StoneFly Disaggregated Infrastructure for Enterprise Storage and Backup Solutions

StoneFly Inc. adds composable disaggregated architecture to its range of enterprise appliances.

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What is disaggregated architecture approach?
The disaggregated architecture, as opposed to integrated appliance architecture, dedicates hardware independent chassis for different components of an iSCSI SAN, converged or hyperconverged infrastructure.

Examples of said key components include storage controllers, HCI controllers, RAID controllers, RAID arrays, EBODs or JBODs.

What is composable disaggregated hardware configuration?
With over 17 years of experience of delivering HA storage and backup and DR appliances, the company came up with an approach for composable disaggregated architecture.

The disaggregated architecture, whether it’s for iSCSI SAN, converged storage (iSCSI SAN+NAS+object) or hyperconverged storage, comprises:

Dual storage controllers or HCI controllers for hyperconverged appliances (1U or 2U iSCSI standard or optional FC)
RAID array (12-bay to 36-bay rackmount with integrated dual active/active RAID controllers and storage drives)
RAID arrays come with redundant efficiency hot-swappable power supplies and are capable of supporting 7,200, 10,000 and 15,000rpm 12Gb SAS SSDs, or combinations of both.

The dual 1U storage controllers (or HCI controllers for HCI infrastructures) are capable of supporting a maximum of 1,776 storage drives with expansion units. While the dual 2U storage controllers or (HCI controllers for HCI infrastructures) are capable of supporting a maximum of 4,440 storage drives with expansion units.

This makes the storage solutions capable of supporting petabytes of data, when fully populated.

Ease of Management via SDS Solution
While the composable disaggregated infrastructure is capable of storing petabytes of enterprise data, it does not pose a problem when it comes to data management. That’s because it’s managed via the company’s patented^(*) storage virtualization solution StoneFusion.

By leveraging the enterprise-grade storage management software, users can manage all their disaggregated storage nodes via a single centralized web GUI. The software also offers data services that optimize storage and facilitate monitoring, management, and control.

Examples of these data services include delta-based snapshots, synchronous and asynchronous replication, thin provisioning, erasure coding, deduplication, volume encryption.

^(*) Patent #: 7,302,500, 7,555,586, 7,558,885, 8,069,292 as certified by United States Patent and Trademark Office.

Benefit of composable disaggregated infrastructure
When asked about the major benefits of the composable disaggregated infrastructure, John Harris, technical sales director, StoneFly, said:”Scaling out just the performance part of an infrastructure has been a challenge with the traditional model of data center infrastructure. With the disaggregated architecture, users can scale the way they like. They can add more performance by adding more storage controllers, they can add storage capacities by adding expansion units, or they can add both by adding full appliance nodes. Disaggregated architecture makes life easier for IT administrators and data center owners.“

Offering disaggregated infrastructure
for entire range of enterprise storage and backup and DR solutions, including:

iSCSI SAN appliances (Voyager DX and Voyager FC)
Converged storage (NAS+SAN+Object) appliances (USO-HA)
Hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) (USS-HA)
Hyperconverged backup and DR appliances (DR365V and DR365)

Resource:
Blog: The Whats, Whys and Hows of Disaggregated Storage Infrastructure

Read also:
StoneFly StoneFusion MSP Edition SDS Solution
To consolidate storage infrastructure and provision cloud and on-premises multi-tenant NAS, SAN and S3 object storage
May 24, 2019 | Press Release