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.

I’ve started playing around (I mean testing) with Terremark’s vCloud Express offering a few weeks ago. This is not only interesting technology but it is also an interesting project. I get to understand how VMware works in the cloud and blog about it. The posts run on the VMware blog.

My first posting details how to get started with Terremark’s vCloud Express. Here’s an excerpt to whet your appetite:

I spend most of my day testing software for reviews on blogs, websites, and magazines – plus the testing that we at Sarrel Group do directly for software developers. Virtual machines play a major role in my test operations. We have a number of servers running VMware and the VM’s themselves live on a mix of NAS and SAN boxes. This is a huge leap forward from the old racks and racks of physical machines we used to have in the lab at PC Magazine (at one point we had 512 PC’s in one lab and 128 in another).
Enter vCloud. Now I don’t even have to consolidate VM’s onto my servers. I just build them in the cloud, run my tests, and then delete them. In the past 2 weeks I’ve learned that I can be just as productive with NO hardware as I was with 640 PC’s. Even I, the jaded battle-scarred tech warrior I am, feel a bit giddy with such power and flexibility at my disposal.