In this episode I’m with Philippe Nicolas (Rozo Systems advisor). He helps us to understand better Rozo FS and its potential.
We talk about:
– Rozo systems
– Why RozoFS is different
– Use cases
Audio is not very good this time, but content is worth a listen!
Here a complete transcript of the show
Enrico: Welcome everyone to a new episode of Juku.beats. Today I’m with Philippe Nicolas which is well-known in the valley for the IT press tours among other things. Welcome Philippe.
Philippe: Hi Enrico. Pleasure to be with you. Thank you for inviting me for this new podcast.
Enrico: First of all I know that you have joined a new company called Rozo Systems. Can you give us an idea of the company and of course your role in the company.
Philippe: I’m Philippe Nicola presenting today Rozo System as an advisor. I have more than 20 years in this [inaudible 00:00:46] industry having worked for Compaq, AGI, Veritas Software, Symantec, Brocade and Scality.
As you said Enrico I’m based in the valley doing different stuff and some company asked me to give them some advice for their development in the US. Rozo System the company I joined recently is a storage ISV who develop a scale-out nas with some particularity especially in the intelligent data protection layer. This is really an innovative technology I will describe in a minute.
Enrico: In fact I know that Rozo System is a scale-out nas which is a very, very crowded market now. What else I know that they are developing this registering algorithm which is a particular interesting. So if you can explain us how it works and what is the difference between this algorithm and the other registering that we know.
Philippe: Sure. So Rozo System develop a product name Rozo FS like Roso File System. The idea is essentially to provide the two main needs a CIO require is performance and protection at the same time. What I mean by that it’s pretty easy for many product to deliver performance when everything works well. When there is a failure, a disc, a node, is a product able to continue and deliver the same level of performance. So this is a challenge Rozo FS address today. The fact that when you deliver a video stream, even if there is a node or a disc failure, there is no glitch or let’s say [happening 00:02:42] during the video stream. So this is perfectly seamless for the application.
Rozo FS is just a software. It runs on community servers. So it’s perfectly aligned with what w heard on the market with the SDS software defined storage. This is just a punch, a pool of X86 machine running Linux, different very standard component. In terms of acquisition cost it’s very low.
Now in terms of product, if I wish to introduce a bit the product, you mentioned it’s a scale-out nas, it’s true. Also the addition of this data protection layer. Let me explain this: Internally the product can be seen as a asymmetry distributed file system. What I mean by that is you have meta-data servers and data servers. Everything is distributed among the two and by the name I just introduce you recognize the role of the different machine of course. You have different number for each of these entity. Externally the pool of servers is exposed as a scale-out nas. The pool of different famous interface you can expect from this such product like NFS, FMB, FTP and even HTTP. The interesting part of the product is what I call the persistent layer which implements an innovative erasure coding technique. The name of this is the mojette transform, invented at the University of [Nantes 00:04:26] several years ago.
In order to detail [inaudible 00:04:32] you have to think about the classic erasure encoding mechanism. The fact that you can encode all the data or just create additional checksum in order to support multiple failures. Multiple failures could come from note failures, or disc failures, and the idea is to continue to serve the data even during this kind of disaster.
Enrico: What are the best use cases for this technology. You mentioned video streaming first, but I’m sure there are many others.
Philippe: Rozo FS is not a generic nas, so we don’t target the very classic needs to replace the famous nas servers, filers or even some generic scale-out nas. The ideas for Rozo is to really address what we call the vertical use cases. Bu that I mean media and entertainment and Rozo Systems signed recently to [inaudible 00:05:41] agreements with cloud DVR players. It was announced during IBC in September. We also target segment like oil and gas, life sciences and genomics and of course HPC. With all this few use cases you immediate will recognize the vertical aspects of the usage and especially in this domain the need of high performance, both in terms of high ups and bandwidth, but also the strong requirement about data protection. The fact that there is no acceptance of any failure or any loss of data.
Enrico: It sounds really interesting. This lead to my last question to you. Where we can find Rosa on Twitter and on the Internet?
Philippe: Good question Enrico to conclude this call. So Rozo System it’s a pretty confidential company. Small company so we try to boost our visibility on Internet with a website of course, so you can visit us at rozosystems.com and you’ll find some documentation, benchmark paper, etc. Also on Twitter rozofs or rozosystems. So I invite you to visit this or ask us to do some POC test in order to realize the value of the product.
Enrico: Okay, great. Thank you very much Philippe.
Philippe: Thank you Enrico.
Enrico: Bye bye.
Philippe: Bye bye.
