Simplivity Cost is Low, Value is High for Converged Infrastructure

Excerpt from Storage Newsletter, “SimpliVity Out of Stealth Mode”

Reveals 2U box OmniCube, all-in-one low-cost VCE or FlexPod

SimpliVity Corporation, a provider of simplified IT infrastructure solutions for virtualized environments, announced the company’s formal entry into the IT market with the launch of OmniCube, an all-inclusive, assimilated IT infrastructure platform designed and optimized for the VM environment.

It is a low-cost, ultra-functional, high-performance, automated IT Infrastructure platform that empowers a single administrator to manage the infrastructure, exclusively from the VMware vCenter.

….

OmniCube is a simple to manage, 2U rack-mounted building block that delivers storage, computing, and networking services for the VM environment. Two or more OmniCube systems are deployed together to form an OmniCube Global Federation, a massively scalable pool of shared resources that enables data movement, extensive scalability, and enterprise system availability – all managed globally from a single pane of glass.

Each OmniCube system comes standard with:

  • Simplified, Extensive Scale-Out
  • Global, unified VM-Centric Management
  • Real-time in-line global deduplication and compression across entire data life-cycle, geographies and the cloud
  • Data Protection: tunable RPO on per-VM basis
  • Low cost, easy to manage DR
  • Public Cloud Integration
  • Cache accelerated performance

….

SimpliVity has developed a new IT infrastructure stack called OmniStack, which includes numerous patent-pending innovations and delivers a new and efficient way of managing IT, including storing, managing, protecting and sharing data globally, including on the public cloud.

OmniStack encompasses broad functionality and a novel data architecture, in which all data is deduplicated and compressed at inception, once and forever, at fine-grain 4KB – 8KB data-sets; across nodes, data-centers, geographies and the public cloud. The OmniCube Accelerator, a PCIe module responsible for all of the intensive algorithm processing, ensures that the deduplication and compression can run inline with no impact on performance. The management and mobility of data in these very small data sets enables the assimilation of OmniCube’s core functionality-data mobility, resource sharing, intelligent caching, scalability, and high availability – into a single platform.

OmniCube supplants the functionality of numerous traditional independent products with a simple, low cost, 2U package, resulting in savings in capital costs and operating expenses, while improving the management of the VMs and the business applications that depend on them.

The SimpliVity OmniCube CN-2000 starts around $32,000 and the CN-3000 starts around $55,000 (US List).

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IBM Storwize v3700 pricing and configuration

IBM recently introduced their Storwize v3700 designed for the SMB market. They provide an online pricing/configuring tool here.

According to IBM, the v3700 highlights include:

Easily managed and deployed system with embedded graphical user interface based on the IBM® Storwize® interface design

Experience rapid, flexible provisioning and simple configuration changes with internal virtualization and thin provisioning

Have continuous access to data with integrated nondisruptive migration

Protect data with sophisticated remote mirroring and integrated IBM FlashCopy® technology

Benefit from advanced functionality and reliability usually only found in more expensive systems

Features dual controllers with up to 180 TB of capacity and 8 GB of cache packaged in a compact, 2U 19-inch rack-mount enclosure

Scales up to 120 2.5-inch disk drives or 60 3.5-inch disk drives with four expansion units

Provides host attachment through 1 Gb iSCSI ports (standard), with support for 10 Gbps, Fibre Channel over Ethernet and 8 Gb Fibre Channel available as options

Helps reduce power consumption with energy-saving features

Organizations of all sizes are faced with the challenge of managing massive volumes of increasingly valuable data. But storing this data can be costly, and extracting value from the data is becoming more and more difficult. IT organizations have limited resources but need to stay responsive to dynamic environments and act quickly to consolidate, simplify and optimize their IT infrastructures. The new IBM Storwize V3700 system provides a smarter solution that is affordable, easy to use and self-optimizing, enabling organizations to overcome these storage challenges.

