customers to start small and scale capacity as their needs grow.”
Delivering the benefits of solid-state technology at a price point the mainstream could afford, LucidFlash offers high end features that large enterprises have been spending millions on for years:
- Thin provisioning to deliver increased capacity utilization and more efficient storage architecture, enabling on-demand allocation.
- Inline deduplication that achieves 10-to-1 data reduction to drive down the cost of storage. LucidFlash deduplication is synchronous, safe, efficiently scales with any size, and places no restrictions on the amount of data to deduplicate.
- End-to-end data integrity, keeping data consistent and eliminating silent data corruption with copy-on-write and checksums. LucidFlash uses a 256-bit checksum stored separately from the data it relates to and unlike a simple disk block checksum, it detects phantom writes, misdirected reads and writes, DMA parity errors, driver bugs, accidental overwrites as well as traditional “bit rot”. Once corruption is detected, LucidFlash automatically repairs the damage before the data is passed off to the process that requested it.
- Unlimited snapshots to protect data from accidental deletion, corruption, and modification with minimal time and capacity requirements. LucidFlash snapshots are very small and efficient, as only the deltas from the previous snapshot are stored. LucidFlash offers functionality to create a snapshot of the file system contents, transfer it to another storage array, and extract the snapshot to recreate the file system. By continually creating, replicating, and restoring snapshots, one can provide synchronization between one or more machines.
- Software RAID that offers single (RAID-Z) or double parity (RAID-Z2) protection like hardware RAID, but without the “write hole” vulnerability thanks to the copy-on-write architecture. The additional level of RAID-Z3 offers triple parity protection, and software mirror option is also available.
LucidFlash brings new level of affordability to high performance, low latency all-flash block and file shared storage, aiming to improve core operations that depend on applications where responsiveness drives the bottom line. It implements several targeted, flash specific software optimizations to deliver improved performance, superior data protection, and flash endurance.
“Faced with rapidly evolving infrastructure requirements, companies are now looking for greater simplicity and efficiency from their storage than ever before,” added Vadim Carter, Lucid Technology’s President. “LucidFlash is well positioned to deliver numerous benefits of solid-state technology across diverse markets and a multitude of applications.”
For more information on the LucidFlash NAS Storage Array, please visit:
ABOUT LUCID TECHNOLOGY, INC.
Located in Largo, Florida, Lucid Technology, Inc. is an innovative technology leader providing network storage solutions to OEMs, Value Added Resellers and System Integrators. The company’s products address business-critical needs for flexibility, affordability, high availability, and high performance. For more information, visit https://www.lucidti.com or email sales@lucidti.com
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LumaForge and Lucid Technology Deliver LumaZAN Collaborative Workflow Platform
LumaForge and Lucid Technology Combine Forces to Deliver LumaZAN Collaborative Workflow Platform for Media and Entertainment Industry.
Combining Cost-Effective Open IT Solutions with Easy to Manage LucidNAS Shared Storage System, LumaForge Introduces the LumaZAN Collaborative Workflow Platform.
LOS ANGELES – June 23, 2014
Leveraging the incredible price/performance value of commodity PC servers and workstations with the enterprise strength of ZFS file sharing software, LumaForge and Lucid Technology combine forces to provide M&E clients with the most cost-effective shared storage solution available on the market today. The LumaZAN collaborative workflow platform delivers rock solid, dependable shared storage across a fast, easy to manage data network that unites artist workstations with back-end servers in an elegant and affordable total workflow solution.
CEO of LumaForge, Neil Smith observes that, “The demand for reliable and cost-effective shared storage for digital content workflows is only going to grow. Hollywood and the M&E industry are rapidly moving to a 4K acquisition and finishing pipeline. As resolution, frame rates and the sheer volume of digital content increases, the demand for cost-effective shared storage solutions is going to increase exponentially. We’ve spent many years working closely mastering the ‘knack of workflow optimization’ in order to deliver maximum performance with maximum ROI. The result of the extensive fieldwork with our customers is the LumaZAN collaborative workflow platform. LumaZAN provides Open IT solutions that combine hardware, software and middleware in ways that are incredibly well suited and cost-effective for digital content pipelines.”
