Toshiba Into Flash Array

Toshiba AsiaPac Pte. Ltd. will start selling storage system Toshiba Total Storage Platform (TTSP) to the South East Asia market.

TTSP is a series of four storage products that brings together Toshiba Group’s experience in storage technologies, to meet the needs of big data, cloud society, and enterprise necessities.

Increase of data volume for IT system, such as big data analysis, requires high speed I/O for large data. At the same time, CSP require storage system with smaller footprint with cost efficiency.

The company’s diversified layer of four products can provide portfolio to meet these requests.

The strength of the group comes from device technologies portfolio which includes NAND flash memory, which Toshiba invented, to SSD and HDD which adds choices of flexibility in devices itself of speed and capacity. The strength brought together not only underlies in devices, but also has capabilities of storage system technologies such as drive control, RAID, storage OS, and up to solution technologies such as virtualization and backup.

Product line-up is as following:

FL 6000: Flash array storage meets the needs for data reading, with saving space and energy.
SC 3000: Balance of performance and capacity.
NL 3000: Near-line storage optimized for large capacity.
TC 3000: Tiered storage controller to boost fast performance and high capacity at the same time.

Among the line-up, the highlight is the storage controller TC3000 which realizes auto-tiering among the different layers such as flash array storage FL6000, disk array storage SC3000 and the near-line storage NL3000 – by combining a hybrid configuration among these storage layers. This enables the system to meet requirements such as expand capacity with near-line storage while taking advantage of high speed flash array or improve performance for existing HDD storage with high speed flash array. This will allow customers to design a storage system to responsive flexibly to changes of requirement for capacity and performance.

Toshiba’s developed tiering optimizer on TC3000 is the technology to maximize the flash storage performance, and provide balance of performance and capacity of the storage without tuning. The tiering of near-line storage and flash array can be executed in 1-million IO/s with 2.6PB maximum capacity (equivalent to approximately 5,000 units of conventional HDD). Another volume management technology ‘hybrid manager’ enables flash memory use rate to be changed dynamically even in operation for taking full advantage.

In the move to realize a community by providing cloud solution, the company established in-house company Cloud and Solutions Company in October 2013 which focuses on providing cloud service and integrated storage system.

To enhance its sales South East Asia market, it initially plans to set up its sales scheme for TTSP with sales partner in Singapore, where market is expected. Toshiba AsiaPac already has such data solutions line up as modular data center, too, and the TTSP will add another solution for the demand. It continues to contribute to providing solutions for the support the big data society.

Product Features

Flash array storage FL6000

Executes 1-million IO/s equivalent to approximately 5,000 conventional HDD

Reliability by the redundancy of main components includes controller, power supply, and fan

Disk array storage SC3000

A primary storage based on disk technology (HDD patrol, preventive maintenance, bad spot management, etc.)

Remote replication (synchronism /non- synchronism) and local replication is supported

Near-line storage NL3000

Maximizes cost-performance with high-density implementation and de-dupe. Ideal for backup and archive

Be able to store data 20 times more capacity provided by HDD with de-dupe

Tiered storage controller TC3000

Tiering technology enables maximum performance of flash array and the storage devices having different performance can be handled just as one disk array

1-million IO/s (with FL6000) and 2.6PB maximum capacity (with NL3000)

Optimal cost by tiering

Manages HDD and flash memory as one virtual volume. Be able to upgrade product or replace part without stopping during operation, enhanced maintainability and operation of the system