Silicon Mechanics Showcased zStax Open Storage Solution

Silicon Mechanics, Inc. was highlighting its zStax ZFS unified storage solution by sponsoring SCaLE 12x, the 12th annual Southern California Linux Expo.

The conference was held February 21-23, 2014, at the Hilton Los Angeles Airport hotel.

Since its launch only 18 months ago, zStax has been a practical software-defined storage alternative to expensive legacy storage options, helping companies reduce lifecycle storage costs.

The demo showed how zStax storage delivers on features, function, and price, helping customers move away from the vendor lock-in associated with legacy systems. During the demonstration, industry expert Tommy Scherer showed how the zStax highly available architecture seamlessly handles load failover.

“Using the consultative approach embodied in our ‘Expert included’ pledge, we are helping customers realize the benefits of software-defined storage,” said Eva Cherry, CEO and president, Silicon Mechanics. “We are reducing the risk and the arduous work associated with transitioning away from legacy storage.“

As a reseller for Nexenta Systems, Inc., Silicon Mechanics has achieved double-digit quarter-over-quarter revenue growth for the zStax product line. zStax is powered by NexentaStor, a NAS/SAN software platform with enterprise capabilities that address the challenges presented by growing datasets.

“As a partner, Silicon Mechanics brings a tremendous amount of value,” said Nexenta’s director of West Coast Sales, Chris Grim. “Nexenta has received a great deal of positive feedback about how well Silicon Mechanics works with customers to develop and deploy a tailored storage infrastructure that can easily scale capacity and performance beyond traditional storage system limits. This system handles rapidly expanding volumes of data and workloads easily while still guaranteeing SLAs with in-house users – and without breaking the bank.”

A significant portion of IT budgets is devoted to maintaining storage. zStax customers realize savings, especially when considering the entire platform on a 5-year refresh cycle. Hardware is continually getting better, faster, and cheaper. Companies can also gain access to new technology as it becomes available, instead of waiting for their legacy storage system to adopt it. For example, Silicon Mechanics expects to move toward a 12Gb SAS standard in 2014, doubling throughput from the current 6Gb SAS used in most legacy systems.