Data centres can go the SSD path without sacrificing existing investments

  • Storage Foundation customers may see 400% performance gains over traditional SANs
  • Organisations can reduce storage costs by up to 80% using commoditised storage hardware

SYMANTEC has announced a new version of its Storage Foundation software, which it claimed enables data centres to leverage Solid State Drives (SSDs) in ways that could allow customers to access mission-critical data and applications 400% faster than traditional Storage Area Networks (SANs).
 
It is also the only offering to provide these benefits regardless of which storage hardware components are in place, the company said in a statement. Customers are free to choose any storage infrastructure provider, and businesses can make critical decisions faster, Symantec claimed.
 
The growth of mission-critical data and applications, supporting real-time decision-making, is driving SSD adoption to increase performance within the data centre, the company said.
 
Adoption, however, has lacked the central management intelligence that customers need to manage their storage efficiently and effectively.
 
Data centres can go the SSD path without sacrificing existing investmentsSymantec said its offering solves this problem while allowing customers to combine SSDs with existing Direct Attached Storage (DAS) and SANs without compromising availability.
 
“Today’s data centres rely on strong enterprise storage platforms that provide high levels of automation, performance and security,” said Nigel Tan (pic), director of systems engineering at Symantec Malaysia.
 
“With Storage Foundation 6.1, Symantec is enabling organisations in Malaysia to derive a better return on their investment by optimising data centre services, improved efficiencies and reduced costs,” he added.
 
Storage Foundation 6.1 functionalities and benefits include:

  • A vendor-agnostic intuitive caching layer, enabled by Symantec’s SmartIO technology. SmartIO detects critical application workloads and caches only the hot data on local SSDs, which could result in up to 400% improved performance over traditional secondary storage.
  • Flexible Storage Sharing (FSS) technology enables servers to access remote data as if it were from local storage. This allows organisations to reduce storage costs by up to 80% using commoditised storage hardware, while helping to ensure that all data is replicated, protected, and available.

“Symantec’s latest offering is designed to help customers leverage the next generation of storage,” said Ashish Nadkarni, Storage Systems research director at IDC.
 
“In today’s information-centric world, businesses want both increased performance and cost savings – and it doesn’t make fiscal sense to rip and replace existing storage to deploy new technologies like flash.
 
“However, with Storage Foundation 6.1, customers can ease into the adoption of new technologies, while mixing and matching high-end solutions with traditional hardware, without sacrificing existing service levels,” he added.
 
Related stories:
 
WD Se hard drives for ‘scale-out’ data centre use
 
Brocade out to shed SAN player image

 
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