DataON: S2D-3110 Hyperconverged Cluster Appliance and MUST Visibility/Management Framework

DataON Storage, the storage division of Area Data Systems, Inc. , announced the first product in its S2D-3000 family of Hyper-Converged Cluster Appliances (HCCA).

DataON S2D-3110

The S2D-3110 and firm’s MUST (Management Utility Software Tools) Visibility and Management Framework provide cluster monitoring, performance metrics, system health statistics, and diagnostic analytics for Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct and Storage Replica. These HCCAs and expansion storage systems are Microsoft Corp’s. certified for Windows Server 2016, for deploying Hyper-V, SQL, VDI, Hekaton, Exchange Online, SharePoint and Microsoft Dynamics ERP.

DataON S2D-3110 rear

“As a pioneer of Microsoft clustered storage platforms, DataON has delivered resilient, high-performance and scalable solutions for over 500 scale-out software-defined storage (SDS) deployments,” said Howard Lo, VP, sales and marketing, DataON. “The new DataON S2D-3110 HCCA is built with the single purpose of automating and optimizing Microsoft environments and infrastructure. DataON is focused on customers who have made the ‘Microsoft Choice’ for their data centers.“

The S2D-3110 is a performance, cost effective and modular Hyper-Converged Cluster Appliance enabling IT teams to rapidly and deploy Microsoft’s enterprise virtualization and hybrid cloud services. The S2D-3000 Family of HCCAs is based on the company’s ClusterBlock Architecture (CBA), which was announced at IDF16 in August 2016. The CBA was created with Microsoft and Intel Corp. to provide scale-out infrastructure and management services for key Microsoft-based environments, such as Hyper-V, Storage Spaces Direct, and Storage Replica. The S2D-3000 family is comprised of solutions that are performance and IOP optimized, balanced IOP and density optimized and capacity optimized for the delivery of core Microsoft services and enterprise applications.

“Microsoft has a long history of building certified, turnkey solutions with DataON for Storage Spaces Direct (S2D). As we move to Windows Server 2016, we are expanding this relationship to provide Hyper-Converged Cluster Appliances that support Hyper-V, Microsoft enterprise applications and Storage Spaces Direct deployments,” said Siddhartha Roy, manager, group PM, Microsoft. “Customers leveraging DataON’s Hyper-Converged Cluster Appliances and MUST Management Framework will have both an optimized infrastructure and increased operational visibility and reliability into their new Microsoft-based Software-Defined Data Center.“

Click to enlarge

Integrated S2D-3110 HCCA platform and MUST Visibility and Management Framework delivers:

Preconfigured 4-nodes S2D-3110 HCCA cluster – Expand performance and capacity with scalability and operational flexibility
Application performance – The S2D-3110 HCCA with four (4x) cluster nodes is capable of providing over 2.4 million IO/s (running VMFleet) using the all flash NVMe based SSD technology to scale I/O intensive workloads.
Hyper-V virtualization hosting – Each S2D-3110 HCCA can support up to 40+ Hyper-V VMs per node up to 16 nodes per cluster.
Storage and network with SMB 3.0 over RDMA – Delivers highest throughput, lowest latency and increase CPU efficiency
Hyperconverged scalability: Incremental compute, networking, and storage resources provides near-linear scalability. Each HCCA can also be expanded in capacity via 12Gb SAS JBODs for further storage expansion.
Automated deployment – Automated out-of-box workflow accelerates time to deployment for Windows Server 2016, Storage Spaces Direct, and Storage Replica environments.
Integrated data protection and guarded fabric – Support Windows Server 2016 with Shielded VM and TPM 2.0 attestation for security and BC

Click to enlarge

Firm’s MUST provides a level of advanced monitoring, visibility, analytics and management tools, leveraging the open Windows Storage Management API (SM-API).

It is a stand-alone management framework which provides three tiers of visibility:

SDDC and hyper-converged infrastructure tier: With the initial focus on storage monitoring and visibility, MUST provide system level information for performance, capacity, hardware inventory and faults/alerts. With MUST you will have dashboard level view of operational visibility, analytics, infrastructure health management, storage systems metrics and event logging insights.
Hyperconverged cluster appliance/Node tier: At the Hyper-Converged Cluster Appliance (HCCA) node level MUST provides a deeper level of visibility and management. At this tier the firm provides node and device level performance, health and operational analytics for the HCI cluster. This enables to provide proactive systems maintenance and understand requirements for workload migrations.
Systems and storage services audit log tier: At the systems and storage services audit level the vendor provides the detailed logging level visibility for events to do root cause analysis and export analytics source data.

“IT organizations are looking for alternatives to VMware. Hyper-V running in Windows 2016 with Storage Spaces Direct provides this alternative and brings a new hyper-converged solution option for companies that have decided on Microsoft,” said Eric Slack, senior analyst, Evaluator Group. “DataON’s new S2D-3000 family of hyper-converged appliances leverages Intel’s latest Xeon processors and NVMe high performance flash to create an interesting new entry into the hyper-converged market.”

“DataON is the only Hyper-Converged infrastructure provider solely focused on Windows Server 2016. Their focus on optimized deployment, monitoring and management with the new HCCA and MUST visibility software have enabled them to deliver a premier solution for Microsoft-based environments.” said Frank Berry, senior analyst and founder, IT BrandPulse. “By combining Intel NVMe-based SSDs, the latest Intel Xeon Processor Family and high-performance, low-latency RDMA-based networking, DataON demonstrated over 2.4 million IO/s on 4 node Storage Spaces Direct Cluster using the new S2D-3110 HCCA at IDF16.“

“High-performance, low latency networking provide the backbone of Hyper-Converged solutions for next generation data centers,” said Motti Beck, senior director, enterprise market development, Mellanox Technologies, Ltd. “We are pleased that DataON has integrated our end-to-end RDMA-capable networking solutions, which enables up to 100Gb/s data communication speed in their Hyper-Converged Cluster appliances. This delivers IT managers to maximize their data centers efficiency and to meet the networking and storage demands of Microsoft’s Software-Defined Data Center.“

“Building on our mission to use the latest technology, EVGA continues to invest its IT Data infrastructure using faster hardware with the latest Microsoft software. These new Hyper-Converged systems offer additional features and functions and most importantly increase reliability at an affordable cost,” said Joe Darwin, chief branding officer, EVGA Corporation. “Working with companies like Microsoft, Intel and DataON, gives our IT team a good foundation to provide a solid infrastructure for future growth planning.“

The S2D-3110 HCCA and MUST Management Visibility Framework is available.