About flashback protection technology

Like many other flash devices, NAND flash eventually fails with use. Those failures can be either permanent or temporary. Flashback Protection redundancy is designed to address those IO Accelerator chips that experience permanent failures, and provides additional protection above and beyond ECC for soft failures.

Flashback technology provides a real-time RAID-like redundancy at the chip-level, without sacrificing user capacity or performance for fault tolerance. In general, solutions that use physical RAID schemes for redundancy/protection, must either sacrifice capacity (RAID 1), or performance (RAID 5).

Flashback Protection technology, with self-healing properties, ensures higher performance, minimal failure, and longer endurance than all other flash solutions.

Software RAID and health monitoring

Software RAID stacks are typically designed to detect and mitigate the failure modes of traditional storage media. The IO Accelerator attempts to fail as gracefully as possible, and its new failure mechanisms are compatible with existing software RAID stacks. A drive in write-reduced mode participating in a write-heavy workload is evicted from a RAID group for failure to receive data at a sufficient rate. A drive in read-only mode is evicted when write I/Os are returned from the device as failed. Catastrophic failures are detected and handled just as though they were on traditional storage devices.

Monitoring IO Accelerator health 54