Starboard Storage Systems Announces AC72 Platform

The AC72 introduces the SSD Accelerator Tier, a tiering architecture that is designed to lower operational overhead.

Storage specialist Starboard Storage Systems announced the release of the AC72 Storage System for small and midsize businesses, which is designed to simplify managing mixed workload environments that include unstructured, virtualized and structured data. The AC72 provides consolidation onto a single storage system, optimizing the configuration for each application by creating a Dynamic Storage Pool with virtual volumes tuned for each workload.

The AC72 Storage System is priced at $59,995 for an all-inclusive storage system, including 24TB storage, an SSD Accelerator Tier with three solid-state drives (SSDs), thin-provisioning, asynchronous replication and snapshots. Customers can expand the system by adding Starboard AC72 Storage System Expansion Shelves. The SSD Accelerator Tier is a second-generation tiering architecture that is designed to lower operational overhead and provide predictable performance when and where it€™s needed. The SSD Accelerator Tier boosts performance for both reads and writes, providing optimally tuned storage that maintains high performance for mixed workloads.

Starboard Storage said it has more than 30 customers managing more than 750TB of capacity with the AC72 Storage System. €œWe were able to consolidate all workloads under the Starboard Storage solution to improve storage utilization and management,€ said Shane Brown, CEO of DigeTekS. €œAs a result, we saw exceptional I/O performance, 20 times faster than the previous iSCSI solution we were using. Even during volume production and peak load periods we were able to maintain high performance and throughput across our virtual environment.€

In a comparative test run by Evaluator Group, the AC72 system was benchmarked against a leading mid-range unified storage system. The January 2012 study revealed that the AC72 Storage System achieved 100 percent better performance in the Iometer test and 42 percent more transactions per second in the JetStress performance test. Both systems were comparably configured with SDDs and (hard-disk drives) HDDs.

"Starboard Storage Systems has addressed pressing storage needs for the mid-tier market by introducing an advanced systems architecture while reducing the complexity of storage management,€ said Randy Kerns, senior strategist of the Evaluator Group. €œIn a mixed workload environment, Starboard Storage has been shown to deliver twice the performance at half the cost of existing SAN and NAS systems."

Combining dynamic storage pooling and automated SSD acceleration for each application workload offers small and midsize enterprises an enhanced level of simplicity in managing mixed workload environments, the company said. In addition, Starboard Storage Apps simplify provisioning of volumes across multiple storage protocols, including CIFS, NFS, iSCSI and Fibre Channel. Since the AC72 was specially designed to manage mixed workloads, IT administrators can reduce their time and costs in managing storage.

With the AC72 Storage System, users save as they grow with an all-inclusive software license that includes thin-provisioning, mirroring, asynchronous replication and snapshots. The AC72 scales up to 474TBs with a completely redundant architecture. Starboard distributes its products through a network of value-added reseller partners.