Storwize V3700, the most recent addition to the IBM Storwize family of disk systems, delivers efficient, entry-level configurations specifically designed to meet the needs of small and midsize businesses. Designed to provide organizations with the ability to consolidate and share data at an affordable price, Storwize V3700 offers advanced software capabilities usually found in more expensive systems.

Web-based GUI with point-and-click management capabilities
Internal disk storage virtualization enables rapid, flexible provisioning and simple configuration changes
Thin provisioning enables applications to grow dynamically but only consume space they are actually using
Simple data migration from external storage to Storwize V3700 storage (one-way from another storage device)
FlashCopy creates instant application copies for backup or application testing

2U modular disk system
1 Gb iSCSI host interface with optional 8 Gb Fibre Channel or 10 Gb iSCSI/Fibre Channel over Ethernet host ports
Up to 180 TB of capacity
Maximum disk drives:
Small form-factor enclosure: 24 x 2.5-inch drives
Large form-factor enclosure: 12 x 3.5-inch drives
Supports up to four expansion units (up to 120 drives per system)
Dual-port, hot-swappable 6 Gb SAS disk drives
Support for RAID levels 0, 1, 5, 6 and 10
4 GB cache (per controller) standard, upgradable to 8 GB
Redundant, hot-swappable power supplies and fans
AC power (110 – 240 V)

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Skyera Skyhawk 44TB at Low Cost

Original Article by Brian Beeler at Storage Review

Excerpt…

Skyera has launched the SkyHawk, a half-depth 1U rack-mountable box that provides up to 44TB of flash storage with an Ethernet switch built in. Not only is the system ridiculously full-featured for such a diminutive box, Skyera is also attacking price. By leveraging 19/20nm consumer MLC NAND flash Skyera is able to drive pricing of roughly $3/GB for native storage, with the value proposition reaching as high as $1/GB with data compression and deduplication enabled. The SkyHawk also includes all the expected software features like thin provisioning, snapshots, cloning and storage QoS.

While Skyera isn’t yet a household name in the enterprise storage market, they do have a deep set of engineering chops as much of the team drove the development of the initial SandForce SSD controllers. By taking a renewed look at all of the components in the technology stack; flash controller, RAID controller, storage blades and network interface, the Skyera team was able to generate a 100X life amplification for the NAND. This longevity of course is what drove the ability to use low cost consumer MLC NAND, instead of more expensive eMLC or SLC NAND, while still providing the endurance and reliability that the enterprise requires.

Getting More out of MLC NAND

The drive to reduce cost in flash-based enterprise storage arrays is nothing new, almost every startup in the storage array market offers some take on MLC NAND as the driver of lower cost performance storage solutions for the enterprise. Where Skyera believes they have an edge though is they’ve crafted their own proprietary flash controller complete with proprietary algorithms that allow the controller to adapt to the flash as it ages. As a result, Skyera expects to deliver five years’ worth of enterprise endurance with the consumer-grade MLC flash being used. Another core advantage is that since Skyera owns the architecture, they can easily adapt their firmware and controller to work with future generations of flash that will require different write parameters.

Networking Too

Not typically found in flash arrays, the Skyera SkyHawk also includes a built-in network switch. The switching feature includes 40 GbE ports and three 10GbE ports and is designed to give compute servers a more direct path to the Skyera flash storage tier. The array does not require the switch to be used, but by Sykera providing the option, users can eliminate another hop in the data path that can introduce latency.

Pricing and Availability

Skyera offers the arrays in three capacity points of 12TB, 22TB and 44TB with pricing of $48,000, $77,000 and $131,000 respectively. The early access program begins in Q3 of this year, with general availability scheduled for Q1 2013.

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Nimble Storage CS210 Pricing

You can get Self-Service Nimble Storage Pricing at 4NimbleStorage.com, or follow this link:

Nimble Storage announced the availability of an entry-level converged primary and backup storage array designed and priced to meet the requirements of smaller IT environments and remote offices while delivering the functionality and performance associated with enterprise-class SANs.

