DataOn Kepler-47 G2 Hyper-Converged Appliance and HCI-668 Hybrid Storage Solution for Microsoft Azure Stack HCI

DataON, storage division of Area Electronics Systems, Inc., announces two hybrid cloud solutions for Microsoft Azure Stack HCI.

Kepler-47 G2 hyper-converged appliance – A 2-node hyper-converged appliance designed for SMB, ROBO, edge and IoT deployments

HCI-668 – A hybrid storage solution featuring a 2U/1-node rack server with a 60-bay external JBOD

The Kepler-47 G2 hybrid cloud solution for Azure Stack HCI is a low cost and small-sized hyper-converged appliance designed with an integrated compute, network and storage infrastructure. It features a mini tower form factor, making it for deployments where there may not be dedicated space for a traditional data center, if there is limited space to house data center equipment, or if the data center needs to be portable for temporary deployments.

Designed for SMB, ROBO, edge and IoT deployments
Can be deployed in under 15 minutes
Complete HCI solution for under $10,000
Xeon E processor (6-8 cores)
All-flash storage with SSD cache (4-48TB raw)
High-speed/low-cost direct connect networking with 25GbE RDMA or Intel Thunderbolt 3 eliminates the need for costly high-speed network adapters and switches to connect the nodes
Easy to manage and monitor with MUST and Windows Admin Center

The Kepler-47 G2 is designed to allow to start small with 2 nodes and switchless ‘back-to-back’ networking support. It provides full active-active for compute and storage and doesn’t required a costly witness VM – you can use a USB key or NAS as a witness. It also features nested resiliency that can handle 2 failures at once.

The Kepler-47 G2 is based on Project Kepler-47, a PoC from Microsoft’s Windows Server team. The goal was to see if it was possible to create a low-cost appliance that could run Storage Spaces Direct to meet the needs of small and ROBO deployments.

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The HCI-668 hybrid cloud solution for Azure Stack HCI allows to go up and go bigger with up to 4TB per cluster. For organizations that require large amounts of storage, the HCI-668 delivers storage in a performance and capacity optimized, all-flash NVMe cache server node with converged 60-bay JBOD storage. It is powered by 2nd generation Xeon Scalable processors and Optane DC Persistent memory to get faster insights from data-intensive applications, with improved service scalability with higher VM and container density.

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Solutions add to company’s family of hybrid cloud solutions for Azure Stack HCI

Azure Stack HCI is an evolution of data center computing that blends Windows Server technologies with Azure management service integration. It helps customers with large and complex IT estates and varying needs, helping them solve IT problems while being able to grow and evolve as business and IT needs change.

It features the same Hyper-V based software-defined compute, storage, and networking as Azure Stack and shares similar testing and validation criteria. It follows engineering best practices to get customers up and running without lengthy design and build times.

Built-in integration to Azure makes it easy for IT staff to start using Azure for infrastructure management services and start building cloud skills. With the Azure management services in Windows Admin Center and the company’s MUST, customers can integrate on-premises workloads with services such as Azure Site Recovery, Azure Backup, Cloud Witness, and Azure Monitor.

“In talking with customers, we found there is a tremendous demand for size and cost-sensitive HCI solutions for SMB, ROBO, edge and IoT applications,” said Howard Lo, VP sales and marketing, DataON. “The Kepler-47 G2 presents a unique offering because it brings software-defined compute, storage, and networking on industry-standard x86 servers and integrates on-premises workloads with Microsoft Azure services. In addition, the mini tower form factor is ideal for deployments where there may not be space to house a server rack or for temporary deployments, such as out-of-town court cases, seasonal processing plants, or mobile medical deployments.”

Erin Chapple, corporate VP, Windows Server, Microsoft Corp., said: “As customers’ IT and business needs change, it’s important that Microsoft and its partners provide solutions that are robust and flexible. Microsoft is proud to have partners such as DataON who have developed solutions for Microsoft Azure Stack HCI that meet the needs of customers who are shifting to hyper-converged infrastructure and hybrid scenarios for better data center efficiencies.“

Managed by MUST

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The company’s solutions for Azure Stack HCI include the firm’s MUST visibility and management tool to provide SAN-like storage monitoring features for customers deploying Windows Server software-defined solutions.

MUST displays dashboard-level metrics of your cluster through a single pane of glass, with operational visibility of system analytics, infrastructure health management, storage system metrics, and event logging insights. It also sends system alerts and automated e-mail notifications for hardware failures, configuration issues and resource saturation.

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MUST can be used through its standalone console or within Windows Admin Center, adding historical data reporting, disk mapping, system alerts, and call home support.

Company’s difference
The firm is focused on customers who have made the ‘Microsoft choice’ to deploy a Windows Server-based storage solution. Its team of Microsoft experts know how to design, deploy and support Windows Server storage and will work with to performance tune workloads with benchmarks.

This solutions are:

Customer-proven with over 650 enterprise deployments and greater than 150PB of Storage Spaces Direct deployments.
Certified for Windows Server 2016 and 2019 Server Software-Defined Datacenter (SDDC) Premium and Standard editions. Certified for Windows Server 2012, 2012 R2, 2016, and 2019
Validated solutions for Azure Stack HCI and Windows Server Software-Defined (WSSD) for performance, manageability, and security offered.