Symantec is moving deeper into the hardware market with the recent introduction of two appliances: the NetBackup 5200 data deduplication appliance and the FileStore N8300 scale-out NAS platform.
Symantec introduced FileStore software, which is based on the clustered file system in Veritas Storage Foundation, in late 2009 and is now bundling that software with commodity hardware. The FileStore N8300 scale-out NAS appliance can be integrated with Symantec’s Enterprise Vault archiving software, NetBackup, and Storage Foundation SmartTier, and includes Symantec AntiVirus security software.
As an Enterprise Vault NAS target, the FileStore N8300 leverages technology called Partition Secure Notification.
“Partition Secure Notification enables FileStore to inform EV when data EV has stored has been replicated or secured,” says Colin Davitan, director of product management in Symantec’s Storage and High Availability Group. “EV can then go back to the source and delete the original data, which frees up capacity on the source and reduces costs.”
Officially, Symantec says that the FileStore N8300 scales to six nodes, but company officials note that the FileStore software can scale to 16 nodes. Total capacity per cluster is 1.4PB (256TB of file system capacity) on Fibre Channel or SATA drives with automated tiering.
Symantec claims performance of 177,000 operations per second (OPS), based on the SPECsfs benchmark, in a 12-node ccluster. The company also claims near-linear performance increases as nodes are added. Davitan attributes the performance to Symantec’s clustered file system, which has now been optimized for NAS.
Pricing for the FileStore N8300 starts at $72,648.
NetBackup 5200
Symantec also recently began shipping a new appliance in its NetBackup 5000 series of deduplication appliances, which first debuted in September 2010. The NetBackup 5200 appliance bundles Symantec’s NetBackup 7 software, which supports both client and media server deduplication. The 5200 can be used for inline and/or post-process deduplication.
“Users have a choice of where to do dedupe – on the client [source] or on the media server, or to mix the two approaches,” says Greg Nuss, director of product management in Symantec’s Information Management Group.
The NetBackup 5200 can be configured with up to 32TB of deduplication capacity, and Symantec claims a maximum throughput performance of up to 10.5TB per hour. The company also claims capacity reduction of 10X to 50X, and up to a 99% reduction in bandwidth consumption, on the NetBackup 5200. Options include tape-out functionality and catalog-aware WAN replication where only dedupe data is replicated.
Pricing for the NetBackup 5200 starts at $59,995 per node.
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