Promise Technology Offers VTrak Ex30 Storage Platform

Storage solutions specialist Promise Technology announced the release of the VTrak Ex30 series of storage solutions. The 8Gb Fibre Channel, 6Gb SAS, 1Gb iSCSI and 10G iSCSI solutions incorporate the Intel Xeon C5500/C3500 processor, providing an increase in power and flexibility (up to 650K I/O ps). The VTrak Ex30 series also increases the performance up to four times more than previous generations, from 1,500MB per second to 6,000MB per second, as well as reducing power consumption, requiring less cooling and offering a smaller profile chassis to fit in racks under 20 inches.
Built on Intel's next-generation storage platform, the VTrak Ex30 comes standard with dual power supplies/cooling units for improved uptime and reliability. The company said the VTrak Ex30 is well-suited for primary and secondary storage, especially for businesses utilizing virtualization, cloud storage, business continuity and disaster recovery applications. The fully integrated Ex30 series is available in configurations from 8TB to 384TB of storage. The Ex30 series is available now in selected quantities and will be generally available in the first quarter of 2011, according to a company release.
"The Ex30 system from Promise delivers a number of functions that end users from midrange organizations to enterprise customers expect to see in storage systems, including multi-tiering, storage virtualization, data protection and thin provisioning," said Natalya Yezhkova, research director for IDC's storage systems program. "While many of these functions are delivered by other storage products, the all-inclusive approach is not yet as common. At the same time, having all functionality included in the storage system offering, as it is done by Promise, is important for end users."
A newly developed management tool supports importing configuration scripts and an array of health and performance monitoring tools. The software is localized in 10 languages, and the platform supports advanced drive power management (MAID 2.0) to manage idle drives in an effort to conserve power usage. It also provides support for larger configurations, including up to seven expansion chassis; support for a total of 192 drives is included.
"We are very excited about the storage virtualization opportunities we are seeing when we couple the new Promise VTrak Ex30 with the recently announced VTrak S3000," said Brian Smith, city planning IT director for the city and county of San Francisco. "As a major SharePoint user, the ability to easily provision our storage systems with a scalable solution that addresses our rapidly expanding data is key to our ability to provide the highest level of service to our clients. We find that this new solution from Promise delivers those features and more."