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 today at Truth in IT’s 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 don’t 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, it’s about as plug-and-play as it gets.
This is good news for those businesses that have limited or no IT people in house. It’s also beneficial for those organizations that are trying to free up their IT staff 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 300TB’s of storage capacity.
Cost-Effective 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 efficiently than RAID based protection schemes.
What’s more, Exablox includes continuous data protection and snapshots to enable businesses to protect data locally and offsite 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-effective alternative to some scale-up backup appliances on the market. With a list price of $12k for 48TB’s 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-effective, high performing and highly available storage available to the masses.
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As a 22 year IT veteran, Colm has worked in a variety of capacities ranging from technical support of critical OLTP environments to consultative sales and marketing for system integrators and manufacturers. His focus in the enterprise storage, backup and disaster recovery solutions space extends from mainframe and distributed computing environments across a wide range of industries.
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