Symantec Enhanced FileStore N8300 Clustered NAS for De-Dupe

At VMworld 2011 Europe, Symantec Corp. announced enhancements to FileStore N8300, the latest version of its clustered, NAS appliance, designed to help customers build virtual environments and cloud storage, manage large volumes of data and control the costs of associated storage.

Certified for VMware environments, FileStore N8300 is integrated with VMware vCenter Server. It enables organizations to optimize storage costs associated with virtual machine sprawl and provision servers and virtual desktops through cloning and de-duplication of virtual machine images.

Complete VMware Storage Platform
As organizations scale their virtual environments, they find themselves looking for ways to optimize their increasing storage requirements and maintain performance associated with retaining hundreds or even thousands of virtual machine images on traditional storage. FileStore N8300 enables organizations to benefit from their virtualization investments with a clustered NAS solution that scales servers and storage independently, provisions virtual machines with nearly instant, space-optimized cloning, and delivers storage optimization capabilities for VMware environments. With FileStore N8300, organizations can manage from within VMware vCenter Server or with a VMware View plug-in.

With this release, organizations can:

• Optimize storage consumption in a VMware environment with space-efficient cloning and deduplication of VMDKs
• Provision thousands of servers and virtual desktops in minutes with nearly instant, space-optimized cloning of VMDKs, via VMware vCenter Server or VMware View plug-in
• Increase VMware performance and remove controller bottlenecks with scale-out storage technology
• Overcome boot-storm challenges with page caching capabilities.

Manage Data Growth
Organizations struggle to manage an ever increasing amount of data, systems and applications due to the amount of information created each year, which The Economist estimates is growing at 60 percent each year. IDC reports similar growth by predicting that the ‘digital universe’ will grow from 1.8 zettabytes in 2011, to more than 7ZB by 2015. Unfortunately for most organizations, unstructured data is an increasing amount of information they must try to manage.

FileStore N8300 helps organizations meet the demands of digital content growth and optimize their storage investments with primary storage de-duplication that is based on Veritas Storage Foundation File System technology. Organizations can control their storage savings with a flexible deduplication solution that allows them to set the schedule and the granularity of deduplication detection, and run deduplication on full or incremental data sets.

The growing unstructured data also presents storage, management and accessibility challenges for organizations. FileStore N8300 natively integrates with other Symantec products to provide a holistic solution for storage and management of data. It provides automatic storage tiering with Veritas Storage Foundation SmartTier feature, malware protection with Symantec Anti-Virus and faster backup through integration with Symantec NetBackup. In addition, FileStore and Symantec Enterprise Vault provide a storage infrastructure for end-to-end archiving.

Scalable, Highly Available, File-based Storage Services
Symantec FileStore helps organizations meet the demands for a range of workloads from file serving to emerging web-based services. FileStore can be configured to survive multiple node failures, ensuring the availability of data and continued uptime of data operations with redistribution of workloads across clusters. FileStore N8300 is modularly scalable and can scale up to 16 active-active nodes, up to 256 TB of file system capacity, and supports 1.4 PB of total storage on the backend. The redundant connections between clustered nodes and back-end storage arrays help to avoid performance bottlenecks. The system may grow, shrink, or be reconfigured, all online and without downtime or interruption to business operations and built-in replication ensures the non-disruptive operations in case of a disaster.

"Organizations are faced with the difficult tasks of managing data growth and controlling storage costs as they more widely adopt virtualization," said Yogesh Agrawal, vice president of Symantec’s FileStore Product Group. "With Symantec FileStore N8300, we are making it easier for customers to store and manage large volumes of data, and provide advanced storage optimization capabilities to cost-effectively store virtual machine images and address the performance challenges as they scale their virtual environments."

"We’re delighted that Symantec FileStore is now a VMware-certified NAS storage device," said Parag Patel, vice president, Global Strategic Alliances. "As more organizations deliver desktops as a managed service with VMware virtualization and cloud solutions, FileStore is an excellent storage target, because it utilizes deduplication technology for VMDK files."

FileStore N8300 5.7 is available in the U.S., Canada, U.K., Italy and the Middle East. Pricing starts at $50,000.