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STORAGE SWITZERLAND BRIEFING NOTE
STORAGE ADMINISTRATOR NIRVANA
What if setting up a new storage system took less time than
waiting for a cup of cappuccino to brew at your favorite cafe?
Sound too good to be true? Well at Truth in ITs Next Generation
Storage Summit in Chicago, Exablox Sr. Director of Product
Management, Sean Derrington, claimed their scale-up storage system
can install in under 5 minutes. If true, this could be storage
nirvana for many time constrained, war weary storage
administrators.
Plug-and-Play Storage
Exablox' storage solution for the mid-market data center, is
designed to make storage management brain dead simple. With
Exablox, administrators dont have to fuss with LUN or volume
creation to make storage available to their applications, nor do
they have to tune the platform for performance. Instead, Exablox
scale-out storage solution serves up a NAS front-end to
applications and automatically disperses and load balances data as
it is stored on the system. In fact, according to Derrington, about
95% of storage management on their systems requires zero
configuration. In other words, its about as plug-and-play as it
gets.
This is good news for those businesses that have limited or no
IT people in house. Its also beneficial for those organizations
that are trying to free up their IT sta to focus on more business
revenue generating activities. Exablox systems can
be deployed with as little as a single 2U node and fan out to
six nodes in a logical ring architecture to support up to nearly
300TBs of storage capacity.
Cost-Eective Data Protection
To ensure strong performance, an SSD device is installed in
every node to enable fast access to metadata while the remaining
storage capacity can be intermixed with SAS, SATA and SSD drives.
By dispersing files or objects across each drive resource within a
node and across multiple nodes in a ring configuration, data is
actually protected more eciently than RAID based protection
schemes.
Whats more, Exablox includes continuous data protection and
snapshots to enable businesses to protect data locally and osite
for DR purposes. Exablox can also be used for general purpose
storage, like user file sharing and/or it can be used as a backup
target. In fact, Exablox seems to be getting strong traction as a
cost-eective alternative to some scale-up backup appliances on the
market. With a list price of $12k for 48TBs of raw storage
capacity, this is in line with virtually any IT budget. And with
advanced storage feature functionality that is typically only found
on higher end enterprise storage systems, Exablox is making
cost-eective, high performing and highly available storage
available to the masses.
Colm Keegan, Senior Analyst
About Storage SwitzerlandStorage Switzerland is an analyst firm
focused on the virtualization and storage marketplaces. For
more
information please visit our web site: storageswiss.comCopyright
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