Spinnaker Networks claims chart-topping performance and scalability for its new NAS server — and at least one analyst agrees that the company may have come up with the complete package.
Spinnaker says the new SpinServer 4100 delivers a 50% performance increase over the SpinServer 3300 — and a 40% performance advantage over Network Appliance’s FAS960 filer. Additionally, a global distributed file system lets the SpinServer 4100 seamlessly scale performance and capacity beyond competitive solutions from Network Applianceand EMC, the company claims.
“The performance levels are phenomenal,” gushes Arun Taneja, founder and consulting analyst at the Taneja Group. “The single unit performance is higher than any other box out there today.”
Most boxes are “good in one dimension or another,” says Taneja. BlueArc, for example, is “very good at throughput, but not as good on I/O.”
But with seamless expansion, high I/O performance, and strong throughput capacity, the SpinServer 4100 offers “pretty darn balanced performance,”
concludes Taneja.
A combination of SpinServer 3300 and 4100 servers can be deployed together for a customized approach to enterprise storage management and availability, according to Spinnaker.
“The SpinServer 4100 delivers a new level of performance, scalability, and manageability, and provides customers with an ideal solution in a broad range of applications, including large scale Oracle databases, large scale server consolidation, and performance demanding applications,” states Jeff Hornung, Spinnaker’s VP of Marketing.
The 4100’s performance capabilities and versatile architecture make it “a one-stop source for all enterprise NAS storage requirements,” adds Hornung.
All Spinnaker SpinServers are built on the same scalable NAS architecture. Combining a switched Gigabit Ethernet clustering design with SpinFS, a global distributed file system, the SpinServer family avoids the “NAS island” nature of previous generations of NAS products, the company reports. It enables centralized management of up to 512 SpinServers in a scalable cluster as a single global storage pool, reducing the time, complexity, and cost of managing large-scale NAS storage assets.
SpinFS delivers linear performance scalability whenever a new SpinServer is added to the cluster. SpinClusters can consist of any combination of SpinServer 3300 and 4100 models and can be scaled up to 11,000 terabytes. The Spinnaker SpinFS global distributed file system allows all Spinnaker storage to be managed from a single command line or Web-based management console with a single management view.
Spinnaker’s SpinMove software enables on-the-fly, non-disruptive file system movement anywhere within a cluster. Storage administrators can load balance, redistribute data, or reconfigure an entire storage environment with no downtime and without having to modify user desktops, claims Spinnaker.
SpinHA and SpinMirror software options provide high levels of data protection and availability. SpinHA offers server redundancy and complete failover functionality and delivers greater than 99.99% availability to keep critical processes running. SpinMirror enables mirroring of data to SpinServers connected via a LAN, MAN, or WAN in a SpinCluster, providing protection and immediate service restoration in the event of a disaster.
A single SpinServer or multiple SpinServers in a scalable cluster can be deployed with any of three storage options: SpinStor Fibre Channel disk storage arrays, SAN-based storage systems, or ATA disk systems where cost is a factor.
The SpinServer 4100 is available now. Pricing starts at under $50,000 for “a well-configured server with a rich set of software functionality, including NFS, CIFS, Snapshot, Restore, and NDMP.”
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