The Cloud Blog

Today, HDS announced the newest members of our High Performance NAS family, the HNAS 3080 and HNAS 3090. As I had alluded to in my earlier post, one of the strongest areas of need is in reducing the costs associated with managing IT — tools that enable customers to “do more with less.”  The capabilities built into this new member of the HNAS family (and shared across all HNAS products) help customers do exactly that.  As a society, we’re certainly not going on a data diet (hence the title of this blog), so we best come up with some compelling ways to better manage the deluge…

The new products bring the proven, enterprise-class features of our existing 3100 and 3200 platforms to a new segment of the market.  Of note, there are some significant capabilities that truly allow customers to “do more with less”.  Let me elaborate:

- Because even the smallest 3080 can support a single file system with up to 128TB of storage, it’s simple to ’set and forget’; create one share and don’t worry about outgrowing it (which would then require admin time — and cost — to split shares and move data).  Instead, those ever-growing Oracle databases or caches of high-def video content can be managed in one place.  And a single 3080 can address up to 1PB of storage in total.  That’s a far cry from the 16TB limit some others enforce — 16TB is only 8 SATA drives, after all…

- Performance counts as well; I don’t want to have to split and copy my data around because a single filer cannot serve the data quickly enough.  Again, the lowest-end 3080 can provide up to 60K IOPS and 700 MB/sec in a mixed workload environment.

- The most integrated and advanced intelligent file tiering in a midrange product helps drive down the cost of storing your file data.  By setting some simple policies, the HNAS family can automatically move your data from Fibre or SAS disks to SATA disks, and then to our HCAP platform for longer-term retention.  All the data is still found right where you left it, it’s just automatically put in the right place at the right time.  And if you want more sophistication and would like to manage data placement by its content, not just simple rules, the tiering also collaborates with our Data Discovery Suite (see Michael Hay’s recent blog on the subject here).

- No matter how big something may look today (yes, I actually remember when 4K of memory was A LOT), we’ve proven that we can outgrow it.  So, it’s imperative to be able to grow from where you start, and only pay for what you need.  This is exactly what the HNAS family offers — start with a single node, and grow from there.  Need more space; just add more disk (it can be thin provisioned if you like).  New more performance; just add another node.  It’s still managed as a single entity and all data is where you left it.

So, yes, there is “data, data everywhere”, but at least with these products, it can all be managed under one simple umbrella.  And that comes back to the initial point — capping management costs.  If you choose a platform that grows with you (instead of one that requires you to buy one silo after another and manage them all), you’ll reduce your overall costs (in fact, the new NAS products can give you up to a 30% TCO savings versus other competitive products).  You can find more information on these new products here.