Huawei Symantec Debuts T-Series IP/FC SAN for SMBs

Huawei Symantec Technologies Co. Ltd. unveiled the Oceanspace T-Series, a family of scalable storage systems tailored for medium-sized enterprises.

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Oceanspace SS5500T, S5600T and S5800T

For data center managers, T-Series systems stand-out by maximizing storage consolidation with the highest capacity per controller by:

automating performance tuning with migration of data to the optimum storage tier
reducing energy usage with aggressive power management.

They are for channel partners looking to fill the void left by storage vendor consolidation.

"High-availability, high-performance and a broad suite of software, which a few years ago were found only in high-end disk arrays, are expected today in mid-range systems," said Jane Li, General Manager of North America, Huawei Symantec. "Storage partners will find the feature-rich T-Series is well-suited for data center environments."

Oceanspace T-Series
T-Series is a family of SAN systems pre-packaged with the power, flexibility and ease-of-use needed in core data center storage applications, including storage consolidation and remote replication for disaster recovery.

Powerful – A redundant T-Series system can support well over 1,000 disk drives for massive storage consolidation. T-Series systems support connectivity to the fastest SANs : 8Gb Fibre Channel and 10Gb iSCSI. Smart Cache technology inside each T-Series system tunes the performance of the system by automatically migrating data to the SSD tier that will provide a balance of performance and cost.
Flexible – Modular T-Series hardware allows scalability one building block at a time. Administrator-defined energy saving policies control auto disk sleep, fan speed tuning and even CPU speed tuning. In addition, a suite of software gives data center administrators the agility to deploy storage applications such as remote replication for disaster recovery, with a single license.
Easy – The graphical user interface provides point-and-click control of a broad suite of powerful system and storage management functions.

The T-Series family of storage systems
includes 4 models:

Oceanspace S5500T – Up to 288 SSDs / SAS, or SATA HDDs
Oceanspace S5600T – Up to 576 SSDs / SAS, SATA or FC HDDs
Oceanspace S5800T – Up to 1,152 SSDs / SAS, SATA or FC HDDs
Oceanspace S6800T – Up to 1,440 SSDs / SAS, SATA or FC HDDs

Huawei Symantec T-Series systems are available to value-added resellers from Condre Storage and Synnex.

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Headquartered in Chengdu, China, Huawei Symantec, joint venture between Huawei owning 51% and Symantec 49%, is in network security and computing solutions, but also becoming a serious storage manufacturer. It has a total of more than 4,000 employees, with 55% of them are in R&D - including 1,000 for storage only - whose centers are established in Beijing, Shenzhen, Chengdu, and Hangzhou in China, as well as in the Silicon Valley. The firm has a U.S. subsidiary in Cupertino, CA, but also offices in Russia, Malaysia, South Africa, Germany, UK, Brazil and UAE. It holds more than 300 patents in storage and network security field.

The firm does not reveal financial results saying only "that the company has achieved rapid growth, with a revenue increase of over 50% on an annual basis since the company was established in 2008."

It manufactures all it storage products including SSDs, expect for FC switches coming from QLogic. It designed the NetBackup 5200 appliance for Symantec with its own hardware and Symantec software as part of a joint venture.

In 2010, Huawei Symantec forged partnerships with Synnex Corporation and Condre Storage in North America, iValue InfoSolutions in India, and Drive Control Corporation and Mustek in South Africa.

Look at this new high-end Oceanspace S6800T on par with the offering of many storage giants.

It's based on up to 12 hot-swap TurboModules. Each one is equipped with 64-bit multicore processors and a cache capacity from 48GB to 192GB for a maximum of 36GB/s internal bandwidth, with 24 disks in 2U/4U or 12 2.5-inch disks in 1U. They can be 2.5-inch 500GB SATA or 300/600/900GB 10K SAS HDDs, 3.5-inch SATA 1/2TB 7,200rpm or SAS 300/450/600GB 15K HDDs, or eventually 100GB SSDs.

Ports are 4Gb FC or SAS 2.0 in the back end, 8Gb FC and 1/10GE in the front end. All the common RAID levels can be used: 0, 1, 3, 5, 6, 10 and 50. They can be connected to 1,024 host computers working on 4,096 LUNs and accept 2,048 snapshots. Other functionalities include HyperMirror (synchronous and asynchronous remote replication), HostAgent (host side application aware snapshot and replication managing module), UltraPath (multipath software), and DiskGuard (host side volume protection).

TurboBoost provides more performance and three kinds of power saving technologies using SmartCache that monitors hot spot data and cache them to SSD automatically. Internal batteries ensure that data in the cache is written to the coffer in case of a power failure.

Five other interesting technologies:

Disk Pre-copy: Faulty disks are detected in advance and data migrated to healthy disks to avoid RAID reconstruction

Bad sector repair: Repair bad sectors "with best effort".

Disk Spin Down: Based on RAID group workload, the system can spin down the disks in a specified RAID group, reducing power costs by 40%, according to the company.

Intelligent 16-step fan speed tuning: Based on the current system temperature, the system can adjust the fan speed to reduce power.

Intelligent CPU speed adjusting: Based on system workload, the system can adjust the CPU speed to reduce the power costs.

With a maximum of 12 modules in 2U (SAS) or 4U (SAS or FC), you can get 1,440 SSDs or SAS, SATA or FC HDDs with support of AIX, HP-UX, Solaris, Linux and Windows operating systems.