Introducing Sonic Quantum tier. NVMe-based S3-compatible object storage.

We've launched our Sonic Object Storage service the day before new year's 2023 celebrations 🎉 Sonic is our vision of highly-scalable, highly-affordable storage service that you can use with the tools you already love. Sonic is also a drop-in replacement for you cloud provider's S3-compatible storage offering when you start to scale. Thus you can keep running on your favourite cloud vendor, but at higher speed and without the growing pain of the storage costs in your monthly invoices. 

Today we are launching Sonic's second tier. It's an edge storage starting in Germany 🇩🇪 coming to North America 🇺🇸 next. It's built on NVMe disk drives and is meant for low read and write latency, staggering number of operations per second and instant data access in the single-digit millisecond counts. We've called it Sonic Quantum Edge tier. 

Object storage is the de-facto standard for unstructured data. It scales to virtually unlimited size easily, bares none of the negative aspects of older storage solutions like RAID, introduces clever algorithms like Reed-Solomon's erasure coding (EC) to protect and distribute data across the entire cluster for maximum durability, performance and availability. When it is also S3-compatible like Sonic, such an object store can easily be plugged into any app or service. S3 SDKs, adapters and plug-ins are available for any stack that you might be building with, usually just a npm install or a single require away. Check our knowledge base for ready-made examples.

However, while object storage can be fast, and Sonic is already powered by our global edge network making it one of the fastest S3-compatible stores for locally and globally distributed data, it is not necessarily fast in writing or updating data. The durability added by erasure coding algorithms comes at the expense of data manipulation. In Sonic's standard tier, we avoid this by tagging data as hot or warm. Hot data changes frequently and is therefore replicated. Changes to this data can happen in real time as needed, and replication brings durability without the cost of calculating parity data, but at the expense of higher disk space usage. Warm data is more suitable to be encoded for efficient long-term storage and durability. Once data is erasure coded, changes to it are not really possible, because it would require the container which originally had the data to be rebuilt from all the data shards that are spread across all servers, decoded and turned into a normal container. As you've probably already guessed, these processes don't scale very well, especially for large numbers of small files. So Sonic does all of these intensive tasks in the background because they may take some time, while it would simply save an updated file to a new copy and serve it instead. To you it looks like it all happened instantly. 

Sonic Quantum: the fastest S3-compatible hot storage 🤩

So the above approach does not scale if a lot of data needs to be changed often, and should data need to change often, it obviously also needs access to read and write operations without any wait. Machine Learning datasets, real-time ad delivery, transactional app data, platforms leveraging logs for real-time decision making, as well as SaaS products keeping up with growing user bases need their data updated and delivered with no delays. Because of this, Sonic Quantum is built on NVMe disk drives - the fastest non short-term memory currently available. In our testing on an already  loaded edge location (Germany), we've clocked 227 000 IOPS (input/output operations per second) at 4KB block size. For comparison, an unused hard disk (HDD) usually manages around 130 IOPS, while an unused, reasonably good SSD disk, may reach 50 000 IOPS. As a result, Sonic Quantum's read and write latencies are so low that would persistently measure in single-digit milliseconds, limited only by network throughput. 

Built-in high-speed CDN for delivery ⚡

On top of a stellar I/O performance, Sonic Quantum also comes with our global edge network built in. It caches copies of stored objects close to the end users, providing for fast file downloads and fast loading of web assets anytime, everywhere. Both services are integrated in each other out of the box, which means that no extra setup of any kind is required. Just create a storage zone and you are ready to go. 

Unmatched pricing 🤑

At this point you might be thinking that Sonic Quantum would cost a hefty premium for it's unmatched performance in the hot storage industry. I am super happy to say that this is not the case and Sonic Quantum is currently the most affordable S3-compatible hot storage in the world, billed at just $0.05/GB ⚡ And just like it's standard tier sibling, there are:

✔️ No request fees

✔️ No API usage fees

✔️ Free egress towards Pushr's edge network

Getting started

Sonic's Quantum tier is now conveniently available for you to select when creating a new storage zone from your account's dashboard:

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