DataON Storage: 12Gb Cluster-in-a-Box Shared Storage Appliance

DataON Storage, provider of OS-agnostic storage enclosures, announced the evolution of the Cluster-in-a-Box (CiB) platform-the CIB-9224 converged storage appliance.

The design is based on a modular chassis supporting dual compute nodes and up to 42TB of 12Gb tiered storage using HGST‘s Ultrastar SSDs and HDDs.

DataON utilizes 12Gb SAS drive advancements from HGST to leverage Microsoft Corp.‘s Windows Server 2012 R2 clustering technology with Storage Spaces, enabling performance access to shared storage from each node.

These innovations will be on display May 12-15, in the DataON Storage booth at the Microsoft TechEd North America 2014 Conference, George R Brown Convention Center in Houston, TX.

“Microsoft’s Windows Server 2012 R2 offers robust file-based shared storage including a new tiered storage paradigm,” states John Loveall, principal program manager, Windows Server. “Using Windows Server 2012 R2 with DataON Storage delivers compelling performance when featuring the 12Gb SAS drives, which are necessary for a wide range of customer workloads, while providing cost-effective storage.”

This all-in-one appliance delivers HA services and shared storage in a 2U footprint. The CiB-9224 includes end-to-end 12Gb SAS performance, tuned for hybrid HDD/SSD auto-tiering with Storage Spaces and Windows Failover Clustering features.

It offers next generation Xeon platform to deliver Hyper-V and file serving capabilities from a dual node HA appliance. It employs energy efficient DDR4 memory, integrated 10GbE ports and can scale by adding external JBODs through LSI Corp.‘s DataBolt SAS expander technology, to deliver aggregate bandwidth for 12Gb and/or existing 6Gb storage drives-allowing a device transition.

“As growing data consumption drives the need for higher-performance using 12Gb SAS, LSI is committed to providing best-in-class 12Gb SAS HBAs and RAID controllers to its ecosystem partners,” states Brian Sorby, senior director of marketing, datacenter solutions group, LSI. “With the first-to-market DataON CiB-9224 and full lineup of high-performance 12Gb appliances that feature LSI 12Gb SAS solutions with LSI DataBolt technology, DataON’s customers will benefit from having increased performance when using either 12Gb or legacy 6Gb SAS devices.”

DataON’s cluster-in-a-box converged architecture is positioned to consolidate disparate file and compute servers into one easy-to-manage comprehensive scale-out Hyper-V and Storage Spaces appliance. A CiB-9224 platform is designed for remote and mid-sized office environments to dynamically run up to 32+ VMs with shared 12Gb SAS storage from a single appliance, by eliminating the complexity and sprawl of disparate IT devices.

“DataON Storage furthers the groundbreaking shared storage innovations with the introduction of the first all 12Gb SAS Cluster-in-a-Box,” states Trenton R. Baker, VP business development, DataON. “We’re enthused to bring the CiB-9224 tiered storage ready appliance platform to the Windows Server 2012 R2 community, utilizing the HGST Ultrastar 12Gb SAS drives.”

CiB-9224 platform is flexible enough for branch office and mid-sized environments while robust enough for enterprise deployments tuned for hot/cold tiering, making this platform for deployments as a Scale-Out File Server (SOFS) building block. In an SOFS design the CiB-9224, using SMB Direct with Mellanox Technologies Ltd.‘s RDMA capable 10GbE/40GbE/56Gb IB networking adapters, allows commodity hardware Hyper-V compute nodes to stream data to/from the CiB-9224 fileserver with higher speeds and lower utilization of the processor-allowing the use of more VMs.

“Mellanox’s interconnects provide businesses with flexibility and stability while also addressing performance needs,” said John Kim, director of storage marketing at Mellanox. “Mellanox IB solutions unlock new levels of performance for all flash 12Gb/s DataON appliance deployments by enabling low-latency and efficiency benefits with the use of RDMA in Windows Server 2012 R2 environments.“

Microsoft Partner Network and certified IT professionals are continually facing space constraints, hardware sprawl, and a lack of datacenter-class power with a mandate to reduce their TCO . Purpose-built to exceed these expectations, the CiB-9224 is designed around the HGST 12Gb drives certified for Windows Server 2012 R2 to make it easy for customers to deploy, compute and store resources effortlessly, without sacrificing enterprise performance.

“HGST was first in the industry to deliver 12Gb SAS SSDs, and we’re honored to be working with DataON to enable their new 12Gb CIB-9224 hybrid storage appliance,” said Ulrich Hansen, VP of SSD product marketing, HGST. “To help contend with massive data growth and accelerate application performance, the 12Gb SAS interface represents the next performance step in the evolution of SAS, and helps unleash the full performance potential of our enterprise SSDs and HDDs. Leveraging our award-winning drives, we expect DataON’s new hybrid storage appliance to deliver great efficiencies of scale, improve asset utilization and help lower TCO.”

Pricing for a complete 24-bay 12Gb HDD/SSD converged storage appliance for concurrent Hyper-V and file serving starts under $35,000. The CiB-9224 is currently qualifying for Windows Server 2012 R2 and select software-defined storage partners with broad availability and partner distribution scheduled in Q3 2014.