StorTrends 3400i Dual Controller SAN From American Megatrends

American Megatrends Inc. (AMI) introduce its StorTrends 3400i SAN storage appliance. Extending the StorTrends SAN series from AMI, this solution integrates the features of StorTrends iTX network storage software in a dual controller 16-bay 3U form factor.



The StorTrends 3400i is the first StorTrends appliance to feature the new, 64-bit version of StorTrends iTX network storage software - StorTrends iTX2.8 - which is optimized for this platform and designed home in a data center or server room as front-line storage for high-volume transactions or as part of a tiered storage solution. OS-agnostic High Availability makes it a candidate for mission-critical data that requires 'always on' availability and reliability, while the auto failover capability between its dual containers ensures that any disaster or interruption is handled.

Paresh Chatterjee, Chief Technology Officer of AMI, points out the performance gains and reliability when using the 3400i appliance in a Disaster Recovery (DR) solution. "Customers seeking high performance along with high uptime will find the StorTrends 3400i very attractive, as the dual controllers with Quad Core Intel processors act in an active/active configuration to increase I/O throughput," he says.

StorTrends 3400i adds hard and soft improvements
over the previous 3U StorTrends 3200i IP-SAN, including:

• Dual Controller Configuration: Auto Failover/Failback in Active/Active or Active/Passive Configurations
• Software RAID with RAID-RT Technology: Scalability to 256 TB
• Data Archiving: Data Deduplication and Compression for Archiving Data
• Auto Tiering: Hierarchical Tiering of Data with Information Lifecycle Management
• Near-CDP with Data Snapshots: Advanced Redirect on Write (ROW) Snapshots, with support for 8,048 Snapshots
• WDS Technology: Compression, Encryption, Data Dedupe and WAN Optimization for fast replication
• Data Replication:  Replicate Data to DR (Disaster Recovery) and Remote Sites
• Vertical Capacity Expansion: Save hardware and disk costs by expansion with up to seven StorTrends 3401j JBOD Appliances, with multi-pathing for increased performance and reliability
• Virtualization:  Support for virtualization suites including VMware, Microsoft Hyper-V and Citrix Xen
• Multi-Platform Replication: Lower DR costs by replicating from the StorTrends 3400i dual controller appliance to a single controller StorTrends 2400i

However, like its siblings in the StorTrends lineup, The StorTrends 3400i keeps many of the aspects that users know about StorTrends, including the ManageTrends GUI for 'single pane of glass' storage management, wizards for simple, fast configuration and a host of all-inclusive, enterprise-class features prei-nstalled on every StorTrends appliance at no added cost.

Because the StorTrends 3400i features Asynchronous Replication with WDS, it is also ideally suited for Disaster Recovery (DR) applications requiring a secondary appliance in an offsite location, as WDS provides savings in bandwidth usage and data transfer times. The Archiving with Deduplication feature adds additional layers of flexibility and functionality to its replication capabilities, and takes it beyond a mere DR role into the realm of true data warehousing.

American Megatrends President and CEO S. Shankar commented: "Because the StorTrends 3400i is a dual controller storage appliance, it conserves hardware (i.e. duplication of additional disk) and integration costs and precious rack space while providing outstanding uptime. From data backup and recovery, remote or local storage, to replication and multiple site backups, the StorTrends 3400i truly does it all."

With Thin Provisioning and ILM, the JBOD expansion capability of the StorTrends 3400i can be leveraged to the maximum. The Auto Tiering/Information Lifecycle Management (ILM) of StorTrends iTX analyzes data for its value, and stores it accordingly - in the fastest, most responsive top-tier storage for the most popular data, and automatically migrates it down the chain to less expensive, less powerful storage as it loses value. For organizations struggling to contain the cost of adding new storage and exploding volumes of data, ILM can manage data growth and accessibility, reduce cost, improve recovery, and remove risk and exposure to data loss.

Expandability is also a key attribute of the StorTrends 3400i. Along with its onboard SAS expander for JBOD expansion, the option to add two additional NIC ports or 10 Gigabit Ethernet means fast network performance. With the ability to expand up to seven StorTrends 3201j JBODs, the StorTrends 3400i enables organizations to solve their data storage with a single StorTrends appliance.