SGI Releases Flexible, NAS Solution

By Allison Proffitt 

April 11, 2012 | SGI released SGI NAS yesterday, a full-featured, flexible enterprise-class open storage solution. SGI NAS fully integrated with the SGI Modular InfiniteStorage product family, and can start small and yet scale to multiple petabytes of unified storage according to business demands. It supports advanced enterprise architecture from virtualization to the complete lifecycle of data—from creation to archive—with a minimum of datacenter real estate.  

“SGI NAS is really redefining or resetting the bar if you will on what the rules of what you would expect from network attached storage,” Floyd Christofferson, director of storage products at SGI, told Bio-IT World. “You can start small and really take it wherever your data needs grow. This is a key attribute of this system.”  

Another strength of the system is the “flexibility of the feature set,” said Christofferson. “It’s not a one size fits all; it can be configured specific to the workflow.” SGI NAS includes full VM integration, even in mixed vendor environments, and with the latest Intel Xeon E5 series processors, the system offers infinitely flexible configuration options from terabytes to petabytes of storage and can be expanded to extremely large deployments with multi-node local and remote clusters. With support for multiple NAS and SAN protocols, standard features include inline de-duplication and native compression, unlimited snapshots and cloning, unlimited file size, and high-availability support. 

“In terms of return on investment, it means that as needs upgrade or migrate to new platforms, we can migrate the software and the data to new platforms later on. Other NAS vendors can’t do that,” he said.   

At the core of SGI NAS is a standards-based open storage architecture that blends the modular flexibility of SGI hardware and software to provide a best-of-breed unified storage solution. This approach enables straight-forward integration into legacy storage environments, and ensures that customer data is not trapped within expensive siloed arrays. The scalability and density of the system enables IT managers to invest in a cost-optimized system based upon today’s requirements that has no capacity limitations to penalize future expansion. 

“This is new for us because this is a software layer. Traditionally on the storage side we do very, very large hardware systems for backend software infrastructure,” explained Christofferson. “But even on the software storage side, a lot of that is infrastructure. This brings all of that storage power right up into user space. This is something a user would interact with directly, and provides a level of enterprise class features that are important for a user-based environment, as opposed to just a core infrastructure environment.” 

Data integrity is at the heart the SGI NAS solution, with constant monitoring to proactively identify and prevent silent data corruption. Additional features such as support for real-time failover between active/active clusters in different geographies as well as both synchronous and asynchronous multi-site replication capabilities ensure always data is available where and when it is needed. 

“We’re using commodity parts, large capacity but lower power, lower performing disc drives. We put those behind higher performing SSDs and memory for caching that enables a hybrid solution that gives significantly better performance with lower powered infrastructure than other competitors do,” Christofferson said, “and we can tune this [to customers’ needs].”