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When you’re a small storage systems provider trying to make a go of it against incumbents like EMC, IBM and HP, you typically try to win on price or performance.
agámi Systems wants to do both.
The company today rolled out the agámi Information Server AIS1006, a new storage array designed to help cost-conscious small- and medium-sized businesses (SMB) employ business continuity and on-site data protection without sacrificing too much performance.
The machine retails for $17,970, which if you’ve shopped for storage arrays before makes you inclined to think you’re getting just a bunch of disks (JBOD).
But there is actually a fair degree of functionality for that price range, which agámi was able to achieve by using SATAdisk drives as an alternative to the typical $20,000 per terabyte industry incumbents charge for their Fibre Channel-based drives, said Paul Speciale, vice president of product management for agámi.
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An SMB storage array. Source: agami |
The AIS1006 is also an alternative to Linux or Windows-based white boxes with SATA drives that are short on performance and scalability.
For example, Speciale said that while Dell is perceived as a low-cost provider, its PowerVault NX1950 unified storage box stores up to 4.5 terabytes but costs $30,000.
The machine offers 300 megabytes per second (MBps) of throughput and 6 terabytes of capacity to go along with RAID5 with parallel rebuild, snapshots and call-home features.
Another perk is pre-integrated live replication with agámiFSR, which copies file systems between a primary and a secondary AIS server synchronously or asynchronously over a LAN or WAN. Speciale said agámiFSR provides more granular, bit-by-bit replication than the block-based approach of EMC’s SRDF replication tool.
Replication functionality is considered table stakes for storage vendors these days. Customers demand such features to help them meet stringent corporate compliance regulations that demand data be preserved, unaltered, for specific time periods.
Moreover, like its more powerful AIS3000 and AIS6000 predecessors, the AIS1006 uses a blend of 64-bit Symmetric Multi-Processor (SMP) technology, SATA drives and HyperTransport I/O technology to enable a unified storage architecture.
This special architecture enables agámi systems to simultaneously connect iSCSI, NFS, CIFS, NDMP and SNMP, which means customers don’t have to buy several different machines to manage storage created in different protocols.
The AIS1006 is also 100 percent compatible with agámi’s higher density and higher performance AIS3000 and AIS6000 products, which the company began selling in March.
agámi is selling the AIS1006 beginning today exclusively online; the e-commerce approach is a departure from agámi’s previous reseller and direct sales methods.
Article courtesy of InternetNews.com