The Nimble CS210 combines primary and backup storage in a single array, and is built around a new architecture designed for flash memory in combination with high-capacity drives – a solution that delivers high performance at a low cost.

While the system’s capabilities and usable capacity of 8TB for primary storage and backup system for smaller IT environments, its performance also makes it for I/O-intensive applications such as virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) deployments. Furthermore, built-in capacity optimization and WAN-efficient replication enable it to serve as a cost-effective offsite storage array for disaster recovery for small to midsize IT environments.

“With the CS210, Nimble has uniquely addressed the storage pains of the mid-market,” said Mitch Gram, vice president of professional services at Sovran, a technology solutions provider and Nimble partner. “Smaller firms have all the challenges of the enterprise for functionality, features and performance in a SAN, but on a smaller scale and with more constrained budgets. The CS210 can help our customers meet those challenges, while providing an ideal solution for demanding environments such as VDI.”

The CS210 breaks new ground in providing disaster recovery at an affordable price. Offering WAN-efficient replication, the solution is up to 20 times more bandwidth efficient than a typical SAN, making DR possible over even moderate-sized WANs and without requiring separate WAN optimization solutions. And the CS210 offers improved recovery point objectives (RPOs) and recovery-time objectives (RTOs) when compared with replicated disk-based backup solutions.

The CS210 delivers enterprise-class functionality:

Performance. The CS210 delivers performance in this form factor and price band, particularly for the most challenging random-read-and-write IO patterns.
Instant, integrated backups and restores. The CS210 eliminates backup windows by enabling instant backups on the same array used for primary storage. Backups take seconds and do not impact application or storage performance.
Intelligent data optimization. A copy of active ‘hot’ data is held in flash, enabling fast reads, while all data is stored in cost-effective, high-capacity disk. Data is laid out sequentially, enabling fast writes to flash and disk.
Inline compression. Unlike existing architectures that store data as fixed-size blocks, Cache Accelerated Sequential Layout (CASL) stores variable-size blocks, achieving 50- to 75-percent compression with no added latency.
Replication. Disaster recovery with the Nimble CS210 is enabled by highly WAN-efficient replication, up to 20 times more efficient than typical SAN replication.
Data recovery. Sixty to 90 days of compressed, block-level incremental snapshots are captured on high-capacity disk at scheduled intervals, improving recovery-point objectives.
Virtualization support. The CS210 provides simplified application management and VM-consistent backups for Microsoft and VMware environments.
Thin provisioning. The CS210 maximizes storage capacity by allocating blocks of data on-demand, virtually eliminating instances of allocated but unwritten space.
Zero copy cloning. With zero copy cloning, the CS210 enables efficient data reuse by allowing entire storage volumes to be copied with no appreciable increase in storage capacity requirements.
High availability. The CS210 incorporates dual, hot-swappable controllers and power supplies with mirrored NVRAM, ensuring system availability.
Administration. An user interface eliminates the complexity of provisioning and managing separate storage, backup and disaster recovery devices, and also removes the administrative overhead of managing massive data copies between tiers. Predefined application and data protection policies allow new volumes to be created in just three steps.

“Smaller mid-market enterprises face the same storage challenges as their large counterparts, even if their storage capacity requirements are an order of magnitude smaller,” said Amita Potnis, senior research analyst, worldwide storage systems, with analyst firm IDC. “Nimble has taken a smart approach to the challenge, building on the exhaustive feature set and proven functionality of its enterprise-class CS220 and CS240 arrays. The CS210 is built for the IT generalist who needs a full-featured SAN with no compromises.”

Innovation
Nimble Storage’s CS Series is based on its Cache Accelerated Sequential Layout (CASL), which enables fast inline data compression, intelligent data optimization leveraging flash memory and high-capacity disk, instant optimized backups and WAN efficient replication – all in a single device. CASL allows organizations to reduce their capital expenditures for storage and backup while eliminating the need for separate, disk-based backup.

