Digi-Data took the wraps off its latest high-end offering last week, a high-performance, scalable system that offers 10-25 terabytes of capacity for less than $100,000.
Digi-Data CEO Bill Tomeo calls the company’s new STORM Xtreme Array “a quantum leap when it comes to storage architecture.”
Traditional upper-midrange systems support 4-8 Fibre Channel ports, Tomeo says, but STORM Xtreme can scale to three nodes, or 24 ports, with more planned. Using Serial ATA disks, the array can scale to more than 300TB, he says.
The system also offers performance of 60,000 cache IOPS, which Tomeo calls “real, not fluffed-up numbers.” The company claims the highest performance in its class, with sustained data transfer rates greater than 900MB/s in a three-node network cluster.
Tomeo says the offering is “perfect” for reference data, “the vast majority of data in an enterprise.”
“The limitations of existing midrange storage solutions have created a complexity and cost nightmare for customers,” Tomeo says. “With the STORM Xtreme Array, customers have a cost-effective solution for tight IT budgets with a flexible, modular architecture that easily scales in multiple dimensions to address future requirements.”
Most modular storage systems are constrained by fixed storage controller platforms, Digi-Data says, limiting scalability in performance and capacity and forcing customers to pay for pricey upgrades or additional systems as requirements increase. STORM Xtreme gets around those limitations by using a network of storage nodes.
“Enterprise Strategy Group’s research has proven that the future of storage intelligence lies in the fabric, so the distributed Digi-Data architecture is right in line with where the market is heading,” says ESG founder and senior analyst Steve Duplessie. “By eliminating the closed box concept and all its restrictions, the company has a completely clean slate in which to design product for the future rather than retrofitting from the past.”
Digi-Data says STORM Xtreme’s network of storage nodes and virtualized storage pool unite to form a single logical storage system that supports heterogeneous application workloads and server operating systems. Both Fibre Channel and SATA disk drives are supported in any combination for a tiered storage infrastructure. Dynamic capacity expansion and XapShot, Digi-Data’s data replication application, enable data growth and migration. The company’s RECON management application allows all storage nodes to be accessed through a single integrated management environment.
