Features - Storage Innovations:

ONStor ENHANCES VIRTUAL SERVER INTELLIGENCE TO EXTEND SCALING

ONStor Inc announced the expansion of intelligent features included on the SF4400 family of scalable NAS solutions, to deliver an enhanced virtual server feature set for businesses seeking to deploy highly scalable and simple-to-manage NAS infrastructures.

Building on its proven virtualization architecture, ONStor has expanded the functionality of embedded intelligence included on each SF4400 solution, specifically enhancing their EverON software platform and AutoGrow, a key element of the onboard storage virtualization suite. With the new upgrades, administrators can easily create powerful storage solutions that deliver connectivity, performance, and scalability benefits that are unmatched by the competition.

"We've taken our successful appliance architecture, which delivers a highly superior, proven solution to Fortune 20 companies, hospitals, government agencies, national labs, and universities around the world, and added new intelligence to allow businesses to achieve more flexibility, more performance and more simplicity in their storage infrastructures," said Jon Toor, vice president of marketing for ONStor. "The upgrades to the EverON platform are part of our continuing work to deliver functionality and performance that is unmatched in the industry, allowing administrators to easily deploy and transparently manage robust, open system storage solutions to support business initiatives."

Single Button Balancing Of Workloads, Performance Increases

As the only NAS vendor that offers virtualization both for processing and storage resources, ONStor's virtual servers enhance management flexibility by separating the logical view of servers from the physical. To users on the network, an ONStor virtual server appears to be a complete NAS device with a unique name, IP address, and user authentication. To administrators, virtual servers provide flexible resource allocation with single-pane-of-glass management and one-touch control. Using ONStor, new virtual servers can be deployed in minutes, rather than the days required for physical servers, speeding application deployment and productivity.

With the new software release, ONStor has expanded its virtual filer feature in the SF4400 family with an upgrade of the foundational EverON software platform. Starting with the industry's most scalable storage platform, ONStor has included capabilities that now allow IT administrators to balance workloads across multiple physical devices with single-button ease. With this feature, overall throughput is increased and performance scaling is enabled by allowing workloads to be balanced across multiple ONStor SAN filers in a process that is transparent to users and requires no data migration to achieve balancing. In addition, the new upgrade also allows monitoring of I/O and throughput statistics on a per virtual server basis.

Any-to-Any Connectivity, Doubles Typical Storage Utilization ONStor has also enhanced a key element of their storage virtualization suite with the upgrade of AutoGrow, an embedded feature that allows IT administrators to automatically expand file systems to meet changing requirements. Working in conjunction with ONStor's storage pooling architecture, AutoGrow delivers full any-to-any connectivity and allows storage to be managed in a pool that can be accessed, protected, and provisioned by any of the attached ONStor 4400 appliances.

With this upgraded capability, newly attached capacity can be assigned to file systems across multiple devices, rather than being allocated only to a single device. This allows new storage to be added precisely where it is most needed, and to be deployed in minutes rather than the hours or days required in typical SAN environments. Compared to the conventional method (where file systems are initially sized to meet forecasted demands), AutoGrow allows administrators to more than double typical storage utilization by virtually eliminating storage over-provisioning.

About The ONStor Product Family

The ONStor SF4400 family of scalable NAS solutions gives IT managers the flexibility of open storage. Like NAS, the ONStor SF4400 serves data to Windows, Linux, and UNIX clients and servers on a local area network. However, the SF4400 SAN filer goes beyond conventional NAS by allowing customers to choose the storage that's right for them. Compatible with storage from a wide range of vendors, including IBM, EMC, Storage Tek, 3PAR, Hitachi, Nexsan, Engenio and HP/Compaq, the ONStor SF4400 gives IT managers the option of leveraging their existing SAN infrastructure or migrating to the storage that best meets their needs. The ONStor SF4400 is also proven interoperable with the advanced storage management capabilities provided by IBM's SAN Volume Controller and 3PAR's InServ Storage Server with Thin Provisioning.

With the ability to scale to 40 petabytes, performance of up to 140,000 IOPS, multiple levels of redundancy, and data protection features such as SAN-based disk-to-disk data replication, the ONStor SF4400 SAN filer brings enterprise-class capabilities to the file services market.