Self-Service Nimble Storage Pricing and Availability

The CS210 is available exclusively through authorized Nimble Storage partners.

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Simplivity’s OmniCube, Scale Computing’s HC3 – hyperconverged stack

Excerpt from Howard Marks of Network Computing https://www.networkcomputing.com/servers-storage/hyperconverged-stacks-from-simplivity-an/240007306

In last week’s post, “The Hyperconverged Infrastructure,” we explored the industry trend toward integrated storage, compute and networking stacks, and its latest development, in which vendors combine the compute and storage components into a single, hyperconverged, scale-out building block. Two vendors, SimpliVity and Scale Computing, used last month’s VMworld to reveal new hyperconverged systems.

….

The OmniCube’s software also provides inline data deduplication, which not only expands the available storage in the cluster but also reduces the amount of internode data replication traffic needed to make the system able to survive a node failure. Since OmniCube’s storage subsystem was designed specifically to host vSphere VMs, it has enough context to manage storage on a VM rather than a volume basis–including per-VM application-consistent snapshots and replication.

Since the data is deduplicated in ingest, OmniCubes use significantly less WAN bandwidth for replication than other storage systems. SimpliVity even has a software instance of the OmniCube stack that can run on a public cloud so organizations can use cloud providers for disaster recovery.

If SimpliVity’s offering was just a scale-out hybrid storage system with inline dedupe and the ability to do per-VM application-consistent snapshots as well as replicate VMs to a public cloud provider, it would join Tintri as one of my top storage systems for virtualization. Add in that I can run my workloads on the same system or from other vSphere hosts so I can scale compute and storage separately, and I start thinking it might be too good to be true.

By comparison, Scale Computing aimed its HC3 at significantly smaller use cases and customers than SimpliVity. For the past several years, Scale Computing has been selling scale-out unified storage systems for SMB/SME customers built from 1U servers running Linux and an extended version of IBM’s GPFS distributed file system. While most hyperconverged systems use a virtual machine running under a hypervisor as a virtual storage appliance, Scale’s HC3 uses clustered GPFS and runs the KVM hypervisor on top of GPFS.

While KVM, Linux and GPFS provide a reliable platform, they’re not widely known as easy to use and generally require a significantly higher level of technical expertise to install, optimize and administer than most SMBs can muster. Scale addresses this by providing a simple Web UI for administering the whole shebang, from creating file shares to spinning up new virtual machines.

A three-node HC3 cluster, which Scale recommends for up to 30 virtual servers, will cost an SMB or remote office about $25,500, while an eight-node cluster is just less than $68,000. These are all-inclusive prices for servers, storage, hypervisor and the Web management software. Most users would probably pay significantly more for three servers, a low-end disk array and vSphere licenses.

Users can add nodes to the cluster at any time, should they need more compute or storage resources. Scale is even allowing users with storage-only nodes to upgrade to HC3 with a memory and software upgrade.

Of course, for less than $10,000 a node, Scale isn’t providing the same performance as SimpliVity or Nutanix. Each HC3 node has a single quad-core Xeon processor, 32 Gbytes of memory and four 1-Tbyte disk drives. Scale doesn’t currently use flash for acceleration, so small clusters will have rather modest storage performance from a dozen or so 7,200 RPM drives. Luckily, most SMBs have rather modest storage performance needs.

SimpliVity and Scale Computing join Nutanix and Pivot3 in the hyperconverged infrastructure arena. These two examples show that the concept of hyperconvergence can extend from a very modest cost to high-performance systems with leading-edge storage features.

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NexGen Storage Pricing

Original article at NexGen Storage

Pricing and availability

The NexGen n5 Series n5-100 and n5-50 systems will be available on August 20, 2012 and the n5-150 system will be available September 30, 2012 through authorized NexGen resellers. List pricing for the three new n5 Series systems will range from $55,000 to $108,000.

