News

posted on 17 June 2008 12:47

Fujitsu Siemens Computers has announced a new scale-out system to store vast amounts of unstructured data, the CentricStor FS, with extremely rapid response times and huge throughput.

CentricStor FS is designed to store relatively unstructured file data and cope with the need to store extremely large amounts of it with very fast access and simple administration. The processing resource uses RX300 Xeons and the storage component uses FSC's FibreCAT SX80 products, with either capacity-centric SATA drives or performance-centric SAS disks. There is a 4Gbit/s Fibre Channel connection between the processing and storage resources.

Users, applications in servers, access the system through either NFS or a CIFS interface. There is no block-level interface and this system isn't intended to be a DBMS, Exchange or ERP application storage resource.

There are five models available:-

- FS2000C - ITB SATA 7,200rpm, 24 - 48TB
- FS4000C - 1TB SATA 7,200rpm, 24 - 192TB
- FS4000S - 300GB SAS 15,000rpm, 14.4 - 57.6TB
- FS8000C - 1TB SATA 7,200rpm, 48 - 384TB
- FS8000S - 300GB SAS 15,000rpm, 14.4 - 115.2TB

The SATA models have RAID 6 protection with the SAS models having RAID 5. The next level of protection is to have a 2-node cluster with failover and a third level of protection is replication of data from one cluster to another.

The fast performance is partly due to the striping of data across multiple drive spindles and across multiple nodes.

CentricStor FS systems can be clustered together as nodes using 1Gbit Ethernet. The software virtualizes the hardware and presents a single distributed file system. There is no master node; the system being a fully distributed one. It also has in-built load balancing.

Administrators use a centralized, browser-based administration function. Introducing additional storage components is simple: new hardware is automatically recognized and the system will automatically configure itself for the optimal exploitation of available bandwidth and system capacity. Even the largest-capacity CentricStor FS systems can be set up and online in a day.

Although it is branded CentricStor it shares no technology with the existing CentricStor VT, FSC's virtual tape library; CentricStor being an umbrella FSC brand for data storage products.

The FS system stores file data, not objects and is not a content-addressable store in the EMC Centera mould. FSC resells Centera and sees it being applicable to a niche market without the tremendous growth prospects as is the case with unstructured data.

The scalability comes from the ability to cluster CentricStor FS systems together with processing and storage capacity resources being independently scalable. The FS8000 has four nodes. It could be extended relatively easily and clustered CentricStor FS configurations could scale into a multi-petabyte area.

Possible additions for the future include data deduplication and spin-down drives. FibreCAT SX products have spindown on their roadmap.

This FSC system addresses the same extreme data storage problems as HP's ExDS9100, EMC's coming Infiniplex/Maui combination, IBM's DIV products, and the clustered Isilon systems.

The CentricStor FS will be available from September 26th onwards and be priced aggressively.

Note. FSC intends to add a file-level interface to CentricStor VT and then CentricStor FS would be able to export files to CentricStor VT. FSC may well then add a layer of file virtualization above the FS and VT CentricStor products to present a unified and multi-tiered virtualized file system storage resource.

^{[Chris Mellor.]}