Astute Networks Announces ATCA Storage System

Astute Networks, a provider of bladed storage solutions, announced an update to its Edge Storage Foundation Suite to include support for network attached storage and an enhanced graphical user interface for the Caspian Edge Storage product platform.

The Astute Networks ESFS is an extensible storage and systems framework designed for leveraging the open standards of the ATCA (Advanced Telecommunications Computing Architecture) and creating the deployment simplicity and ease-of-use required by end users in mission-critical environments such as defense and telecommunications.

With this update, Astute provides an ATCA storage blade which features iSCSI block storage access with TCP/IP and iSCSI hardware offload as well as simultaneous network attached storage for file storage access. The NAS functionality supports both Linux/Unix network file system (NFS) and Windows SMB (server message block). In addition to the NAS functionality, the ESFS update includes an enhanced graphical user interface for simplified storage management. The secure-channel GUI enables users to monitor status of disk drives, network connections and storage volumes, configure RAID arrays, partition volumes, assign iSCSI targets and configure NAS file sharing through NFS or SMB.

"With the recent enhancements to the Edge Storage Foundation Suite, our customers now have the flexibility to operate their storage in a heterogeneous environment, with all the benefits of ATCA functionality," said Simon Knee, vice president of software and architecture, Astute Networks. "By offering unified block and file access in a single blade, users can easily share data between operating systems and optimize their storage utilization."

Bill Rick, director of federal sales for the company, said their defense customers who operate their networks in the field require reliable storage systems that are easy to deploy and manage. "Astute Networks' Edge Storage Foundation Suite offers high-performance block and NAS filer functionality as well as a GUI that speeds configuration, carefully monitors and diagnoses storage operations and saves time and resources in mission-critical environments," he said.

Late last year the company launched ReliaBlade Technology, an ATCA-based storage platform to eliminate single points of failure. If a rack mount Fibre Channel storage array is used with ATCA servers, two cables are needed for each server that connects to the storage array. By comparison, an Astute storage implementation using either two internal JBODs or one external JBOD only requires four SAS cables.