Infortrend Designs Storage Systems for Virtualization

Changing business models, cloud computing, increased computational density, and the concept of Green IT are all factors driving a major transformation that is changing the face of the traditional data center. Infortrend Technology, Inc. has identified consolidation, agility and automation as the keys to ensuring that the infrastructures of today’s data centers have the tools needed to transition to the next generation of data centers. With these three keys to success in mind, Infortrend has taken a holistic view in their development of storage systems to ensure that the systems can be seamlessly integrated into next generation data centers, while delivering exceptional IT efficiency and a competitive edge.

Virtualization technology has enabled IT consolidation beyond physical boundaries. By allowing users to run multiple virtual servers on a single physical server, server virtualization increases resource utilization and reduces management overhead. All Infortrend storage systems are designed to be compatible with the server virtualization technology provided by leading players such as VMware and Microsoft, as well as emerging providers such as Citrix. Infortrend’s storage systems also support the latest protocols, such as 8Gb/s Fibre Channel and 10GbE iSCSI, to deliver the high bandwidth required by server virtualization environments.

According to James Hsieh, vice president of global marketing at Infortrend, "The more a business can plan ahead for the next generation data center, the more competitive advantages over others it can gain. Featuring agility, automation, wide compatibility, and power efficiency, Infortrend’s storage systems are designed to serve as a powerful building block in the dynamic and heterogeneous environment of next generation data centers. Infortrend’s systems not only give users the initial benefits of reduced costs up front, they also set the foundation for better IT efficiency in the future."

With Infortrend’s Enterprise Scalable Virtualized Architecture (ESVA) systems, users can further extend the benefits of virtualization into the realm of storage. By consolidating multiple ESVA systems into a single storage pool, system management is simplified and users are able to dynamically scale the pool to meet changing capacity and performance needs. No matter how widely application workloads may vary, ESVA’s intelligent load-balancing and thin provisioning technologies always ensure optimized performance and capacity utilization without manual intervention.

Later this year, Infortrend will be adding a new tiering capability to its ESVA family of products, enabling them to bring even more efficiency into the data center. By automatically migrating data to different storage tiers based on user-configurable policy, ESVA will help users achieve respective service levels for data of different importance in the most cost-effective way. Infortrend will also be upgrading its entry-level product line, EonStor DS, with thin provisioning and tiering capabilities. With wide support for common operating systems such as Windows, Linux, Sun Solaris, HP-UX, and IBM AIX, both the ESVA and EonStor DS systems can be easily integrated into user’s existing environments. ESVA and EonStor DS systems also support high availability features such as multipathing and clustering to help minimize service downtime.

In addition to leveraging IT efficiency to enhance business benefits, next generation data centers are also concerned with reducing energy consumption and carbon emissions in order to meet compliance regulations. Due to this, Infortrend embeds various green designs into its storage systems, including 80 Plus-Silver certified power supplies, 3-level dynamic cooling and multi-level drive spin-down, which can reduce energy consumption by up to 60 percent. Additionally, Infortrend uses 2.5-inch drives in its storage systems, which delivers better performance per watt than using 3.5-inch drives. Further adding to Infortrend’s green design philosophy will be the company’s introduction of solid state drives (SSDs) into its storage systems, which the company will announce later this year. The use of SSDs will enable performance demands to be satisfied while consuming as little power as possible. Integrating Infortrend’s energy-efficient storage systems into a virtualized data center is a tenet of Green IT, as this strategy can greatly reduce the amount of equipment required to satisfy application demands.