Leil Storage is modern storage designed for backup and archival data. Leil is an Estonian company with the headquarter in Tallin.

With their solution, they are trying hard to revitalize, redo, and right many wrongs around the concept of backup and archival storage.

There are several storage solution for backup/archiving, but there are some points that make Leil Storage very interesting:

• Aims to capture market share in backup and LTO/tape storage
• No performance compromise! Enables rapid data retrieval, which is crucial due to the current pace of data growth
• Reduces energy use with a lower KW/TB ratio

The first point is a common goal for several disk based solution and, of course, the price can be one key point to be considered.

The other two points are quite interesting.

Performance

Several solution use a massive amount of SSD to reach this goal.

But how is possible reach interesting performance results with spinning disks, to keep the price low and comparable with tape based solutions?

Leil Storage harnesses state-of-the-art technologies, such as Host-Managed Shingled Magnetic Recording (HM-SMR) drives. SMR technology has been in use for the last decade by hyperscalers only.

Western Digital developed a specialised HDD product tailored for Leil Storage, integrating SMR technology and a power disable feature:

• The power disable feature empowers Leil Storage to entirely disconnect electricity from these drives, leading to enhanced energy efficiency.
• SMR technology facilitates a denser data storage format, ultimately lowering electricity consumption and cost per terabyte.

Green

Tape based solutions are green because offline tapes does not consume energy… but how is possible make much more green a HDD based solution?

As written before,  Leil is using specific HDD build from WD to craft an eco-friendly data storage system that slashes electricity consumption by 43%.

The introduction of the green features has an amplification effect at scale, making it possible for more people to consume less energy while storing more data, making the world a greener place. The product solves the problem of suboptimal legacy data storage, which is not optimised for specific workloads and is not compliant with today’s green agenda.

SaunaFS

The core of Leil Storage is SaunaFS, a robust distributed POSIX file system meticulously designed to revolutionize the storage solutions by offering unmatched efficiency, security, and redundancy. At its core, SaunaFS is a distributed file system primarily written in C++, inspired by the pioneering concepts introduced by Google File System.

SaunaFS is an underlying software-defined storage platform for products like Leil Backup & Archive storage but can handle various use cases as well.

Architecture

Leil Storage is a modern storage designed for backup and archival data based on SaunaFS
software-defined storage platform. But not only!

Leil Storage = SaunaFS + ICE + Arctic Forest Concept

The Infinite Cold Engine (ICE) enables rapid data retrieval, which is crucial due to the current pace of data growth, without compromises on performance and saves energy. Has different phases of implementation, with different goals of energy saving:

• Phase 1: HM-SMR support,18% total energy savings
• Phase 2: Write-group conception Y2024, 43%
• Phase 3: Popular Data Concentration (PDC), Y2025, 50%
• Phase 4: AI-driven background service, Y2026, 70%

The Arctic Forest Concept elevates security and provides a novel marketing edge, is built on the foundation of SaunaFS Copy-on-Write snapshots. This additional immutability layer enhances the already robust immutability features, presenting a ground-breaking and exclusive market offering.

A perfect backup target

Leil Storage is designed to be a perfect backup target for existing backup solutions, like Veeam, Acronis, Rubrik, Cohesity.

Other backup vendors to be supported through the following protocols:

• Native FUSE Linux client
• Native FUSE Windows client
• NFSv4
• S3