NexGen Storage today announced the expansion of its n5 Series of storage systems with new PCIe solid-state offerings. The NexGen n5 Series offers several solid-state configurations that deliver a range of performance levels and price points, and each n5 system offers both 10GbE and 1GbE network options. With higher performance and capacity in a compact, 3U footprint, the new offerings provide:

• 5x to 10x lower $ per GB than all-SSD arrays with equivalent performance1; and
• 10x more IOPS per rack unit versus disk-based storage systems2.

With its expanded offering, NexGen makes enterprise-class solid-state storage capabilities available and affordable for mainstream customers to meet targeted performance requirements in mixed workload environments.

“There is tremendous end-user value to be gained from judiciously employing solid-state storage as part of an overall storage approach. Our research indicates a clear shift toward end-users viewing solid-state technology as applicable for increasingly broad data center deployment and usage, and not just for specific applications or isolated workloads,” said Mark Peters, senior analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group. “By offering high-end solid-state capabilities at affordable price points, NexGen’s n5 Series solutions are well-positioned to bring that solid-state storage value into mainstream data centers.”

Each n5 Series storage system provides active-active high availability and delivers the full power of NexGen’s cutting-edge capabilities, including:

Predictable Performance with Storage QoS. Provides predictable, guaranteed application storage performance. IT administrators can set performance levels for all applications and manage performance as easily as capacity.
Service Levels for Total Control. Automatically shifts resources from non-critical to mission-critical applications as needed to ensure performance is maintained for an organization’s more critical applications, even if the system is compromised.
The Lowest $/GB and $/IOP. Moves data real-time between high-performing solid-state and economical disk drives to offer industry-leading price/performance.

“NexGen’s innovative solid-state storage systems and Storage QoS allow us to deliver extremely efficient, high quality IT services to our organization,” said Robert Samples, senior systems engineer at Kansas City Urology Care. “NexGen’s n5 systems have a very small footprint compared with my existing storage, which chews up a ton of power, takes up roughly 15U of rack space and costs a fortune every year in maintenance and support. By comparison, the NexGen n5 takes up only 3U of rack space and utilizes about one-third of the power.”

“Organizations can achieve higher storage efficiency along with more consistent performance levels through smart, right-sized solid-state storage deployments,” said Rick Merlo, vice president of sales, NexGen Storage. “NexGen’s n5 Series gives organizations the ability to meet varying performance, capacity and price point requirements.” Read more about this on NexGen’s blog.

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Tintri’s VM aligned storage array – pricing seems a bit high

We all know that there is a lot of wasted space in most VM storage repositories due to duplicate data. (Or we should.) But what isn’t as well known is the way the disk storage is configured can introduce a lot of delays in its throughput. This is because most storage arrays aren’t aware of the peculiarities of how VMs have to store their data on the specific blocks of their arrays, and the array can waste time seeking and retrieving information from its VMs.

A way around this is to re-align your VMs to make sure their information is stored properly on the array, but until now this has been a fairly complex process. Tintri is attempting to resolve this and other VM storage issues with its second-generation VMstore hardware storage appliance. Most of its storage input/output comes from its built-in flash memory and the new version has dual storage controllers for added redundancy.

The VMstore comes with the ability to do auto-alignment, to boost performance by anywhere from 10 to 20 percent. VMware is currently supported and other hypervisors are planned for the near future. Here is a description of the underlying issue.

The array has some additional features, including the ability to have visual and quantitative (real-time and historical) “end-to-end latency” from the application all the way down to the block storage level. You can now tell where your storage bottlenecks are, and be able to determine if you have throughput or application layer issues. Dashboard can either be run from a browser, as you see here, or fit inside a tab on vSphere’s vCenter.

Tintri Pricing isn’t cheap for this unit — $65,000 plus an Ethernet network adapter for 8.5 TB of usable space.

