DataON Storage Expands Hyper-Converged Infrastructure

DataON Storage, the storage division of Area Data Systems, Inc. and provider of hyper-converged platforms for the software-defined datacenter, announced the Microsoft certification of the CiB-9224 F1 all-flash Cluster-in-a-Box (CiB) for Windows Server 2012 R2, Storage Spaces.

Built on the inaugural certified software-defined Storage Spaces platform, DataON’s certified CiB-9224 F1 empowers organizations to transition into a self-contained, highly available, hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) using compute and shared-storage technology. The CiB appliance architecture simplifies IT deployments and increases performance levels with reduced TCO.

“BC is imperative to our client base, the all-flash CiB from DataON with HGST Ultrastar flash is the perfect solution for our Windows Server 2012 R2 enterprise deployments,” said Andre van den Berg, president, XCES BV and DataON Channel Premium Partner. “With successful sales of the CiB-9224 F1 already, we believe that a Microsoft certified DataON architecture delivers Hyper-V density, low latency IO/s speeds, and 24/7 continuous availability-this is an all-flash appliance we can completely rely on.“

The hyper-converged infrastructure appliance market will nearly quintuple from 2015 levels to nearly $5 billion by 2019, or a 46% CAGR between 2015 and 2019, according to Gartner’s Forecast Analysis.¹ Demand can be attributed to the need for speed, deployment window flexibility, and managing change to virtual servers, virtual desktops, and hybrid cloud infrastructures with a more cost effective approach. In order to achieve desired TCO levels, a continuous application delivery can be achieved through hyper-convergence with improved performance speed and BC.

“The DataON simplifies Storage Spaces deployments with a single HGST flash-optimized CiB, delivering hundreds of VMs and better than two million IO/s from the clustered shared storage CiB-9224 F1 all-flash hyper-converged appliance,” states Trenton R. Baker, VP business development, DataON Storage.

DataON’s all-flash array (AFA) CiB brings together active dual-node clustering, flash-tuned shared storage, networking and Windows Server Hyper-V virtualization designed for organizations looking to maximize their IT resources while helping them speed up time-to-value.The CiB-9224 F1 all-flash hyper-converged appliance is purpose-built for the datacenters to achieve industry economics and density enabled flash storage for every application.

“Speed and reliability in deriving actionable intelligence on operational data is key to unlocking value in the modern data center,” said Ulrich Hansen, VP of SSD product marketing at Western Digital Corporation. “HGST Ultrastar SSDs offer unrivaled reliability and extreme SSD performance to drive real-time data analysis. The certification of the CiB-9224 F1 all-flash CiB allows customers to benefit from HGST’s award-winning drives and stay ahead of the mountains of data growing across enterprise infrastructure environment. “

The CiB-9224 F1 is optimized to utilize Western Digital’s HGST Ultrastar SSDs as a hot tier shared across active dual-nodes via end-to-end next generation 12Gb SAS expanders and 10GbE internal heartbeat for failover and failback resiliency. Microsoft hyper-converged appliances require fault tolerance, scalability, and continuously available clustered nodes to achieve breakthrough I/O performance. The CiB-9224 F1 all flash pure storage appliance delivers in excess of two million read IO/s ad over 1.1 million write IO/s performance with better than 11GB/s throughput speeds. Windows’ Storage Spaces is flash-tuned for read intensive and simultaneous write-back cache applications such as SQL Server databases, OLTP, HPC and big data analytic-without contributing to data center hardware sprawl.

“The impact of flash-based arrays have on datacenters is undeniable, as more flash-based platforms are delivering enterprise data services,” said Siddhartha Roy, group program manager, Windows Server HA and storage, Microsoft Corp. “By introducing all-flash shared storage built on Windows Server 2012 R2, Storage Spaces, companies like DataON can provide the performance and continuity for hyper-converged features expected in enterprise Hyper-V deployments.“

The Microsoft certified DataON hyper-converged all-flash array CiB appliance supports Microsoft Azure Backup and Microsoft Azure Site Recovery to essentially become a Cloud-in-a-Box, with cost efficiencies built in. By utilizing Windows Azure Pack, the CiB-9224 F1 can provide a multi-tenant, private flash cloud that works with Windows Server and System Center, to deliver self-service provisioning, easy movement of workloads to the cloud, and infrastructure management. The CiB’s integration with system center includes VMM for policy-based provisioning and orchestration of compute and storage resources at VM-level granularity.

DataON is shipping the CiB-9224 F1 all-flash Cluster-in-a-Box hyper-converged appliance for Hyper-V and tiered SOFS Storage Spaces beginning under $35,000, and two million IO/s all-flash array solutions with 128 virtual cores and 38TBs priced under $124,000.

¹ Gartner, Prepare for the Next Phase of Hyper-Convergence, George J. Weiss, Andrew Butler, 01/22/16