Enterprise hard disk/hybrid storage systems: 2016 Products of the Year finalists
The 11 finalists in the hard disk/hybrid storage systems category of the 2016 Products of the Year include cloud and arrays that don't demand all-flash drives.
What kinds of storage systems don't use all-flash drives these days? Well, there is cloud storage, arrays that mix in just enough solid state to juke performance while keeping price down, and storage that doesn't require screaming fast speeds. All of those types are finalists for Storage magazine/SearchStorage's 2016 Products of the Year in the hard disk/hybrid storage systems category.
The 11 hard disk/hybrid storage systems contenders include cloud storage from Avere Systems, ClearSky Data, Hitachi Data Systems and Zadara Storage, on-premises file storage from Quantum, Qumulo and Synology, on-premises SAN arrays from DataDirect Networks, Dell EMC and Nimble Storage, and Nexsan Unity on-premises unified storage. These hard disk/hybrid storage systems all use hard disk drives (HDDs) or a mix of HDDs and solid-state drives (SSDs).
Avere Systems Cloud-Core NAS
Avere's Cloud-Core NAS integrates private and public object storage with traditional NAS infrastructure to create a single logical storage pool through Avere's global namespace. The system includes Avere's FXT 5000 NAS nodes and CX200 object storage nodes based on OpenStack Swift. A minimum configuration includes 120 TB of usable capacity with triple replication for data protection.
ClearSky Data Global Storage Network
ClearSky delivers enterprise primary, backup and disaster recovery data as a managed service in the vendor's cloud. ClearSky promises 100,000 of IOPS, three milliseconds or less latency and 99.999% uptime. The Global Storage Network stores hot data in appliances at the customer's site, warm data in a point of presence within 120 miles, and copies of all data are also stored in multiple cloud locations.
DataDirect Networks SFA14K Hybrid Solution
DDN's SFA14K hybrid system is a block-storage high performance computing (HPC) platform that the vendor claims can deliver more than six million IOPS with 60 GB per second bandwidth in a 4U chassis. It can scale to 7 PB in one rack, and uses NVMe along with SSDs and HDDs in one system.
Dell EMC SC Series with Storage Center Operating System 7 (SCOS 7)
SCOS 7 added block-level deduplication and enhanced compression to the SC Series (formerly Dell Compellent) hybrid arrays. Dell EMC claims the data reduction lowers the effective per GB cost to under $0.45 for its TLC flash drives and $0.10 hard drive tiers.
Hitachi Content Platform
The latest version of Hitachi Data Systems' HCP object storage system included Adaptive Cloud Tiering to move data to a public cloud, high-capacity S30 nodes that scale to 450 PB of storage capacity, a G node server with more compute power, and support for SSDs and OpenStack Swift.
Nexsan Unity
Nexsan Unity is a unified storage platform that uses DRAM and SSDs for block and file storage. Its FASTier caching accelerates I/O performance and n-Way Sync provides automated site-to-site replication.
Nimble Storage Adaptive Flash Arrays CS-Series
The latest version of Nimble's CS midrange hybrid arrays scale to 1.4 PB effective capacity in an array and 5.6 PB in a cluster. The CS also supports non-disruptive controller upgrades.
Quantum Xcellis Workflow Storage
The Xcellis Workflow Storage system converges Quantum's StorNext file system with compute and at least 48 TB of storage. The system can support billions of files across 64 virtual file systems and supports Fibre Channel and Ethernet connectivity.
Qumulo Core 2.0
The software upgrade to Qumulo's data aware storage platform adds real-time analytics and erasure coding. The 2.0 release also enables Qumulo QC storage customers to use 10 TB Helium HDDs.
Synology RackStation RS3617xs+
The latest Synology rackmount NAS platform includes more compute with 6-core Xeon CPUs and up to 64 GB of DDR4 memory that helps drive performance to 4.9 GB per second and 556,727 IOPS when using RAID 5. It also has a new Btrfs file system and DiskStation Manager 6.1 operating system that includes snapshot replication.
Zadara Storage Cloud
Zadara upgraded its cloud storage system with object storage capability, up to 3.2 TB of flash cache, 16 Gbps Fibre Channel support and Docker functionality. Zadara Storage allows customers to build a drive mix of SSDs, high-RPM SAS and 6TB 7200 RPM HDDs. Zadara offers mixed storage pools and charges for consumed capacity.