Original article from readwriteweb.com

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Ten Coolest Storage Startups for 2012 (so far)

This is a consolidated article by Joseph Kovar from CRN

Before launching into the 10 coolest storage startups for 2012 so far, it’s worth taking a minute to note a couple companies that would normally qualify for such a list but were acquired in the second quarter of this year, including:

XtremIO: This Israeli developer of all-Flash storage arrays was in May acquired by EMC, making EMC the first tier-one storage vendor to have such an offering once XtremIO completes its first product.

Schooner Information Technology: Schooner, a developer of enterprise open-source database software optimized for SSD use, was in June acquired by SanDisk, which just happens to make SSDs.

The lesson here? If you see a new vendor you like, better quickly partner up with it or risk starting up with a larger parent company later.

Here are the Top 10 Coolest for 2012

Actifio

Actifio, Waltham, Mass., is a startup developer of the Protection and Availability Storage (PAS) platform, which it claims allows businesses to instantly recover any data.

PAS eliminates multiple copies of files to reduce the data footprint by up to 90 percent, Actifio claims. Unlike traditional storage systems that create multiple copies of data for such purposes as storing the data, replicating it, restoring it and testing new applications, Actifio allows a single copy of the data to be used to recreate any version of the data from any point in time.

Actifio in March hired former Cisco and VCE channel executive Russell Rosa (left) to serve as its new vice president of worldwide channels.

Pricing for an Actifio PAS appliance starts at approximately $25000.

Bitcasa

Bitcasa, Mountain View, Calif., develops cloud storage technology that promises unlimited storage capacity, file sharing and mobile device data sync for $10 per month. Data on the Bitcasa cloud is encrypted and deduped on the client side before it is uploaded to the cloud, where only a single copy of duplicate blocks of data is stored.

The company expects customers will eventually store all their data in its cloud while maintaining as large a local cache as they require for storing frequently accessed data. The local cache also predicts which data will be accessed beforehand so it can download it from the cloud to the device.

GreenBytes

Ashaway, R.I.-based SSD array developer GreenBytes in May closed a $12-million B round of funding aimed at helping continue development of its all-SSD and hybrid SSD-hard drive storage solutions.

GreenBytes in 2010 came to market with its first array, a hybrid appliance called the HA-3000, which features both SSDs and spinning hard drives with a single controller. It targets the backup market by providing high-speed data deduplication.

The company more recently introduced its Solidarity, an all-SSD array with dual controllers targeting the primary storage array market for SMB customers.

Inktank

Los Angeles-based startup Inktank, founded by the developer of the open-source Ceph scalable distributed storage system, in May came out of stealth mode to provide enterprise-level support for customers looking to use Ceph to build scalable storage infrastructures.

Ceph is an open-source storage technology that provides object, block and file storage in a single file system for unified storage. It was originally developed as a Ph.D. project to solve issues related to scaling metadata in high-performance computing applications.

CEO and Chief Architect of Inktank Sage Weil is also the original developer of Ceph.

Nimbus Data

Based in San Francisco, Nimbus Data is the developer of all-solid state storage systems featuring enterprise-grade Flash memory. The arrays scale from 2.5 TB to 500 TB and feature up to 800,000 4-KB block I/Os per second speed. They also support multipathing, clustering and no single point of failure.

The company’s file system includes such features as inline deduplication, thin provisioning, snapshots, and synchronous mirroring and asynchronous replication.

Nimbus Data in January introduced its first formal channel program.

In January 2012 – Nimbus announced its entry into the high availability enterprise SSD market with the uveiling of the company’s – E-Class systems – which are 2U rackmount SSDs with 10TB eMLC per U of usable capacity and no single point of failure. Interface support includes unified 10GbE, FC, and Infiniband. Pricing starts at $150K approx for a 10TB dual configuration system.

Starboard Storage

New Jersey-based Starboard Storage Systems in February came out of stealth mode with a channel-only model for its new AC72 storage architecture, designed to handle mixed workloads including structured, unstructured and virtualized data with a single platform.

