DataON Announced Productization of Project Kepler-47

DataON, provider of hyper-converged cluster appliances (HCCA) and optimized storage systems for Windows Server environments, and the storage division of Area Data Systems, Inc., announces the first commercially available Kepler-47 hyper-converged infrastructure for Windows Server 2016 Storage Spaces Direct:

Kepler-47S – Value-optimized solution with hybrid SDD/HDD storage in a 2-node cluster
Kepler-47P – Performance-optimized solution with all-flash SSDs in a 2-node cluster

Project Kepler-47 was a proof-of-concept from Microsoft’s Windows Server team that was presented at Microsoft Ignite 2016. The goal was to bring the software-defined data center features of Windows Server 2016 to ROBO, edge computing, and IoT environments. While these deployments share the same need for HA for mission-critical apps and reliable storage, enterprise customers are looking for lower cost options.

The DataON Kepler-47 appliance is a low-cost and HA solution that enables ease-of-deployment and delivers saving of hyper-convergence with compute and storage in a single two-node server cluster. Built to optimize the full stack of Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct, this pre-configured and stress-tested solution is ideal for smaller deployments at an affordable cost.

This solution can achieve over 200,000 IO/s in a 2-node cluster. It combines NVMe SSDs with a choice of hybrid or all-flash storage to maximize performance and capacity. This appliance runs on the Cluster Shared Volumes Resilient File System (ReFS) to maximize data availability, deliver high resiliency, and improve data integrity across scale-out file server (SoFS) and software-defined data center stacks.

Intel Xeon E3-1230 V6 4C/8T 3.5GHz
64GB DDR4 ECC memory
10TB usable storage (mirrored)
200,000 IO/s throughput
Intel Thunderbolt 3 networking

“DataON is exclusively focused on customers who have the ‘Microsoft choice’ for their software-defined data centers,” said Howard Lo, VP sales and marketing, DataON. “We were intrigued by the Project Kepler-47 proof-of-concept last year and we wanted to accept the challenge to bring the first Kepler-47 appliance to market. We are excited to introduce the Kepler-47 appliance, a budget-friendly Storage Spaces Direct two-node solution for customers with small and ROBO deployments. We are proud to work with Microsoft, Intel, and MSI to make this concept a reality.”

Claus Joergensen, principal program manager for Storage Spaces Direct, Microsoft Corp., said: “Project Kepler-47 was a proof-of-concept that was born during our development of Storage Spaces Direct over the past 4 years. The question that we were trying to answer for our customers was ‘how low can you go?’ We had a high-performing, resource-efficient and budget-friendly product in Storage Spaces Direct and we wanted to see if it was possible to create a low-cost appliance that could run Storage Spaces Direct to meet the needs of small and ROBO deployments.”

Kepler-47 uses Intel Thunderbolt 3 over a USB Type-C connector instead of traditional Ethernet networking between the servers. This eliminates the need for costly high-speed network adapters and switches. Thunderbolt 3 provides up to 40Gb/s throughput, plenty for replicating storage and live migration of VMs.

“This is a new and exciting application for Thunderbolt technology,” said Jason Ziller, GM, client connectivity division, Intel Corp. “The ability for Thunderbolt 3 to provide low-cost 10GbE networking makes it a perfect complement for Storage Spaces Direct to provide a low-cost hyper-converged infrastructure.”

DataON partnered with Micro-Star International Co., Ltd. (MSI) to design the Kepler-47 appliance, including the chassis, motherboard and components.

“DataON and MSI have been long-time partners in creating hyper-converged cluster appliances,” said Norman Tsai, GM of enterprise platform solutions BU, MSI. “When DataON approached us about the Kepler-47 concept, we were enthusiastic to support this project and provided our rich x86 platform design and production resources.”

The Kepler-47 appliances will be featured at the DataON booth at Microsoft Ignite 2017, from September 25-29, 2017 in Orlando, Florida.

Designed fo Windows Server 2016 Storage Space Direct
Kepler-47 solutions are built to optimize the full stack of Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct in a hyper-converged platform. They are designed with integrated compute, network and storage infrastructure with near-linear scalability to simplify and maximize the deployment of Microsoft applications, virtualization, data protection and hybrid cloud services. These pre-configured 2-node clusters are capable of supporting up to 20 Hyper-V VMs per nodes, for expanded capacity and operational flexibility.

DataON Kepler-47 solutions deliver:

Simple 2-node hyper-converged infrastructure – Provides HA and storage for enterprise applications with over 10TB usable capacity in a mirrored configuration.
Hyper-V virtualization – Supports more than 20 Hyper-V VMs per HCI deployment
Low-cost, high-speed networking – Thunderbolt 3 provides simple, standardized and cost effective connection with the highest appliance I/O bandwidth, eliminating the need for costly network adapters and switches in many implementations.
Small Form Factor – Saves space with a footprint more than 50% smaller than a standard 2U rack server.
HA and Resiliency – The servers form one Windows Server 2016 failover cluster with Cloud Witness as low-cost, low footprint quorum technology.
Fault Tolerant – Uses local drives and leverages Storage Replica with Azure Site Recovery.
Integrated data protection and guarded fabric – Supports Windows Server 2016 with Shielded VM and TPM 2.0 trusted attestation for security and BC.

Managed by Must
All Kepler-47 solutions are pre-configured with DataON MUST (Management Utility Software Tool) infrastructure visibility, monitoring and management software. Integrated with the Windows Storage Health Service API (SM-API), it provides advanced cluster monitoring, performance metrics, system health statistics, and automated system alerts for Windows Server 2016 Storage Spaces Direct.

MUST delivers SAN-like storage monitoring features through a single pane of glass, providing real-time dashboard level metrics for IO/s, latency, and throughput on cluster nodes and volumes. With system alerts based on Windows Health Service faults and SAN-like call home services, systems administrators can be automatically notified of hardware failures, configuration issues and resource saturation.

DataON is the first to market with a tool that provides visibility, monitoring and management of your Windows Server 2016 deployments.

DataON Difference
DataON is focused on customers who have made the ‘Microsoft choice’ to deploy a Windows Server-based storage solution. Its team of Microsoft experts know how to design, deploy and support Windows Server storage and will work with you to performance tune your workloads with benchmarks.

DataON solutions are:

Customer-proven with over 600 enterprise deployments and greater than 100PB of DataON Storage Spaces Direct storage deployments.
Optimized by a team of Microsoft experts to ensure successful deployments into IT environment, tuned to workloads.
Certified for Windows Server 2012, 2012R2 and 2016.
Certified for Windows Server 2016 Server Software-Defined Data Center (SDDC) Premium and Standard editions.
Certified for the Windows Server Software-Defined (WSSD) Program.

DataON has a history of supporting Windows Server environments, including:

The first certified enterprise JBODs for Windows Server 2012 R2.
The first Cluster-in-a-Box (CiB) appliances for small business and enterprise deployments with Hyper-V support