It's a double blow for storage professionals: Data is growing exponentially, while backup windows are shrinking. Sepaton, a company that already claims to provide the fastest backup, is now shipping the S2100-ES2 Series 1910/2910 system with version 6.0 software. It delivers "the industry's fastest performance, multiprotocol support, high reliability and industry-leading deduplication," say company officials. At up to 1,500Mbytes/second/node, the 2100 provides more than double the performance of previous models. It has 64-bit hardware and software in a 2U form factor, with 48Gbytes of RAM and 72 percent less of a power/cooling footprint. In addition, it adds support for Symantec NetBackup OpenStorage on 10 Gbit Ethernet concurrently with Fibre Channel tape emulation, which should ease platform migration issues for enterprise customers.
Starting at $257,500, the system is built around Hitachi Data Systems AMS 2100 disk arrays and features reliability enhancements, including automatic snapshots of the DeltaStor database, a streamlined software installation process, automatic verification of software versions on all nodes, intelligent handling of full storage pools and redundant links among nodes. Sepaton has also enhanced its deduplication ratios for IBM Tivoli Storage Manager (TSM) capabilities.
Backup has been boosted to 43.2Tbytes per hour, and users can incrementally add more capabilities as their needs grow, says the company.
While he finds the hardware refresh interesting, particularly the ability to simultaneously work in both Fibre Channel and 10Gbit Ethernet, (which gives data center managers the opportunity to make a single data protection choice for both environments), what really excites Mike Karp, VP and principal analyst, Ptak/Noel Associates, is the new software release. "Integration with mission-critical software is of paramount importance in this segment, and shops using TSM will certainly want to take advantage of Sepaton's increased integration with the TSM software. Additionally, as TSM sites are often quite large, Sepaton's linear scale-out capability makes this a very competitive offering."
Dave Russell, Gartner Research VP, storage technologies and strategies, also likes the new software capabilities, but he thinks there's another benefit to the hardware. "The ability to scale and to store a large amount of data should allow large enterprises to consolidate on a smaller number of deployments to avoid "appliance sprawl." Sepaton says single/dual-controller point solutions like EMC's Data Domain require five times as many systems to handle growth.
