Infortrend Introduces Enterprise Scalable Virtualized Architecture

Infortrend unveiled its range of storage solutions ESVA: Enterprise Scalable Virtualized Architecture, a SAN storage system built from a revolutionary concept to reinforce storage virtualization capability, performance advancement and deliver massive scalability.

Infortrend’s ESVA series enables mid-range enterprise storage users to achieve optimum return on investment, simplify storage infrastructure and maximize application productivity to ensure a much lower total cost of ownership. Furthermore, to underline this major achievement, the Infortrend ESVA series has been awarded ‘Best Choice: Data Storage Product’ by Computex Taipei 2009, the world’s second largest ICT exhibition.

"The ESVA utilizes industry standard Fibre Channel or iSCSI SAN protocols and offers storage virtualization, thin provisioning, distributed load balancing, array-based snapshots, replication and energy efficiency," said Tony Chu, President of Infortrend Corporation. "The product family delivers a very cost-effective approach in today’s complex storage management environment."

Infortrend will support customers and partners through a 24×7 global service center, providing professional and timely assistance when required.

The innovative architecture of a ‘scale-out’ storage pool, exclusively designed by Infortrend to differentiate from conventional scale-up mechanisms, enables the subsystem to scale out the virtualized foundation by simply adding additional ESVA arrays for capacity and performance expansion.

Typical ‘scale-up’ systems that require fork-lift upgrades and downtime caused by the need to migrate data or load balance can lead to service disruption and additional overhead as well as the unknown factor of compatibility issues when systems are eventually re-enabled, causing additional, unwanted pressure. The ESVA architecture differs in that its unique and dynamic virtualized ‘scale-out’ mechanism allows on the fly scalability, increased capacity utilization and further efficiency in data read/write load balancing. For customers with budget constraints, capacity and performance can be incrementally increased as needed.

"ESVA: Enterprise Scalable Virtualized Architecture is a major product milestone that Infortrend prides itself on," expressed Michael Schnapp, CTO of Infortrend Technology. "After many years of experience and endeavor, Infortrend has come to a turning point with an accomplishment that best represents our leading-edge technology in storage solution development and, most significantly, our commitment to our customers."

"The innovative architecture built into the ESVA incorporates feedback from business partners and customers as well as the careful consideration of our industry-leading RD team and ability to respond to global market trends and application requirements," Schnapp added. "Packaged with a comprehensive service support program, we believe the ESVA is a storage solution that will prove to be indispensable while, at the same time, being simple to manage and maintain, as well as achieving cost-effectiveness in the enterprise storage management infrastructure."

Resellers nation wide will provide ESVA product availability and applications assistance. Joe Fernandez, Executive Vice President of Axcelerate Networks, a Northern California based solutions provider, said: "Infortrend’s ESVA gives organizations high performance and scalability without the huge costs that are usually associated with this much flexibility. The scale-up or scale-out architecture will allow organizations to develop a more strategic approach to their data management plan."

Bell Microproducts will distribute and support ESVA applications thru a reseller network in North America. Gary Gammon, VP of Enterprise Products Marketing at Bell Micro, said, "Bell Micro is pleased to offer this feature rich, cost-effective solution to our reseller customers. It provides advanced performance features that will allow end users to solve their complex storage management problems at a reasonable price and is easily scalable to support their future growth needs." Reseller applications and technical support will be offered thru the Bell Micro Solutions Center in Eden Prairie, Minnesota.

Innovative features offer end user benefits

• Application Support Functionality: In addition to innovative concepts such as virtualization and scale-out storage pools, Infortrend’s new ESVA series offers additional value add features and benefits such as thin provisioning for best return on investment, load balancing for simplifying storage scaling and array-based snapshot and replication for maximizing application productivity.
• Efficiency: With a commitment to energy efficient IT, the ESVA series is designed with redundant and hot-swappable hardware components in order to achieve high fault-tolerant capability; the smart drive spin-down, dynamic cooling mechanisms and highly efficient 80 Plus power supplies help reduce energy consumption.
• OS Support: Since the ESVA series is optimized for top-tier applications, it provides broad support for enterprise-level operating systems, such as Windows Server 2008, Solaris, Linux, IBM-AIX and HP-UX, and support for server virtualization including VMware and Microsoft Hyper-V.

Hear what Roger Cox, Research VP, Storage Markets, Gartner, has to say about ESVA