STORAGE SWITZERLAND BRIEFING NOTE

STORAGE ADMINISTRATOR NIRVANA

Colm Keegan, Senior Analyst

What if setting up a new storage system took less time than

be deployed with as little as a single 2U node and fan out to six

waiting for a cup of cappuccino to brew at your favorite cafe?

nodes in a logical ring architecture to support up to nearly

Sound too good to be true? Well at Truth in ITs Next

300TBs of storage capacity.

Generation Storage Summit in Chicago, Exablox Sr. Director

Cost-Eective Data Protection

of Product Management, Sean Derrington, claimed their scaleup storage system can install in under 5 minutes. If true, this
could be storage nirvana for many time constrained, war weary

To ensure strong performance, an SSD device is installed in

storage administrators.

every node to enable fast access to metadata while the

remaining storage capacity can be intermixed with SAS, SATA

Plug-and-Play Storage

and SSD drives. By dispersing files or objects across each

drive resource within a node and across multiple nodes in a

Exablox' storage solution for the mid-market data center, is

ring configuration, data is actually protected more eciently

designed to make storage management brain dead simple.

than RAID based protection schemes.

With Exablox, administrators dont have to fuss with LUN or

volume creation to make storage available to their applications,

Whats more, Exablox includes continuous data protection and

nor do they have to tune the platform for performance.

snapshots to enable businesses to protect data locally and

Instead, Exablox scale-out storage solution serves up a NAS

osite for DR purposes. Exablox can also be used for general

front-end to applications and automatically disperses and load

purpose storage, like user file sharing and/or it can be used as

balances data as it is stored on the system. In fact, according

a backup target. In fact, Exablox seems to be getting strong

to Derrington, about 95% of storage management on their

traction as a cost-eective alternative to some scale-up

systems requires zero configuration. In other words, its about

backup appliances on the market. With a list price of $12k for

as plug-and-play as it gets.

48TBs of raw storage capacity, this is in line with virtually any

IT budget. And with advanced storage feature functionality that

This is good news for those businesses that have limited or no

is typically only found on higher end enterprise storage

IT people in house. Its also beneficial for those organizations

systems, Exablox is making cost-eective, high performing

that are trying to free up their IT sta to focus on more

and highly available storage available to the masses.

business revenue generating activities. Exablox systems can

About Storage Switzerland

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information please visit our web site: storageswiss.com
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