Fujitsu Appliance With Hyperscale, Software-Based Distributed Storage System

Fujitsu Limited plans to deliver new storage appliance providing customers needing instant online access to large data volumes with a new hyper-scale, software-defined storage solution based on Intel technologies and utilizing Ceph (Inktank Storage, Inc.) open-source software.

Fujitsu and Intel Corp. are collaborating to ensure that the new Ceph file system-based Fujitsu storage appliance is enterprise-ready and integrates Intel Virtual Storage Manager (Intel VSM) to provide Ceph cluster management.

A technical preview of the upcoming product will be given at the Intel Developer Forum, Septeber 9-11, 2014, in San Francisco; CA

Exponential data growth is pushing today’s storage architectures to its limits. Factors such as system I/O performance, storage scalability, traditional RAID technologies and the data migration of petabyte volumes are creating challenges for enterprise storage professionals. Switching to a software-based distributed storage system (SDS) will address these challenges and provide new levels of scalability, flexibility and agility.

Target customers for the new Fujitsu storage appliance are cost-sensitive service- and cloud-providers; research and public sector organisations responsible for large online data volumes; as well as media streaming and broadcasting companies. Fujitsu is also targeting financial institutions requiring ad hoc access to historical data such as contractual documents.

Since Ceph is an integral part of the OpenStack project, the new Fujitsu appliances also deliver the storage architecture for OpenStack users.

The Fujitsu appliances utilise Ceph software and are based on Intel Xeon processors and SSDs and integrate the new Intel VSM. The systems are capable of handling petabytes of data, enabling the deployment of extremely-scalable, high-performance, fault-tolerant storage environments, as well as offering the potential to dramatically decrease online storage costs per gigabyte. The new Fujitsu appliances will also make complex Ceph easier to manage for storage professionals.