Exablox: OneBlox 5210 Scale-Out All-Flash Storage

Exablox Corp. announced the availability of the all-flash OneBlox 5210, a full featured scale-out storage solution designed and optimized to combine the benefits of a distributed object store with the performance demands of virtual environments and unstructured data.

The firm enables IT organizations to deploy high performance scale-out flash storage, combining the ease of use and manageability of a distributed object store with inline deduplication, compression, and multi-site remote replication at a price point less than competitive HDD storage solutions. OneBlox achieves 50,000 IO/s per node and scales to more than 700TB per cluster, all at less than $0.50/GB effective.

Unlike legacy scale-up solutions, IT organizations can granularly scale OneBlox capacity and availability based on current needs without requiring upfront over-provisioning. Gone are the days of IT organizations needing to purchase excess storage based on a 36-month capacity plan. Today, organizations can enjoy an all-flash OneBlox at less than $0.50 per effective gigabyte. The company enables customers to purchase compatible SSDs at retail price, and scale-out with additional drives or nodes in few minutes. Additionally, as the retail price of flash storage continues to decline monthly, IT organizations are able to enjoy the cost savings on future storage purchases.

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Optimized for virtualized environments
Historically, IT organizations have had to decide between the superior resiliency, ease of management, and rich enterprise features of an object-based storage solution or the performance of a legacy RAID-based solution. With the introduction of OneBlox 3308 and 4312, the firm removed this dilemma for IT organizations for NAS, unstructured data and secondary storage applications. Now, with the introduction of OneBlox 5210, the company continues delivers a high performance, distributed object-based storage solution with all of the application accessibility of NFS and SMB optimized for virtual environments.

With OneBlox architecture, IT organizations no longer have to deal with legacy LUNs and associated volume sizing constraints while managing a virtual environment. OneBlox removes these limitations on Vmware, Inc. NFS datastores and supports the configurations that fit any organization, from a few terabytes to a petabyte or more. Aas OneBlox non-disruptively scales-out when capacity is added to the cluster, NFS datastores increase in size and VMs immediately have more available storage capacity – all with zero reconfiguration.

“Exablox was founded on the principal of reimagining storage and we continue to do so,” said Douglas Brockett, CEO, Exablox. “Customers demand the performance benefits of an all-flash solution but often are shocked at the price tag of purchasing unnecessary flash storage capacity or oversized RAID controllers up front. We offer customers the best of both worlds. They can enjoy the benefits of flash now and scale-out additional capacity and performance as they need it.“

Supports latest drive technologies
Starting with the introduction of the first generation OneBlox, The company has enabled organizations to bring their own drives and supported the latest drive technologies, including 6 and 8TB HDDs with OneBlox 3308 and 4312, respectively. With the introduction of the third generation OneBlox 5210, organizations may adopt some of the latest SSDs, including the newest 3.8TB SSDs. As larger 8 and 16TB capacities become available, organizations may combine new and older SSDs in the same OneBlox and within the same cluster.

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Ease of use
OneSystem, a cloud-based management service, enables IT organizations to simply, yet powerfully, manage on-premises OneBlox in any location from any browser. It provides real-time storage and health monitoring by understanding the state of OneBlox, installed disk drives, network, remotely replicated storage and more. With OneSystem, the forensic information and capability that improves the proactive support company’s delivers. In fact, many potential problems are identified and resolved before they negatively impact applications.

Additionally, organizations have the ability to access the following features with OneSystem:

• Segregate management responsibility for any number of OneBlox clusters in any location

• Configure OneBlox multi-site remote replication in three clicks

• Enjoy zero configuration for nearly every storage management task, including adding or removing capacity, or adding additional OneBlox nodes to a cluster

The OneBlox 5210 is available for early access, at a list price of $28,995.