There's been plenty of talk about scale-out storage, which is a storage architecture built from low cost computing devices and commodity storage systems to form a vast, inexpensive storage pool. Scale-out storage means designating volumes for structured or unstructured data, but not both individually. That can be confining to many users, which is one reason why Scale Computing introduced its N05 Starter Cluster at VMworld last week.
The new unified storage is aimed at small and medium businesses and supports both structured and unstructured data for as little as $2,500 per hardware node. Scale's N05 Starter Cluster (3 nodes) offers 1.5TB of storage capacity and is stocked with the usual storage features: thin provisioning, snap-shotting, replication, scale-out capabilities, unified SAN and NAS. There is no support for primary deduplication, however.
N05 is positioned in the market to compete with Dell's EqualLogic. Management is confident that N05 will compete favorably with that product, as well as with less expensive arrays from Promise and NexSan.
Minimal configuration for the N05 Starter Cluster consists of three nodes built on top of the Scale Computing Intelligent Cluster Storage (ICS) technology used in their more advanced storage systems. The Starter Cluster is scalable, which means that customers can add storage as required, use SAN and NAS in the same cluster and control storage with its web-based interface. The N05 solution supports several advanced features such as replication, multi-pathing and extensive controller-less scalability.
N05 storage capacity is increased via software across all nodes in the cluster. You create a single cluster with virtually unlimited scalability. You can increase capacity by as little .5TB per node at a time.
