Scale Computing: Scale-Out Storage For SMEs

There's been plenty of talk about scale-out storage, which is a storage architecture built from low cost computing devices and commodity storage systems to form a vast, inexpensive storage pool. Scale-out storage means designating volumes for structured or unstructured data, but not both individually. That can be confining to many users, which is one reason why Scale Computing introduced its N05 Starter Cluster at VMworld last week.

The new unified storage is aimed at small and medium businesses and supports both structured and unstructured data for as little as $2,500 per hardware node. Scale's N05 Starter Cluster (3 nodes) offers 1.5TB of storage capacity and is stocked with the usual storage features: thin provisioning, snap-shotting, replication, scale-out capabilities, unified SAN and NAS. There is no support for primary deduplication, however.

N05 is positioned in the market to compete with Dell's EqualLogic. Management is confident that N05 will compete favorably with that product, as well as with less expensive arrays from Promise and NexSan.

Minimal configuration for the N05 Starter Cluster consists of three nodes built on top of the Scale Computing Intelligent Cluster Storage (ICS) technology used in their more advanced storage systems. The Starter Cluster is scalable, which means that customers can add storage as required, use SAN and NAS in the same cluster and control storage with its web-based interface. The N05 solution supports several advanced features such as replication, multi-pathing and extensive controller-less scalability.

N05 storage capacity is increased via software across all nodes in the cluster. You create a single cluster with virtually unlimited scalability. You can increase capacity by as little .5TB per node at a time.ICS includes its own block replication system. Each node contains the information necessary to access all data blocks simultaneously. Each node can assume responsibility for any other node in the entire cluster, endowing the system with transparent fault tolerance at all times.

With N05, users can add storage nodes without suspending services or migrating data. IT managers can build out storage clusters that scale up to the multiple petabyte range on a single file system. Users can also schedule intervals of replication in advance. The product configuration supports flexible replication topology, dynamic use storage space for replication, and thin provisioning maintained on the target.

Scale Computing allows for a number of replication topologies based on customer preference (one-to-one, many-to-one, one-to-many, many-to-many). Customers can replicate data from a single location to multiple locations, multiple locations to a single scale cluster or cross-replicate between locations. THE N05 also provides for dynamic use of storage for replication. Customers do not have to pre-allocate a block of storage at initialization.  An initial block can be changed at any time to meet the storage needs of the customer.