Definition

ScaleIO

ScaleIO is a software-defined storage product from Dell EMC that uses existing customer hardware or EMC servers to turn direct-attached storage (DAS) into shared block storage. The product is available as software or, as ScaleIO Node, software preinstalled on commodity hardware. ScaleIO is designed to enable performance on demand for enterprise data center, development, virtualization and physical server environments.

ScaleIO creates a server-based SAN (storage area network) by taking a local application server’s DAS resources and converting them into block storage to enable scalable high-performance storage. ScaleIO converges storage and compute resources to create a single-layer architecture. An alternative two-layer option allows application and storage to maintained separately, depending on what works best for a given application. 

As a software product, ScaleIO supports a variety of hardware. The software installs a data client and a data server on application hosts, which then provide storage and compute resources. ScaleIO can start with as few as three nodes and can scale to 1000 nodes. The system scales without interruption and features self-healing, automatic workload balancing and fast data restoration from mirrored storage. From one megabyte (MB) of RAM, ScaleIO can provide addresses for over a petabyte (PB) of memory.

The company ScaleIO was founded in 2011 in Israel by Boaz Palgi, Erez Webman, Lior Bahat, Erin Borovik and Erez Ungar. EMC Corporation purchased the company for $200,000,000 in 2013; EMC itself was subsequently acquired by Dell in 2016.

This was last updated in October 2016

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