DCIG Analysis: Swiss Vault Tackles Growing World Data Problem

Swiss Vault’s breakthrough data-storage solution addresses the growing data deluge around the globe, according to a new whitepaper from The Data Center Intelligence Group.

The new whitepaper, “Secure Sustainable Storage – A Global Imperative”, recognizes the upstart as an emerging leader in the fight against runaway data.

“As with many innovators, Swiss Vault’s founders’ work put them in touch with emerging requirements far ahead of most people,” writes Ken Clipperton, DCIG’s lead analyst for storage. “They recognized the need to store and securely access large amounts of sensitive data for a lifetime, and they embarked on a journey to meet that need.”

Swiss Vault, based in Princeton, New Jersey, has created a breakthrough data-storage and archiving platform for mission-critical computing that helps companies in life-advancing fields, such as genomics research and earth telemetry, that need to rapidly capture, store, access and retrieve large volumes of data. Its unique Swiss Vault File System reduces the true cost of data by providing more security with less space. The patent-pending system allows 14 times more stored data per conventional server volume (m3), while reducing the volume of data storage up to 50%. Its self-healing feature protects against lost data files and slow latency. The award-winning company also has received environmental acclaim for its solution, which is 10x more energy efficient.

“The Data Center Intelligence Group views our products as a solution to a very serious global problem—and we couldn’t’ agree more,” said Bhupinder Bhullar, CEO of Swiss Vault. “Security, privacy, environmental and financial concerns are growing fast, right along with demands for more data. We must be part of the solution.”

Clipperton’s analysis mentioned how the genomics work from Bhullar, Swiss Vault’s co-founder, motivated him to finding a fix for the problem of economically managing large volumes of data for decades with security and privacy. “Swiss Vault’s software and hardware innovations enable economical, resilient and environmentally sustainable data management,” the author writes.

In his report, the author states that data storage consumes an estimated 4% of the global electrical energy supply, which will accelerate along with future data demand.

Clipperton praised the innovative Swiss Vault data-storage system for its flexibility to utilize existing infrastructure, incorporate diverse storage resources into a single namespace without limits on filesystem size and ability to adapt to the customer’s needs. He writes that the flexibility extends the life of existing infrastructure, which can delay replacements beyond the typical three to four years.

The whitepaper highlights the company’s unique version of erasure coding, which enables high resilience and more efficiency than traditional RAID networks, as being more flexible than other data-storage solutions. Chief Information Officers (CIOs) can run existing HDDs to failure without risking downtime or they can replace older drives with energy-efficient, high-capacity drive without skipping a beat.
Swiss Vault allows customers to decide which level of resilience and capacity efficiency is best, thanks to its unique version of erasure coding that allows any combination of data plus parity (D+P) chunks. Unfortunately, current competitors in the marketplace only allow a few vendor-defined options.

As data requirements change over time, the company’s software can assign a different D+P per directory, file, file type or file class to match the customer’s requirements. This invaluable flexibility, highlighted by DCIG’s analysis, also applies across the hardware infrastructure.

DCIG’s whitepaper identified six specific features, which places Swiss Vault’s technology as best in class when it comes to combatting the looming data tsunami:

1. Networking: Swiss Vault’s software, which can be installed on Linux workstations/instruments for parallel access to data, creates clusters that can utilize standard Ethernet, but use RDMA (RoCE or InfiniBand) if available for inter-server communication. The software does not require SmartNICs.
2. Servers: Swiss Vault’s software is compiled for X86 and Arm and runs on any existing hardware (Raspberry Pi+), without GPUs. VFS is developed and tested on Mint and Ubuntu and runs on any Linux/Unix.
3. Storage: Swiss Vault’s software can integrate existing JBOD-formatted storage and new high-density storage into a single storage pool with unlimited filesystem size. Disks can be moved from server to server and slot to slot.
4. Scaling: Swiss Vault’s software enables incremental expansion by as little as a single drive, which reduces waste by enabling the organization to acquire capacity, as opposed to the traditional practice of buying several years of capacity up front.
5. Innovations: Swiss Vault’s low-power hardware innovations and the latest networking gear extend the life of existing infrastructure, achieving an optimal balance of capacity, cost and sustainability based on the customer’s priorities. The company uses low-power AMD EPYC architecture microcontrollers and other mechanisms to enable a 10x improvement in storage density and power efficiency in terms of Watts per PB.
6. Workloads: Swiss Vault’s specialized data compression is twice as effective as GZIP for the file types common in such environments.

“Every CIO should have a strategy for 100-year data retention with high availability,” Bhullar said. “We must leverage innovation to regain control of this precious asset.”