New RAIDIX ERA 3.3 Release Brings More Opportunities For Managing NVMe Drives

New options include automatic drive replacement for RAID, monitoring of the wear status, and more.

RAIDIX presents an update of its ERA product. Compared to the previous version ERA 3.2, there are six new features to mention:

1. Automatic drive replacement for RAID. Sets of hot spare drives (SparePool), assigned by RAID, are now used for automatic replacement. In the event of failure of one or more drives in RAID, they automatically replace the defective drive with a healthy one, increasing the system’s fault-tolerance.
2. Expanded re-striping function, made possible by simplification of the process of vertical RAID scaling. Increasing the size of the created RAID by replacing drives with ones of a larger size has now become faster.
3. Opportunity to monitor the state of wear of SSD and NVMe drives. Users can now customize the drive wear threshold and receive email notifications when the threshold is exceeded. It helps to monitor the health of the system hardware and gives an opportunity to replace the hardware in a timely manner.
4. Control of automatic LED indication of drives. Thanks to this, working with the LED indication of drives and getting reports on hardware errors have become more convenient.
5. Extended command status output. One can see the causes of a command’s incorrect execution immediately without viewing the error log. The error log is still available to track the system’s status and its objects.
6. Ability to control the number of CPU threads for eraraid. This functionality is intended to differentiate the resource consumption of the RAIDIX ERA itself and the application software.

Evgeny Davydenko, head of the RAIDIX implementation and maintenance department, comments:
‘The new RAIDIX ERA 3.3 has more functions while maintaining very high performance indicators. Also, we have expanded the list of supported distribution kits: now RAIDIX ERA can be installed on SLES and Ubuntu 20.04 HWE. So we met two objectives at once — to give more opportunities to those who have already implemented RAIDIX ERA and to add the features that will attract new users. We seriously count on the AI segment, cloud, and other large databases — in short, all those for whom high performance and access speed are vital’.

About the product

RAIDIX ERA is a software RAID, designed to be employed with the new types of SSD and NVMe drives. It brings greater performance including collecting and processing more data with higher velocity from connected devices, capturing, storing and processing millions of events and measurements per second, delivering faster responses to the analytics and query requests for insights and machine learning applications.