American Megatrends Releases StorTrends iTX 2.7

American Megatrends, Inc. (AMI) unveiled the latest release of its network storage software, StorTrends iTX 2.7.1030 version 3.x, featuring a host of new enterprise-level features including OS-independent High Availability (HA), support for Clustered Nodes, Remote Replication with WDS Link Acceleration and De-Duplication, Auto Provisioning for NAS volumes and much more.

StorTrends iTX 2.7.1030 v3.x network storage software provides dependable, affordable, yet sophisticated storage management for networked storage applications, featuring dual-dialect capability for both IP-SAN (Storage Area Networks) and NAS (Network Attached Storage). While configured to ship with each StorTrends 1300, 2400 and 3200 storage appliance, the StorTrends iTX architecture also lends itself to easy porting to other storage platforms. StorTrends iTX comes preinstalled on all StorTrends storage appliances, and includes the intuitive ManageTrends web GUI for ‘single pane of glass’ storage management that can go ‘from carton to configured’ in 15 minutes or less.

The newest version of StorTrends iTX 2.7 incorporates a number of new features and an impressive array of enterprise options, which position it on a par with the most sophisticated network storage software offerings the market. It extends capacity, offers improved management capabilities, ensures greater protection and provides superior performance for data storage management.

Paresh Chatterjee, Chief Technology Officer of American Megatrends, said: “This new version of StorTrends iTX shows AMI’s commitment to leadership in the development of feature-rich network storage software. AMI has taken a close look at what the market now demands and worked these latest features into our software solution, to keep StorTrends iTX at the front of the class.”

High Availability (HA) in StorTrends iTX 2.7.1030 version 3.x now ensures uninterrupted service with enterprise-class availability, protection from internal and external disruptions and fast recovery from link and node failures with HA failover. StorTrends storage appliances using StorTrends iTX 2.7 take advantage of a new IP virtualization mechanism to implement HA. The advantage with IP virtualization is that there is no dependency on the client side, unlike multipathing, and therefore no special module that has to be loaded on client systems. This makes the implementation both OS and platform agnostic. It also allows StorTrends to deliver a robust HA solution across the board, even for deployments that use application server virtualization or application server clustering.

Thin, Exact and Auto Provisioning in StorTrends iTX 2.7 allow for dynamic management of storage volumes. The Storage Resource Management (SRM) Tools featured in StorTrends iTX 2.7 work hand in hand with these provisioning tools to include capacity trending that captures and displays historic provisioning information, along with a ‘what if’ analysis to assist in future capacity planning scenarios. The new Auto Provisioning feature for NAS volumes allows administrators to implement a flexible ‘grow as you go’ policy. It works by creating an exact provisioned volume that monitors file system allocations, and automatically expands the exactly provisioned volume size and grows the file system to match that capacity – providing all of the advantages of Thin Provisioned volumes, with none of the pitfalls.

StorTrends iTX 2.7 also supports multiple flavors of Windows initiators, VMware virtual machines and Linux initiators. Improved ACL permissions allow support for CIFS and NFS access concurrently, for enhanced support of both Microsoft Windows and Linux environments. Virtualization support for VMware and Citrix Xen is also expanded significantly in this latest version of StorTrends iTX.

This latest edition of StorTrends iTX 2.7 maintains
all of the standard features
that it has come to be known for, including:

Highly advanced Redirect-on-Write (ROW) Snapshot Technology
Wide Area Data Services (WDS) that uses Data Deduplication, Link Acceleration and Compression to speed up remote Snapshot Assisted Replication (SAR) exponentially
Continuous Data Protection (CDP)
Storage Resource Management (SRM) Tools
Information Lifecycle Management (ILM)
Snapshot Validation for replicated snapshots in SAR
Snapshot File System Check for NAS Volumes