Symantec Corp. (Nasdaq: SYMC) today announced enhancements to Symantec FileStore N8300, the latest version of its clustered, network attached storage appliance, designed to help customers address the business challenges associated with building out virtual environments and cloud storage, managing large volumes of data and controlling the associated storage costs. Certified with VMware, FileStore N8300 is seamlessly integrated with VMware vCenter Server, and enables organizations to optimize storage costs associated with virtual machine sprawl and rapidly provision servers and virtual desktops, through efficient cloning and de-duplication of virtual machine images.
The NAS storage market, especial the clustered NAS market is growing at 10%+ as per IDC.
The main new features of the FileStore N8300 are:
- Virtualization: –Support for efficient cloning and storage of VMware images –Integrated with vCenter and is VMware certified
- De-duplication: –Primary block-based storage de-duplication –Leverages recent Veritas Storage Foundation 6.0 code
- Robustness: –Enhancements to replication and failover capabilities Added automated failover capabilities. The product always had replication support and has added autofailover to a secondary site and synchronous replication within 100 km and cascading replication across locations.
There has been an enormous growth in unstructured data. Organizations don’t just need lots of storage, they need storage management and business continuity built in so that storage can be more usable. Scalability, performance, high availability, management, governance, anti-virus, are all necessary. AV is embedded on the unit itself. This is where a lot of Symantec software products come together to provide a full portfolio of NAS services.
Built on commodity hardware in order to keep costs low. More than 600,000 IOPS using 8 off the shelf units.
Regarding virtualization, each VM has a golden image taken, using FastClone they can clone thousands of virtual machines in 20 minutes, only cloning new information so this is more efficient in terms of storage and time. Over time, the clones digress from each other so this is where dedupe becomes important. It’s possible to add more compute or storage nodes to tune performance. There’s also caching capability to prevent boot storms (when everyone logs in at once in the morning). VCenter console can be used to managed the FileStore device so administrators can stay within one interface instead of jumping around.
Sold as a joint solution with Enterprise Vault so that storage and archive comes as one.
In order to reduce backup windows, NetBackup SAN client can take data off of one unit and blast it onto another unit without needed to go from file store to file server, which is 5 to 10 times faster.
Symantec allows customers to back up to cloud storage (which is FileStore in the cloud with services built on it). Or customers can put their own FileStore in the cloud somewhere and back up to it.
Price varies greatly with configuration, based on the number of compute and storage nodes, the type of physical storage, the amount of storage.
My latest blog post for CIOUpdate.com went live this morning. I talk about some of the trends I saw at RSA last week including emphasis on securing virtual and mobile environments.
RSA 2011- Industry Focusing on Virtualization, Mobility and Data — CIOUpdate.com.
DataCore Software Super-Sizes Virtual Disks with Its Latest Storage Virtualization Software Release
Company responds to appetite for very large logical volumes (up to 1 Petabyte) as physical disk drive capacities get bigger and datasets expand.
FORT LAUDERDALE, Florida – December 29, 2009 – DataCore Software, a leading provider of storage virtualization, business continuity and disaster recovery software solutions, once again responds quickly to market demands, this time by stretching the size of its virtual disks from 2 Terabytes (TBs) to 1 Petabyte (PB).
“Rather than inch up to 4 or 16 TBs as others are considering, DataCore made the strategic design choice to blow the roof off the capacity ceiling with 1 Petabyte LUNs,” commented Augie Gonzalez, Director of Product Marketing, DataCore Software. “But we’re still frugal on the back-end, using thin-provisioning to minimize how much real capacity has to be in place day one.”
Performance-wise, these immense virtual disks benefit from DataCore’s 1 TB per node, 64-bit “mega-caches. “You can be big, and very fast too,” added Gonzalez.
Please read more about this feature here: DataCore Supports up to a Terabyte (TB) of Cache.
Why so Big?
The huge virtual disk requirement arises from two industry trends. As regards the physical storage pool, clients are eager to group multiple disk drives, each exceeding 1 TB, into Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks (RAID) sets. With this release, DataCore storage virtualization nodes can control pools consisting of numerous RAID sets, each well over the previous 2 TB maximum.
Demand has also been strong from applications seeking to update and analyze very large datasets that in the foreseeable future will grow well past the 2 TB cap.
Extensible Architecture – Key to Rapid Response
The pace of DataCore’s noteworthy innovations is indicative of its uniquely extensible software architecture. Unbridled by hardware, DataCore rapidly adapts its storage virtualization products to harness the power of bigger, faster, and cheaper equipment within weeks of the technology becoming generally available. That puts customers in the best position to take advantage of future hardware advancements.
The new software release is available immediately. DataCore customers under current maintenance contracts are eligible to receive the 1 PB software enhancements at no charge.
About DataCore Software
DataCore Software, a leading provider of storage virtualization software solutions, fundamentally changes the economics of managing storage with innovative software that combines advanced functions and services with the agility and savings of hardware independence. DataCore lowers the cost and complexity of IT by making storage efficient, fast, flexible, fail-safe and virtual. For more information, call (877) 780-5111 or visit DataCore.
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