The AC72 pools hard drives and SSDs into one dynamic storage pool that can be carved up as needed for mixed workloads. Included is an SSD accelerator tier that adds performance to the storage operations, as well as I/O monitoring technology that automatically tiers storage as needed.

The AC72 storage node is fully redundant with no single point of failure and comes in two main versions, including one optimized for storage performance and the other optimized for storage capacity.

StorSimple

StorSimple, Santa Clara, Calif., in April started selling a new series of storage appliances featuring local capacity of up to 100 TB integrated with cloud-based primary, archive, backup and disaster recovery capabilities.

The new line from StorSimple ranges in terms of on-premise capacity from 10 TB to 100 TB, after dedupe and compression. One new feature, Cloud Snap, puts data snapshots on the cloud that can be used to quickly recover data even if the application that produced the data is not available. The appliances also let data be recovered to the original customer site or, in a disaster, in a remote site.

The StorSimple 5020, 5520, 7020, and 7520 appliances are available immediately, with prices starting at $40,000.

Symform

Symform, developer of a distributed storage cloud that backs up one user’s data across multiple users’ storage devices, in April closed a new $8 million investment round.

The Seattle-based company’s Resilient Storage Architecture breaks up a customer’s data into 64-MB blocks, encrypts them with AES-256 encryption technology, breaks those blocks into 1-MB fragments, adds 32 more 1-MB fragments for parity and then scatters them across storage nodes contributed by other customers.

Those cloud storage nodes are simply space on one or more hard drives contributed by each customer via the Internet. The amount each customer contributes depends on how much cloud storage capacity the customer wishes to access. Each customer pays $50 per server per month with no limit on usage.

Tintri

Tintri, a Mountain View, Calif.-based developer of storage appliances aimed specifically at handling storage in virtualized environments, in February demonstrated its new Tintri VMstore T540 appliance, the company’s second-generation virtual machine-aware storage appliance.

New features include dual storage controllers, expanded usable capacity of up to 13.5 TB in a 3U form factor, end-to-end latency that allows admins to visualize performance bottlenecks and a virtual machine auto-alignment feature that automates the process of aligning virtual machines to the storage layer. The T540 also includes a new four-hour support option that Tintri said guarantees it will respond to any issue within a short window.

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Winchester Systems Pricing for RR2P

Click Here for Winchester Systems Self-Service Pricing Page

Winchester Systems, Inc. announced a significant speed improvement to their RR2P Rugged Removable Canister disk arrays designed for mobile use aboard planes, ships and ground transports. These ‘purpose built’ products are used primarily by the US military and emergency responders.

The product enables authorized personnel to quickly remove reconnaissance and surveillance images and video from the RAID disk array and immediately plug it into a ground station for analysis and insert new canisters into the mobile asset for rapid redeployment. In capturing high resolution imaging data, recording speed is of the essence. Accordingly, the company made improvements to the product to increase the write data rate by 29% to 2,000 MB per second and the read data rate by 10% to 2,200 MB per second.

The RR2P is lightweight 2U RAID disk array chassis made of milled aluminum, weighting only 48 pounds with hard disk drives and 44 pounds with Solid State Disks in two removable canisters. Each canister holds ten compact 2.5″ HDDs or SSDs with capacity to 1 TB each and total system capacity to 20 TB. All ten disks in a canister are carried as a single unit by a handle for safe transport and locks into place with a positive locking lever. Reliable canister connectors are military grade for field usage and are mounted to float to protect against shock and vibration. Designed for harsh environments, each canister includes an easy-to-replace filter that protects against ambient dust and humidity.

The RR2P is a configurable Fibre Channel 8 Gb hosted product, with two ports per canister, that offer options including AC or DC power supplies variety of disk and SSD storage alternatives. It is conveniently only 17″ wide to mount with a variety of standard rackmount rails and offers optional base plate mounting screws for secure lockdown to the vehicle. Prices for RR2P disk arrays start at under $40,000. Products are available now, are built to order and delivery is 8 weeks.

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