At the core of the LumaZAN solution platform is the LucidNAS shared storage file system from Lucid Technology. LucidNAS storage software is built on a UNIX foundation that includes ZFS, the most advanced enterprise file system available today. ZFS brings a wealth of benefits to the LucidNAS storage solution, including native I/O pooling, end-to-end data integrity, and unlimited snapshot capabilities. And to further increase the software utility, Lucid Technology adds an intuitive and comprehensive data management front-end for organizing and administering all aspects of the unified storage solution.
Vadim Carter, President of Lucid Technology explains the importance of ZFS as part of the LucidNAS file sharing architecture. “Traditional fiber channel SANs (Storage Area Networks) are expensive to install and difficult to maintain for small to medium M&E companies. Our unique LucidNAS GUI interface allows customers to install, set-up and manage their LucidNAS storage pools with the minimum amount of hassle. ZFS is a modern 21st century storage architecture that provides high performance scalability with solid data integrity that just cannot be found in any alternative approach. The LucidNAS unique Hybrid Storage Pool architecture automatically caches data on RAM or SSDs to provide optimal performance and exceptional efficiency, while ensuring that data remains safely stored on reliable and high capacity hard-disk drive storage pools.”
By leveraging the Hybrid Storage Pool architecture of LucidNAS, the LumaZAN collaborative workflow platform allows Post-production facilities, VFX houses and studios to benefit from the price/performance value of commodity hardware and the functionality of COTS (Commercial Off The Shelf) applications from companies like Autodesk, Adobe, Apple, Avid, Blackmagic Design and The Foundry. Many of these powerful desktop tools are being re-architected to take advantage of OpenCL and high powered GPUs. LumaForge is working closely with the software companies and AMD to ensure that the LumaZAN collaboration platform incorporates the latest advances in Open IT and GPU technology.
“Open IT standards like ZFS, Unix and OpenCL are critical to sustaining the technological innovation taking place in M&E market,” says Smith. “The days of single vendor proprietary lock-in are over. Customers increasingly want freedom of choice over their strategic hardware and software platforms. The LumaZAN collaboration platform means that customers can choose the hardware, software and networking combination that best meets their budgetary and performance requirements., The added advantage of the LumaZAN platform is that we never hold your data hostage. At any time, your valuable data and video files can easily be moved to any other ZFS platform at the drop of a hat.”
The LumaZAN collaborative workflow platform will premier at the 2014 Creative Storage Conference in Culver City on Tuesday June 24th with an in-depth follow up seminar on Saturday June 28th on The Lot in West Hollywood.
For more information on the 2014 Creative Storage Conference visit http://www.creativestorage.org/index.htm
For more information on the ‘LumaZAN Collaborative Workflow Seminar’ visit Eventbrite at https://www.eventbrite.com/e/lumazan-collaborative-workflow-seminar-saturday-june-28th-tickets-11972342599
For more information about Lucid Technology and the powerful LucidNAS file sharing system, visit https://www.lucidti.com
For more information about LumaForge and its products and services, visit http://www.lumaforge.com
Lucid Technology partners with StorageRep
Lucid Technology Partners with StorageRep to Offer Unified NAS Storage Solutions for the Video Market
LucidNAS is Ideal for Shared-Storage Video Applications
Largo, FL – April 2, 2014 – Lucid Technology, Inc., a leading provider of NAS/SAN unified storage solutions, announced the appointment of StorageRep LLC as a worldwide manufacturing representative for the video market. StorageRep will actively promote all LucidNAS products to resellers and integrators serving the corporate video, film, television, and post-production industries.
“We have identified the video market as a key growth opportunity for our products,” says Vadim Carter, Lucid Technology’s President. “Video professionals are viewing NAS-based storage networks as an increasingly popular solution as it is easy to deploy and cost effective. We are excited to be working with StorageRep and are confident they have the expertise, relationships, and experience to help us succeed in this market.”
