StoneFly 5U Voyager IP SAN Announced at 900MB/s Over 10GbE

StoneFly, Inc., a wholly-owned subsidiary of Dynamic Network Factory, Inc. (DNF), introduced Voyager, a new line of virtualized IP SAN appliances designed to deliver performance at an economical price point. With entry-level pricing starting at US$25,000 MSRP, Voyager is ideal for enterprise customers in need of a robust SAN offering both high availability and versatility for primary and secondary storage applications.

As the newest member of the StoneFly Storage Concentrator family of IP SANs, Voyager comes standard with six or 10 gigabit Ethernet (GbE) iSCSI connections, but is offered with optional quad 10Gb Ethernet connections to achieve performance of up to 950MB/s. This performance makes Voyager ideal for critical applications involving online transaction processing, databases, email, disk-based archives, disk-to-disk backup, virtual servers and other core business uses.

Voyager supports a wide range of virtual server environments including VMware, Citrix XenServer, Virtual Iron and Microsoft.

"With more than 75 percent of our customers either considering or currently using server virtualization, Voyager gives them all the speed and performance they require, plus high availability to ensure support of the most demanding applications and IT environments," said Bahman Jalali, director of product management for StoneFly.

Featuring active-active components for business continuity, Voyager offers full RAID protection and requires no down time for storage expansion. Although less scalable than other StoneFly IP SANs such as the OptiSAN, Voyager’s architecture enables customers to start smaller and then expand to up to 128 drives via expansion arrays. For added flexibility, configurations can be mixed and matched according to customer need with any combinations of SAS, SATA, and SSD drives.

At the cornerstone of the Voyager design is StoneFly’s patented storage virtualization engine, which delivers quad-core processing power, dedicated iSCSI cache, and the StoneFly StoneFusion storage management operating system. StoneFusion provides block-level provisioning as well as centralized storage management and advanced storage features including replication, mirroring and snapshotting.

Voyager is now available, with prices starting at US$25,000 MSRP for a standard 5U rackmount configuration. Expansion arrays in 3U rackmount form factors start at US$11,000.