DataON Cluster-in-a-Box Reaches 420TB Capacity with HGST 6TB HDDs

DataON Storage announced the certification and availability of the HGST Ultrastar He6 helium 6TB SAS drives for its Cluster-in-a-Box (CiB) storage appliance platform.

Designed to deliver highly available shared storage for software-defined storage technologies, such as Windows Server 2012 R2 with storage spaces, the CiB is tuned for hot/cold tiered storage. Utilizing the 6TB helium-filled drives, the company’s CiB-9470, furnishes a capacity of 420TB.

Private cloud and datacenter builders, media and entertainment, and enterprise IT service providers are required to increase storage space efficiency while reducing costs. Combined with the Ultrastar He6, the CiB-9470 cloud-tuned appliance enables IT admins to expand capacity without wasting rack space, increasing power circuits or adding siloed storage units-resulting in maximized space utilization and reduced TCO.

“Cloud data centers around the world look to HGST for highly reliable drive technologies and to improve storage efficiencies by improving TCO on every level of capacity, density, and power consumption,” says Brendan Collins, VP of product marketing, HGST. “We are excited to see our customers adopt this efficiency philosophy and DataON is delivering impressively dense storage capacity with the CiB-9470 appliance when featuring the HGST Ultrastar He6 drives.“

The CiB-9470 clustered storage appliance is based on a modular chassis supporting Xeon processor E5-2600 v2 product family based dual clustered nodes located side-by-side fused with the density of a 70-bay JBOD. This 4U chassis design provides a denser, more efficient storage and processing architecture to reduce complex cabling and lengthy deployment times.

“Cluster-in-a-Box is designed to provide strong storage density and performance,” states Rick Claus, senior technical evangelist, Microsoft Corp. “A scale-out file server appliance like the DataON CiB-9220 can improve ROI when combined with the HGST 6TB drives and enterprise SSDs with tiered Storage Spaces in Windows Server 2012 R2.“

By providing better than 100TB per U of rack space the CiB-9470 can supply over 4pB of RAID protected usable storage capacity in a typical data center server cabinet. The He6 drives combined with a condensed capacity for clustered storage, results in TCO ptimized storage efficiencies with savings, including:

More Capacity – 50% increase in disk capacity space coupled with 15% better disk bay per U ratio over any CiB design.
Efficient Density – Data center-optimized, up to 420TB capacity in 4U; allowing 5PB raw storage per rack.
Fault-Tolerant Resiliency – Dual cluster-aware compute nodes for active/active or active/stand-by.
Continuous Availability – Highly available hot-swap SAS shared storage to reduce downtime.
Cool Technology – Better than 4°C cooler operations with the HelioSeal process and twelve chassis fans.
Smart Energy – Idle power use reduced by 24% and better than 35% total savings over comparable designs.
Enterprise Value – He6 HDD populated CiB-9470 yields 75% less rack space over discrete nodes; better than 25% reduction in TCO-while reducing operating expenses and without sacrificing performance.

“DataON is leading the charge into the future of Cluster-in-a-Box technologies by leveraging the 6TB He6 drives to tackle the near 50% CAGR data center storage growth rate,” says Trenton R. Baker, VP business development, DataON. “It’s simple, with helium drives, HGST is re-writing the future of HDD technology capacity limits.“

Pricing and Availability

The CiB-9470 is currently shipping and available direct and through the storage channel partner program.

Designed with the HGST Ultrastar He6 drives with a 420TB capacity yields a list price of $69,000;
a configuration with 372TB of helium drives and 3TB of HGST s842 Series SAS SSDs is $75,000 to provide hot/cold data in auto-tiering solutions.
The smaller 2U CiB-9220 delivers 72TB with a list price of $19,000.