Lucid’s flagship product, the LucidNAS Unified Storage Appliance, allows customers to easily make the transition to a lower cost NAS/SAN shared storage environment using any commodity 64-bit Intel or AMD server. LucidNAS provides video workgroups with fast, highly-scalable, ultra-reliable, and cost effective storage. The Lucid product also removes the complexity of the filesystem and volume management with automated policies that dramatically reduce storage administration.
Lucid’s product perfectly complements our other product offerings in the video market. With a definite advantage in speed, and scalability – key requirements in 2K and 4K video – the Lucid partnership will enhance our customers’ high performance digital video solutions for film, TV and post production,” says Jerry Palace Co-founder, StorageRep LLC.
The video market represents data-intensive applications including computer graphics, streaming, editing, and content creation. The LucidNAS is well-suited for Adobe Creative Suite, Avid Pro Tools, Apple Final Cut Pro 7, Apple Final Cut Pro X, and others. Multiple editors can access a hybrid storage pool that combines DRAM, SSDs, and spinning HDDs in order to speed up workflow completion time and overall project management.
LucidNAS Unified Storage Appliance provides customers with significant cost reductions and increased productivity by offering affordable, high performance access to networked storage. By utilizing existing Ethernet infrastructure, NAS-based solutions simplify storage deployment, management, and support for editors and IT personnel. Furthermore, many organizations can leverage their existing networks instead of having to purchase new network equipment.
Lucid Technology, Inc. is an innovative technology leader providing network storage solutions to OEMs, Value Added Resellers and System Integrators. The company’s product addresses business-critical needs for flexibility, affordability, high availability, and high performance. Lucid’s flagship LucidNAS™ product is a new type of unified storage appliance that delivers easy-to-use, easy-to-administer scalable storage software in a moderate-cost, plug-and-play, solution. Every bit as powerful as a traditional server, LucidNAS reduces complexity and cost by being task specific and platform agnostic, equally capable of serving Windows, MAC OS, and Linux clients. For more information, visit https://www.lucidti.com or email sales@lucidti.com
StorageRep, LLC was founded in 2006 on the philosophy of providing our customers with a business model that simplifies the way they purchase, sell, and support shared storage. StorageRep provides customers one source for access to industry standard, cutting edge, and high-level storage technologies. We provide pre and post sales engineering support, as well as offering fully tested storage solutions for SMB and mid-size businesses’. Vertical markets that we service include the media and entertainment industry where market realities continue to reshape the industry. Technology platforms are evolving quickly to meet the demand of more eyes watching video on the internet. Shared storage is the cornerstone of media collaboration, providing the performance, reliability, and capacity to sustain real-time workflows in the most demanding environments.
StorageRep, LLC has over seventy five years of combined engineering, marketing, and sales experience in the storage industry. For more information, visit http://www.storagerep.com or email info@storagerep.com
LucidNAS Version 2.8.1 is live
We are proud to present the latest and greatest version of the LucidNAS software. Version 2.8.1 brings many improvements and fixes which all add up to the best, most user-friendly experience yet.
- Performance, performance, and even more performance tweaks
- Improved Active Directory integration
- Improved boot environments
- Faster root on ZFS installation
- Firewall, networking, and LAGG improvements
- ZFS v5000 Storage Pool Allocator support
- SMB stack performance improvements
Updating is easy and only takes 30 seconds right from the web GUI. Just click System Management → System Preferences, select the Update tab, and click on the Update button.
The work does not stop here, however, and we have all hands on deck getting ready for the next release. Replication, failover, and failback will be available in version 2.9
LucidNAS Version 2.8.0 has been released
We are working hard on simplifying network storage and making it easier to use. Another major milestone has just been reached with the release of LucidNAS Version 2.8.0. Major changes in this version are:
- Updated OS Kernel
- All network interfaces can be fully configured from the web GUI, including advanced flags
- New link aggregation configuration implemented
- New firewall configuration with blacklist / whitelist support
- AltQ traffic shaping
- OFED Infiniband networking
- Device polling on supported network interfaces