TALLINN, Estonia, July 21, 2025 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — Leil Storage announces the release of SaunaFS 5.0, redefining what’s possible for on-premise large-scale enterprise storage empowered by hyperscale efficiency. SaunaFS 5.0 is the industry’s first on-premises distributed file system engineered for true exabyte scale, purpose-built to unlock the exceptional density and efficiency of Host-Managed Shingled Magnetic Recording (HM-SMR) drives. It delivers market-leading eco-efficiency and reliability – with no sacrifice in performance.
To accelerate adoption, SaunaFS 5.0 supports drives of variable capacity, allowing to combine drives of different series and generations within the same cluster, as well as mix of CMR and SMR drives – all to make an easier start.
Key Highlights:
- Unmatched Performance: SaunaFS 5.0 introduces a new chunk-based write algorithm, along with improved parallelization and smarter I/O path management. These upgrades provide dramatically increased sequential and nearline throughput, ensuring HM-SMR drives can outperform expectations – even under production workloads.
- Effortless Scalability: Enhanced metadata architecture, advanced chunk management, and next-gen erasure coding allow seamless growth from petabyte to exabyte-scale clusters. Administrators can now mix CMR, SMR, and HM-SMR drives within a single deployment, a best-in-class flexibility unmatched by other distributed file systems.
- Reliability At Scale: The new release features a hardened, resilient failover system and an upgraded floating IP manager designed to maintain high availability during peak operations and site transitions.
- True Eco-Efficiency: Building on Leil’s proprietary ICE (“Infinite Cold Engine”) platform, SaunaFS 5.0 automatically powers down idle drives, optimizing energy usage and substantially reducing data center operational costs.
Under-the-Hood Innovations:
- Streamlined upgrade/downgrade paths
- Improved concurrency, memory handling, and smart caching
- Granular drive management and simplified cluster orchestration
“SaunaFS 5.0 is the result of our two-year pursuit of not just performance, but real, verifiable sustainability. By marrying technical innovation with an eco-first approach, we enable organizations to store vastly more data, faster and greener than ever before,” said David Gerstein, CTO of Leil Storage. “We’re thrilled to bring this advancement both to the industry and our global open-source community.”
About Leil Storage
Leil Storage delivers scalable, sustainable file storage solutions, shaping the future of enterprise data infrastructure. SaunaFS is open source and free to use, with commercial modules available for advanced features and support.
Discover more at leil.io and follow Leil Storage on LinkedIn.
Aleksandr Ragel
AR@leil.io