FormationOne Solution by Formation Data Systems Recaptures Unused VM Storage Capacity

Formation Data Systems, Inc. (Formation) announced features for the FormationOne Dynamic Storage Platform (FormationOne) that allows enterprises to recapture unused storage in their virtualized server environments.

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This feature, which is an industry first called Virtual Storage Recapture (VSR), allows company’s customers to extend their FormationOne deployments beyond standard software-defined storage implementations to be able to utilize storage capacity that is ‘stranded’ within most virtual servers and hypervisor clusters. Using VSR, customers can provision unused capacity across any VM environment including Hyperconverged environments. VSR delivers this reclaimed storage as flexible shared-storage pool which can be used for applications including backup, archive, file and object storage. This solution can unlock terabytes to petabytes of capacity with no incremental hardware purchase.

The Dynamic Storage Platform eliminates the complexities created by traditional storage architectures by delivering differentiated capabilities such as QoS, dynamic tiering, data duplication and CDP to deliver high performance storage with control and protection. The company uses a distributed software-defined architecture that runs on industry standard x86 compute nodes and consolidates workloads across block, file and object data types, lowering TCO by ten times or more.

Today, organizations cannot cost-effectively support the deployment of both traditional and next generation workloads because hardware-centric architectures are very rigid and do not easily support modern, distributed architectures in combination with traditional workloads.

Formation addresses this challenge by providing customers with storage solution that is:

• Software-defined and dynamic

• Hyper-scale and fault tolerant

• Cost effective and scalable

FormationOne VSR
The Virtual Storage Recapture (VSR) feature within FormationOne allows customers that have deployed large virtual server farms to take advantage of the fact that FormationOne can discover and leverage the disk and connected storage array resources in all of the physical hosts across the data center. The distributed architecture of FormationOne allows customers to create completely new pools of virtualized storage resources from capacity that would have been otherwise unused. These new storage resources can now be managed as part of a company’s system, providing administrators access to storage within the standard compute nodes in a Formation domain in addition to the capacity within the VM hosts, arrays or appliances. These resources are managed in a single interface and can be presented as any data type (iSCSI, NFS, Object) with automated data management including QoS, tiering, journaling so that regardless of the storage source, the result is enterprise storage.

“Customers with large VM deployments end up with potentially petabytes of capacity that essentially goes to waste, this new FormationOne VSR capability allows customers to maximize their hardware investments and fully utilize this stranded investment,” said Mark Lewis, CEO, Formation Data Systems. “Formation is here to provide every enterprise with a platform that delivers cloud storage capabilities that are an order of magnitude less costly than today’s traditional architectures, but don’t require sacrificing performance, availability or security.”

Formation advantage:
The FormationOne Dynamic Storage platform provides these differentiated capabilities:

• Integrated de-duplication and data reduction, minimizing the storage footprint

• Workload consolidation across block, file, object and big data use cases

• PriorityOne QoS, which delivers prioritized I/O and throughput across all data types

• TimeLine journaled data protection, with real-time recovery and integrated snaps and clones

• FireBreak analytics, which delivers real time anomaly detection and reporting

• Dynamic tiering and all flash access, which leverage SSD performance at much lower cost points

“Storage operations and business managers seek a unified pool of elastic storage with predictable performance, secure boundaries, and invisible management, but existing technologies can’t deliver at real-world scale,” said Paul Evans, principal architect, Daystrom Technology Group, Inc. “This is why the Formation SDS architecture is so compelling: QoS, dynamic provisioning and inline analytics offer value to both sets of stakeholders. This, in addition to the economic benefits give Formation a solution that can transform the storage landscape for the next decade.“

“Software-defined storage is a great example of a rare-but-real paradigm market shift, and Formation Data Systems is one vendor helping to spearhead the shift. Traditional storage architectures are too costly, complex and siloed, and they can prevent organizations from unlocking – and optimizing – the value in their data,” said Mark Peters, practice director and senior analyst, Enterprise Storage Group. “The new era of ‘software-defined everything’ is upon us, and enterprises are beginning to understand its impact and opportunity. FormationOne is a modern, data-focused platform that can address all of the cost and data management pains most enterprises experience today.“