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Xiotech Corp. is aiming to fill the dearth of clustering options in enterprise storage with its new Magnitude three-dimensional array, according to company officials.”What weve done is taken a pure clustering approach, broken up into layers,” said Xiotech Corporate Architect Rob Peglar, in Eden Prairie, Minn.
Storage administrators today have many third-party application clustering options, and replication software can protect a SAN (storage area network) if there are two of all the hardware, but vendors such as EMC Corp., Hitachi Ltd. and IBM include only primitive controller redundancy by default, Peglar said.
Thats fine for array failover, but its not suitable for data center emergencies, as its not distributed, Peglar said. EMC, of Hopkinton, Mass., last week announced updated replication software, Symmetrix Remote Data Facility/ Asynchronous, or SRDF/A, that copies only data changes. That eliminates the need for full dual-storage environments, but it doesnt ship until next month and costs users an extra $20,000 to start.
Besides clustering, “were bringing from the original Magnitude architecture the ability to dynamically provision and do a lot of things that on other systems would require planned downtime,” Peglar said. Xiotech Zero Server Footprint uses no server-based software, he said.
The original Magnitude is certified for Fibre Channel switches from Brocade Communications Systems Inc., McData Corp. and SAN newcomer Cisco Systems Inc., Peglar said. The new version is in qualifications with all those and uses QLogic Corp.s 2G-bps adapters, he said.
An entry-level Magnitude 3D, which comes with two nodes and holds up to 32 terabytes of raw data, costs about $140,000, officials said. By years end, it will scale to 43 terabytes and up to 60 terabytes by the middle of next year, they said. Xiotechs plans include updated firmware for the original Magnitude, Serial SCSI and Serial ATA drive options, and iSCSI.