Reldata Introduces 9240i Unified Storage System

RELDATA, Inc. announced the next generation of its unified storage system, the RELDATA 9240i, powered by the new release of RELvos 2.4, its 64-bit storage virtualization operating system.

Together, the products enable mid-market customers to cost-effectively simplify management and improve utilization of their storage infrastructures in virtualized private cloud computing environments. The RELvos-powered 9240i is a feature-rich, software-centric unified storage system that consolidates storage area networks (SAN) and network-attached storage (NAS) via an open, standards-based x86 platform in either single or dual controller configuration. This allows organizations to see, virtualize and protect application data for multi-vendor and multi-site storage environments from a single management interface. The 9240i is offered with RELDATA’s exclusive ‘Save as You Grow’ pricing model, competitively designed to provide customers with a cost-effective, long-term growth strategy.

“The market for iSCSI-based SANs is expected to grow at 24.6% CAGR over the next five years driven by overall data growth and the adoption of server virtualization,” said Noemi Greyzdorf, IDC market research manager. “Unified storage solutions offer an easy to use, scalable storage platform for the mid-sized business that helps IT achieve greater operational efficiency while meeting their service-level agreements. Fully integrated value added features such as mirroring, replication, and data migration provide the tools necessary to keep the business running.”

“Customers are under continued budget and technical refresh pressure due to the double-digit data growth associated with the accelerated adoption of virtual servers,” said Steven Murphy, CEO of RELDATA. “As a result, they are looking for cost-effective ways to reduce the cost and complexity of managing virtualized block and file storage, increase storage utilization and ensure the availability of application data in cloud computing environments. Using the RELvos-powered 9240i, our customers can see, consolidate and virtualize existing third party storage, at the block- or file-level, and manage it from a single pane of glass. And with RELDATA’s favorable ‘Save as You Grow’ pricing model, they now have the freedom to scale and manage their storage infrastructures without the expensive capacity software licensing model or paying for bundled features they don’t need.”

RELvos is designed to provide storage consolidation of NAS and SAN while virtualizing industry standard SAS, Fibre Channel and iSCSI storage resources. RELvos provisions block data and file storage services on application requirements. Using RELvos’ modular architecture, customers can: rapidly architect multiple, scalable shared storage pools for on-demand, IP SAN, NAS and multi-vendor platforms; seamlessly expand storage capacity; and consolidate underused storage assets. The RELvos 64-bit performance and throughput rivals that of more expensive Fibre Channel SANs at a lower total cost of ownership. And for complete data protection, an embedded firmware module features SAN-level remote mirroring, incremental volume replication, unlimited SAN-level snapshots, and block-based replication.

The RELvos 2.4 release
offers significant new enhancements, including:

• Support for the new 9240i and legacy 9240G hardware platforms;
• Support of high availability (HA) via iSCSI bridging/mirroring;
• Enhancements for asynchronous replication;
• System utilization and I/O statistics charts in the GUI;
• Several new adaptive storage wizards;
• Ability to interrupt, pause and resume replication at the point where it was interrupted;
• Support for setting automatic expiration date for snapshots and clones;
• New and improved RELbots for storage task automation (adaptive storage wizards and RELbots simplify and automate complex and often time-consuming tasks)

RELDATA’s ‘Save as You Grow’ pricing model was designed to help customers achieve cost-effective growth. Software is licensed at the system level by feature, with no price increases based on capacity. The 9240i system’s pricing requires no minimum or fixed bundles. This allows customers to grow virtual clouds with the freedom to pay only for what they need.

Pricing and availability
The 9240i is available immediately and exclusively through RELDATA’s network of certified channel partners. Pricing is based on configuration. Entry-level pricing starts at $21,891 MSRP for a 9240i with 6TB of capacity. The 9240i base unit includes an industry standard high performance storage controller with integrated serial attached SCSI (SAS) disk storage. Storage can be expanded by adding RELDATA disk arrays or pooling existing resources. The 9240i is available for 1 GbE and/or 10 GbE infrastructures.