Sepaton Ships Storage Pooling Appliance for Cloud Services

Sepaton on June 28 introduced a feature it calls "storage pooling" in a new version of its data storage and protection appliance aimed at cloud computing service providers.

Pooling is an approach to storage virtualization that delineates specific areas of the storage system to be dedicated to specific data flows, in order to enable more efficient multitenant service deployments.

Virtualized storage systems break files into chunks of data that are dispersed into numerous data center or storage locations, and reassemble them on demand. Keeping data file chunks closer together in pools theoretically provides faster reassembly of file chunks.

"Storage pooling can be set up as to disk type, where capacity can be in either 1TB or 2TB drives in separate pools, " Sepaton Marketing Director Jay Kramer told eWEEK. "Customers might want to implement a pool based on WORM [write once, read many] storage technology, or for encrypted data, for example."

WORM storage allows information to be written to storage media a single time, preventing the user from accidentally or intentionally altering or erasing the data.

Kramer said in deduplication, "there might be certain pools [of data] that you don't want to dedupe-data with a very short retention time or ... of certain data types that don't lend themselves well to dedupe."

Kramer also said using Sepaton's "content-aware" appliance, IT and storage managers can set up preconfigured policies for backup and replication of specific storage pools.

"For example, if a customer has Symantec and [EMC Data Domain] Networker environments, those can be maintained in separate allocated pools within the environment," Kramer said.

This whole setup allows multitenancy so MSPs (managed service providers) can enable multiple organizations to share one data protection appliance while segregating the data, Kramer said.

Sepaton uses Hitachi Data System AMS 2100 arrays as its storage hardware and has a global reseller agreement with the Japan-based company.

Kramer said the company's ContentAware Analytics service for management and reporting enables detailed chargeback capability and will be included in the Version 5.4 storage appliance.

Sepaton 5.4 is available now and is available as a no-charge software upgrade for current customers. For more information, go here.