Infortrend Debuts New ESVA Arrays

Infortrend Technology Inc. will announce at VMworld the availability of two new models in its ESVA (Enterprise Scalable Virtualized Architecture) line. The newest additions to Infortrend’s ESVA product family, the E10 and the F70, offer users even more options for affordable storage virtualization. Designed for enterprises, Infortrend’s ESVA product family uses thin provisioning, scale-out technology and data protection to bring users optimal resource efficiency, management convenience, operational resilience, and increased availability.

                       E10

With the addition of the ESVA E10 mid-range storage array, Infortrend delivers data service features such as storage virtualization, distributed load-balancing, thin provisioning, and data protection functions. The most affordable model in the ESVA family, the new ESVA E10 helps users maximize return on investment in their IP SAN while minimizing cost.

The ESVA E10 comes with 16 internal drives and four 1GbE iSCSI ports. Like all other ESVA models, the E10 is based on a scalable virtualized architecture, which allows IT administrators to grow the system in line with their needs. To achieve enhanced performance and expanded capacity, and hence meet the required service levels for applications, users can cluster up to four E10 systems in a storage pool. Scaling is not disruptive to eliminate downtime. For optimized application productivity, workloads are equally distributed among all of the storage systems in the pool. The ESVA E10’s built-in thin provisioning capability further ensures maximum utilization of the pooled capacity. Large, under-utilized data volumes no longer exist, as capacity is dynamically allocated to applications when read operations occur.

Infortrend’s new ESVA F70 provides FC/iSCSI hybrid host connectivity and supports cost-effective remote replication while facilitating high application productivity. The ESVA F70 allows enterprise users to deploy business-critical applications on FC SAN while configuring cost-effective remote replication via iSCSI-based data transmission over Ethernet.

For businesses of all sizes, remote replication must be a key element of a comprehensive disaster recovery plan. Traditionally, FCIP routers are required when users would like to replicate valuable data sets on a FC-host storage system onto another FC-host storage system at a remote site over Ethernet. With Infortrend’s new ESVA F70, FCIP routers are no longer necessary to deploy remote replication, as built-in iSCSI ports can be directly connected to the IP network. The ESVA F70 comes with eight 8Gb/s FC and four 1Gb/s iSCSI ports, and supports Solid State Drives (SSD), SAS drives and SATA drives. For users not requiring remote replication, the hybrid connectivity can also be used to support consolidated SAN tiering. A single storage pool of the ESVA F70 can meet service level requirements of both tier 1 applications on FC SAN and tier 2 applications on IP SAN.

As storage-based virtualization is independent from host platforms and easy to deploy with no additional hardware or software, storage-based virtualization is an ideal way to help companies improve storage utilization efficiency while minimizing additional costs.

According to James Hsieh, vice president of global marketing at Infortrend, "By allowing users to run multiple virtual servers on a single physical server, server virtualization increases resource utilization and reduces management overhead. Infortrend has embraced all of the benefits of virtualization, and we ensure that our products are optimized to run in virtualized environments. In fact, the ESVA product family is based on virtualized architecture – taking storage consolidation a step further. Using scale-out and thin provisioning technology, virtualized storage solutions can be integrated into various OS environments to allow optimal resource efficiency, ease of management, operational resilience, and increased availability – all while reducing costs."

Infortrend is a VMware Technology Alliance Partner (TAP). Infortrend’s iSCSI and Fibre Channel (FC) host storage products are VMware certified.